why techies have such a grudge against yahoo
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer received a massive heaping of criticism for her decision to revoke all employees’ ability to work from home over the last several weeks. From the tech press, most of the wired pundits groaned that Mayer just doesn’t get it. News and blog sites constantly harped on the fact that she had a nursery built onsite so she could stay in the office no matter what and that her expectations about her workers’ lives were completely unrealistic. Token contrarians did their half-hearted best in reminding us that working from home is not for everyone, Yahoo is not exactly a prison but a rather cushy place to work, and that a lot of people in Silicon Valley spend an inordinate amount of time in the office. And from all the sociological and technological bits of punditry created in response to Mayer’s decision, I’d like to declare the tech writers as those who did the best job explaining why her choice was ill advised. They’re the ones who got it.
A while ago, I tackled some pointed criticisms of telecommuting and why they usually showed a problem with the organization not understanding what telecommuting is and how to do it rather than a fundamental problem with the concept. The very same points are present in Mayer’s big decision and what they show is someone obsessed with putting in time at the office not realizing that the number of hours spent in a cube or how many cars there are in a parking lot are not an indicator of how well the company is or isn’t working. In fact, her decision was motivated by how employees came and went according to the usual tech reporter sources, and the fact that there weren’t as many cars outside at 5 pm as she’d like rather than some sort of study as to why the number of cars was so low. Are the employees no longer engaged? Are they more productive when they work from home? Herding them back into the office and keeping them there does not answer these questions. It just makes the parking lot full and the current CEO happy, and this is why she was loudly booed by the tech press which abhors the ass-in-the-chair metric.
So let’s say that you’re an executive of a tech company going through hard times and you work late nights in the office with few people around after the informal quitting time. Wouldn’t you want to see how well the telecommuting employees are doing? Did they get everything delivered? Did they get the projects working? Were they around when questions needed to be answered or call in during the big meeting? Next, since the company isn’t doing well, how about trying to find out if your workers feel trapped or like they’re on a sinking ship and looking for a way out? Is there an actual mission for them to fulfill? Are they being challenged? Do they feel like working for you is advancing their knowledge and careers? If not, of course they’re not going to stick around more than necessary. Likewise, you need to look at how productive the company is and how many of the projects it started are on schedule. More hours at the office does not mean more work and better products. Sometimes they just mean more hours behind your computer.
Of course I appreciate that there are projects which need you in the office and you have to be there until everything is done and ready to go. We’ve all been there, especially before a product launch. But when someone is spending 10 or 12 hours in the office on a routine basis and very proudly brags about running on five hours of sleep and adrenaline, one starts to wonder what it is precisely that requires this person to spend half a life at work. How much is he or she getting done and what exactly does it bring to the company’s bottom line? Is there a better use of all this time and if so, what? These are not rhetorical questions. Running a company costs money and every hour you spend in the office needs to have a reason behind it. If this reason is to show all your subordinates how dedicated you are to work, is that really a good use of a company’s time and resources? And does it mean that you’re wasting time with e-mails that shouldn’t have been written or sent, meetings that are a waste of everyone’s time, and fluffy meets and greets? And would all this cost a lot less if you just let people work from home and get things done?
