Yahoo CEO: No more working remote -- get to the office or quit

It's surprising that Mayer is the one pushing this, because when she was hired, obviously, it was kind of ballyhooed that she would push the working world in the opposite direction. That was likely just some gender stereotyping going on.

LTL mentions that productivity goes down when working from home, but some of the stuff I've read on the Yahoo! memo has noted that raw productivity actually increases, but creativity and innovation suffer. Of course, that contradicts a magazine piece I read last year about how brainstorming is actually a myth and pretty much worthless. So ... I don't know what to fucking believe.

YF has probably been in my office. It's really expensive real estate, like a lot of downtown real estate is in a big city, and sometimes I wonder how much money is wasted on it and whether it's really necessary. My fellow junior colleagues and I often speculate about whether we'll be reporting to an office for our whole career or not. There isn't a ton of accidental interaction, though, because everyone has their own office, and, due to the nature of vertical cities, there aren't a whole lot of people on each floor. People retreat to their office and plug away. I see people in the cafeteria, I see people I'm working on a project with, and my two fellow new hires and I have a scheduled lunch together every Thursday outside the office to check in about work and socialize a little. Overall, I'm able to check in here and various other news sites throughout the day because, to be honest, there's not a whole lot of time-wasting going on otherwise.

But I suspect that's not the case in Silicon Valley, where the offices are lower slung and designed to foster interaction.

 

People work on remote for those companies because they know, if they head into the office, those companies will micromanage them and keep them there for 15 hours. It really doesn't matter how nice the offices are, if you don't feel like you can leave them without a heavy hand of guilt laid on your back.

 

Do they have enough physical workspace to accommodate everyone on payroll? Otherwise they've got to either do some construction or hope this weeds out a lot of people.

Also, wonder how many San Fran wonder kids took jobs there so they wouldn't have to schlep to Sunnyvale five days a week?

 

Really surprised to see this--goes against the whole work from home trend that's being embraced in many industries well beyond the high tech IT firms on the left coast.

My guess is this will backfire on them and they'll lose some high quality people due specifically to this edict--people they really would prefer not to see go, and who might often end up at a competitor.

Work from home can be fairly easily managed, as long as the management in charge is competent. Of course, that's no really different than managing those same people in an office environment anyway.

Working from home is only going to continue to grow as a standard, and especially as fuel prices continue to rise, the demand from the working public to be able to work from home in many, many fields will become a common employment expectation.

So much so that the commercial real estate industry might well mimic some of the same challenges the newspaper industry has seen over the past decade.

 

I think this, too. All it takes is a couple leaders in each field, and the dominoes fall. If a top-five New York law firm, for example, announced tomorrow that associates could now work from home, everyone else would be doing the same as soon as they escaped their leases. There is probably plenty I don't grasp, but the existence of the downtown office space market as we have come to know it seems precarious to me.

 

Which competitor? Google? Facebook? Both of which discourage remote working?

 

I would not be surprised to see large numbers of downtown urban office buildings become our version of the 19th century Wild West ghost towns.

 

Discourage is certainly softer than an all out ban. And if those companies see quality techno-geniuses flocking to their doors, they might find themselves re-thinking their direction, and certainly might find a way to make a few or a thousand exceptions...

 

The move is also couched against the reality of pending staff reductions -- there's a school of thought out here, to which I subscribe, that this is going to force some people to quit and eliminate the need to dismiss them with severance packages. In the tech industry, the severance is usually pretty generous, and avoiding it for a few thousand employees who leave of their own volition would be a nice savings.

 

This is where I fall on it. Yahoo has to make cuts. Hard cuts. If they can give people four months to find something else, and then they leave? Money saved.

 

How much longer will Yahoo! be relevant?

 

A friend's brother works at Google and that place sounds like a dream. Free day care, free meals, free massages, they encourage you to bring food home... Free dry cleaning... He goes there all the time on his days off and stays late even when he doesn't have to...

I see both sides of this... I work from home and do most of my work by video conferencing. I worked in the office for two years and they let you work from home once you prove that you're capable. I get more work done at home, but that's definitely not the case for everyone...