Yahoo cancels work from home
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I hate to disagree, but I have to say that when I'm working from home (a couple of days a week) I get different things done than when I'm working from work. I don't like my commute, but I'd feel really disconnected if I didn't spend time at the office with my colleagues. On the days I'm home, I get more coding done, and more of the sort of rote management work done. When I'm in the office, I chat with people who I wouldn't have set up a meeting with, and find out what's going on in a broader, less targeted way than when I'm at home. It's true that technology makes it less important to be there and, for example, sometimes pair programming is better done with screen sharing and VOIP than sitting in a chair and craning to see the code on the screen. But I feel that the social interaction/brainstorming/overhearing that occurs at the office just doesn't happen as well as it does in person.
Tom Clement Serena Software, Inc. www.serena.com articles[^]
I agree with you. There are pros and cons to working at home or working in an office with other people. To me, trying to make a one-size-fits-all ruling is a sign of poor management and a better idea would be to figure out the right combination. Saying there will be no working from home would be just as absurd as saying that there would be no working from the office. A judicious combination would be a more reasoned approach.
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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While I do wish my company would let me work from home from time to time
Marc Clifton wrote:
waste of heating/cooling office space
I think it's better to heat one office full of 100 people than to heat 100 separate homes that otherwise don't need heating till the evening.
Marc Clifton wrote:
just transporting their brains and bodies to a cubicle
There's the problem. Why, in deed, bother going all the way to the office if all you're going to do is sit by yourself in a cubicle? I work in an open plan office and the intermingling is marginally better. As an aside, I think our company's argument for not allowing work from home is that there is no way to control the hours the employee works. Left to their own devices our employees would work themselves to their graves so they need to make sure they commute so that they only work for the number of hours they are paid for. I'm serious. Mostly... :rolleyes:
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...
PaulowniaK wrote:
I think it's better to heat one office full of 100 people than to heat 100 separate homes that otherwise don't need heating till the evening.
I don't know about your thermostat, but mine can't tell time. My apartment is heated whether I'm home or not. (All the way up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit! :laugh: )
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I hate to disagree, but I have to say that when I'm working from home (a couple of days a week) I get different things done than when I'm working from work. I don't like my commute, but I'd feel really disconnected if I didn't spend time at the office with my colleagues. On the days I'm home, I get more coding done, and more of the sort of rote management work done. When I'm in the office, I chat with people who I wouldn't have set up a meeting with, and find out what's going on in a broader, less targeted way than when I'm at home. It's true that technology makes it less important to be there and, for example, sometimes pair programming is better done with screen sharing and VOIP than sitting in a chair and craning to see the code on the screen. But I feel that the social interaction/brainstorming/overhearing that occurs at the office just doesn't happen as well as it does in person.
Tom Clement Serena Software, Inc. www.serena.com articles[^]
Tom Clement wrote:
But I feel that the social interaction/brainstorming/overhearing that occurs at the office just doesn't happen as well as it does in person.
I've had experiences where I agree with you, but I've also had experiences where being around other people is a distraction, leads to gossip and rumor-mongering, and simply wastes a lot of time. I'm noticing I have a really strong opinion, probably because I like to work in my own environment (my computer hardware and software and environment has, without exception, been superior to what a company has ever provided, except for a client that I worked with once that supplied me with some amazing hardware), I like to set my own hours where I don't have to work (or look like I'm working) when I need to take a mental break to get some creative ideas on how to tackle a problem, etc. Basically, what I want an employer to do is to give me the freedom to choose what is the best way for me to get the work done. I'm not opposed to coming in to an office, but I am opposed to stupid rules preventing me from being a sane, productive, individual. All too often, I think that employees are little more than indentured slaves. Marc
Latest Article: C# and Ruby Classes: A Deep Dive
My Blog -
PaulowniaK wrote:
I think it's better to heat one office full of 100 people than to heat 100 separate homes that otherwise don't need heating till the evening.
I don't know about your thermostat, but mine can't tell time. My apartment is heated whether I'm home or not. (All the way up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit! :laugh: )
lewax00 wrote:
I don't know about your thermostat
Yeah, the good thing is, I don't have one of those! I just hit the ON button on my gas fan heater when I get home and turn it off on my way out. ;)
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...
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lewax00 wrote:
I don't know about your thermostat
Yeah, the good thing is, I don't have one of those! I just hit the ON button on my gas fan heater when I get home and turn it off on my way out. ;)
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...
Well I see you're profile says you're in Japan, so maybe things are different there. In the U.S. at least, there wouldn't be an additional cost to staying home in terms of heating for most people, but I could see that varying from region to region...even where I grew up, a decent portion of homes are still heated by wood stoves, which obviously wouldn't be powered when no one's there, but then I'd still want to compare the cost and environmental impact of wood stoves vs. office heating systems before saying one was a better option than the other. (As for me, I'd rather just wrap up in a blanket, and save both costs...unfortunately I'm not the sole decision maker on that...)
