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

Fucking Wetzel.

 

Sometimes I think I must have worked with Moddy at some point but then I remembered this iss the newspaper business and every story is virtually the same place from joint to joint.

At almost every place I've worked, I've had managers try to guilt me into not taking vacation time. And sometimes I obliged and sometimes I didn't.

The problem managers are those who use the guilt trip and then don't ever take vacation themselves because they want to be some sort of martyr and brag about how if they weren't there, the whole place would fucking fall apart.

One stop had that style of manager. He got cut loose in a layoff and the place continued to operate at a high level and actually improved because you didn't have a micro-managing dick sitting in an office and not actually doing any fucking work.

End of rant. It is just that vacation time and working from home are continual sticking points at my current place.

 

There's the money quote right there. Melissa Mayer gets to see her kid whenever she wants because the day care is attached the office. The rest of you can go fuck yourselves.

 

Shit like this is yet another reason why I'm glad I'm out.

 

Once I was already on vacation when a crisis occurred (there'd been a fire that knocked out the computers and everyone was scrambling to get the paper out). I heard about it through the grapevine and made it a point to be away from the phone. My boss let me know later on that he was disappointed with me because I wasn't checking in regularly during vacation. Had I been doing so, he pointed out, I'd have been able to rush in and help. Uh huh ...

 

Honest-to fucking-God for my last vacation, I deliberately picked a cruise because a) it would get me out of the country and b) cell phones and e-mail don't work, so in no way could I be contacted.

Best. Vacation. Ever.

Of course the day we get back to port, and I turn my phone on, it practically blows up because of the backlog of messages, e-mails, texts and etc

 

If they were being asked to work at a sweatshop for $20 a day, that would be one thing.

But they are simply being asked to "come to work," something most people have been doing all their lives --- and something that about 10% of the population (the unemployed) is dying to be able to do.

I would always --- always --- see the chance to work from home as a gift.

Never would I think I was entitled to it in perpetuity. I'm just not wired that way. I have no "entitlement" genes in my body.

 

I get that but I think it depends on what the expectations were when you were hired.

My wife and I are going through this right now as she was hired by a big American company less than a year ago with the provision she works out of a home office and now she is being told that she has to report to a regional office.

My wife is a pretty social person and misses the relationship side of the office so it is not really a big issue even if it is causing some child care stress.

My issue with how Yahoo is handling it is that it is such a broad brush and as mentioned, the CEO is not being a leader on this.

 

I live in the heart of all this tech boom and I have friends who work at just about every big company based in Silicon Valley. (I know that sounds Drip-like, but when there are tens of thousands of employees at each company, it isn't saying much for me to say that.)

Anyway, if I were to count up the number of times someone at these companies was "working from home" while they were sitting right next to me at a kids' sporting event or school function, that number would be in the hundreds. That is what "work from home" has come to mean out here and especially in that world -- you have your phone with you and can take calls and answer emails, but there isn't a whole lot else happening. You can say that it's bad management oversight, but it's also par for the course, so it's just part of the culture.

The kid issue is the root of the problem, because that's why most of the people want to work from home in the first place. Maybe they were irresponsible workers before they had kids, but I don't think so. When I was childless, where else was I going to be on a Tuesday afternoon? But yesterday, starting at 3:45 p.m., my kids had a total of four practices that they had to get to.

 

This sounds like really, really bad management to me. Yahoo should probably fix its hiring practices and line management.

My question would be, Do these folks have well-communicated responsibilities and are they fulfilling them?

 

If they have good managers, they should be able to work it out.

 

Why would they have to work it out when they can find about a thousand other people to take each job under the conditions they're proposing?