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
Nail the bastards to a desk, if I can't work from home no other sob should be able to work from home! Do I sound bitter and twisted on this subject, dammed right I do, can't take the data off site, can't work from home, CRAP!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
In my initial phase of career, I worked for few companies. There are basically 3 types of people in work place. Extremely gifted and try hard programmers, stupids and then managers. Managers would call a meeting twice a day as it is their work. Stupids are too happy to attend those as they can't do any work and these rare species of programmers feels frustrated when building a model in their mind, they are distracted by the managers. Then there are open cubicles, you can look around, you can hear around and you have no control over your thoughts. This was one of the primary reasons for my frequent switching of job initially and then dumping the whole idea of a job. I have given liberty to my team to work wherever they can work and whatever amount of time they can work. At the end of the day all we care is a nice product. Don't care if someone does it in 2 hours or 20 hours. We do have occasional mandatory meet ups where we discuss about ideas and to do's . But once a product is voted for take up, we are all our own working in that. In office, home, park, I don't care. For companies in real engineering, design, prototyping, product design you need to give space to every one to keep their brain fresh from worries of commutation and rushing and leaving office in time and of course to be away from stupids. In my country India, in cities like Bangalore employees spends four hours daily on commutation as most of the IT parks are way outside the city. 4 Hours of pure unproductive hassle has killed any scope of innovation or ground breaking work. Hope Yahoo does learn something from Bangalore story which promised a great contribution to IT a few years back but is now all about offshore and maintenance.
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Nail the bastards to a desk, if I can't work from home no other sob should be able to work from home! Do I sound bitter and twisted on this subject, dammed right I do, can't take the data off site, can't work from home, CRAP!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
Yahoo is but a shadow of it's former glory. Time was when it dictated the rules we all followed. Now, they are trying to revive themselves. They were tossed overboard a long time ago. With their diminishing labour count I'd have thought they'd have embraced working from home. It means they could sell some of the properties.
"I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot." — Ramón Maria Narváez (1800-68). "I don't need to shoot my enemies, I don't have any." - Me (2012).
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In my initial phase of career, I worked for few companies. There are basically 3 types of people in work place. Extremely gifted and try hard programmers, stupids and then managers. Managers would call a meeting twice a day as it is their work. Stupids are too happy to attend those as they can't do any work and these rare species of programmers feels frustrated when building a model in their mind, they are distracted by the managers. Then there are open cubicles, you can look around, you can hear around and you have no control over your thoughts. This was one of the primary reasons for my frequent switching of job initially and then dumping the whole idea of a job. I have given liberty to my team to work wherever they can work and whatever amount of time they can work. At the end of the day all we care is a nice product. Don't care if someone does it in 2 hours or 20 hours. We do have occasional mandatory meet ups where we discuss about ideas and to do's . But once a product is voted for take up, we are all our own working in that. In office, home, park, I don't care. For companies in real engineering, design, prototyping, product design you need to give space to every one to keep their brain fresh from worries of commutation and rushing and leaving office in time and of course to be away from stupids. In my country India, in cities like Bangalore employees spends four hours daily on commutation as most of the IT parks are way outside the city. 4 Hours of pure unproductive hassle has killed any scope of innovation or ground breaking work. Hope Yahoo does learn something from Bangalore story which promised a great contribution to IT a few years back but is now all about offshore and maintenance.
I think one of the difficulties is where IT managers have not been competent coders. Any competent coder will probably hold your view - most of my solutions come about while I am away from the desk while walking, exercising or on the crapper. Given this it is obvious to me that good coders are more akin to artists than bean counters and need room and space for their inspiration.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
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My theory is that it's a brilliant plot to cut the headcount again without having to pay severance.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Exactly. It's a way to have layoffs without calling them layoffs.
I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone - Bjarne Stroustrup The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke! My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.
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While I do wish my company would let me work from home from time to time
Marc Clifton wrote:
waste of heating/cooling office space
I think it's better to heat one office full of 100 people than to heat 100 separate homes that otherwise don't need heating till the evening.
Marc Clifton wrote:
just transporting their brains and bodies to a cubicle
There's the problem. Why, in deed, bother going all the way to the office if all you're going to do is sit by yourself in a cubicle? I work in an open plan office and the intermingling is marginally better. As an aside, I think our company's argument for not allowing work from home is that there is no way to control the hours the employee works. Left to their own devices our employees would work themselves to their graves so they need to make sure they commute so that they only work for the number of hours they are paid for. I'm serious. Mostly... :rolleyes:
Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike... me...
PaulowniaK wrote:
I think it's better to heat one office full of 100 people than to heat 100 separate homes that otherwise don't need heating till the evening.
It's typically a bit more than this, actually. For my company, the cost is real estate on the whole. Less people in the office mean less office space, which means less rent, less power, less phones, less overall HVAC costs. Get rid of a bunch of big offices/cubes and instead offer smaller "hotel space" for when the work-from-home guys come in, and you've got massive savings. We saved millions of dollars per month by getting rid of a few buildings. Speaking for myself, I'm endlessly more productive when working from home. I'm not surrounded by folks pestering me with gossip and chit-chat, but they're still there for that via email, IM, and phone if I ever feel like I'm missing it. I get to put on some brain-enducing music and open a window. And thou shalt not ever put a price on working in your underwear! :cool: With that said, back to Yahoo! themselves ... I'm wondering if this isn't nasty downsizing through forced attrition. They're not giving people that have moved out of state (assuming there are any) very much time to pick up their entire families and move back. It wouldn't surprise me if she's hoping a bunch of people quit.
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Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
-
Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
I work for a green business. Part of our green thing, is to work from home x% of the time. This turns out to be 1 day each week. Work from home is not frowned upon, so long as it's not all the time. So we have each other spiratically working from home. We use Lync and tfs/git so there's no real reason to be in the office all the time. I'm very comfortable and productive from home.
If it moves, compile it
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Tom Clement wrote:
But I feel that the social interaction/brainstorming/overhearing that occurs at the office just doesn't happen as well as it does in person.
I've had experiences where I agree with you, but I've also had experiences where being around other people is a distraction, leads to gossip and rumor-mongering, and simply wastes a lot of time. I'm noticing I have a really strong opinion, probably because I like to work in my own environment (my computer hardware and software and environment has, without exception, been superior to what a company has ever provided, except for a client that I worked with once that supplied me with some amazing hardware), I like to set my own hours where I don't have to work (or look like I'm working) when I need to take a mental break to get some creative ideas on how to tackle a problem, etc. Basically, what I want an employer to do is to give me the freedom to choose what is the best way for me to get the work done. I'm not opposed to coming in to an office, but I am opposed to stupid rules preventing me from being a sane, productive, individual. All too often, I think that employees are little more than indentured slaves. Marc
Latest Article: C# and Ruby Classes: A Deep Dive
My BlogIt seems to be as if Walt and Marc are largely making the same point: trust the employee to be a professional (i.e., don't si thome and watch movies/play games/etc), and decide what works best for them. This can vary from day to day; maybe it's best for me to work from home once in a while due to weather/appointments/whatever. I prefer to go in just to get out of the house, but a company should be inclusive of those who don't prefer to (as long as, as Marc points out, they remain productive and accessible). I think there is some marginal value in being in the office. The other day, I got pulled into a discussion in a product with which I have no interaction, just to have a general discussion about how to solve a problem. Had I not been physically there, I wouldn't have been walking by, and gotten pulled in. (It turns out that the right answer was to question the preceived requirements. I heard later the understanding of the problem wasn't what the product owner was thinking. I think I added value by being an outside source to point out what was being perceived wasn't a good idea generally, and giving them a new perspective on it to use as an example to go back to the product people with). Anyway, the marginal value is almost certainly not as great as Ms. Yahoo seems to think it is. Sure, events like that happen once in a while, but they're not an everyday event. Marc's points about the environmental impact also have some merit, although they're probably not quite as great; the heat/lights/etc at the office are going to be on whether you're there or not. It's actually worse, I suspect, to work from home, because you're heating/lighting/etc your home which you wouldn't otherwise. Not sure how that offsets once you factor in commuting. If you take public transportation, that's running whether you're on it or not; if you drive, certainly you're saving those emissions.
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It seems to be as if Walt and Marc are largely making the same point: trust the employee to be a professional (i.e., don't si thome and watch movies/play games/etc), and decide what works best for them. This can vary from day to day; maybe it's best for me to work from home once in a while due to weather/appointments/whatever. I prefer to go in just to get out of the house, but a company should be inclusive of those who don't prefer to (as long as, as Marc points out, they remain productive and accessible). I think there is some marginal value in being in the office. The other day, I got pulled into a discussion in a product with which I have no interaction, just to have a general discussion about how to solve a problem. Had I not been physically there, I wouldn't have been walking by, and gotten pulled in. (It turns out that the right answer was to question the preceived requirements. I heard later the understanding of the problem wasn't what the product owner was thinking. I think I added value by being an outside source to point out what was being perceived wasn't a good idea generally, and giving them a new perspective on it to use as an example to go back to the product people with). Anyway, the marginal value is almost certainly not as great as Ms. Yahoo seems to think it is. Sure, events like that happen once in a while, but they're not an everyday event. Marc's points about the environmental impact also have some merit, although they're probably not quite as great; the heat/lights/etc at the office are going to be on whether you're there or not. It's actually worse, I suspect, to work from home, because you're heating/lighting/etc your home which you wouldn't otherwise. Not sure how that offsets once you factor in commuting. If you take public transportation, that's running whether you're on it or not; if you drive, certainly you're saving those emissions.
agolddog wrote:
Had I not been physically there, I wouldn't have been walking by, and gotten pulled in.
Yes, but you're still describing a coincidence. If a business wants to actually facilitate creativity and sharing of ideas, it should not be relying on the watercooler effect. Marc
Latest Article: C# and Ruby Classes: A Deep Dive
My Blog -
Apologies if this is a repost (I know how much that hurts some). Yahoo has abolished work-from-home[^]. I'm wondering how the rest of you feel about it. Speaking for myself, this would be (yet another) sign of time to move to a new employer, as I don't know if I even could work in a regular office anymore. There are just so many tools (IM, Campfire, IRC) that make communication easy.
-------------- TTFN - Kent
I think it's overkill, but marissa mayer's still hot.
Just curious.