Yahoo cancels work from home
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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
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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
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.
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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
I like a hybred, work mostly from office, day or two at home. I have a long commute. Driving continually can wear me out, as well as make it impossible to go to the dentist locally or deal with a plumber. Not to mention sick kids, etc.. Life. I can be very productive at home. Without the commute (and no other appointments), I can login earlier and stay on later. Esp for specific tasks not requiring working with others. There are times when in person is better, I wouldn't want to be remote full time. Large group discussions over the phone are difficult - strong accents, and not knowing who's talking. We have a formal telecommute program. Sometimes too formal, but mostly ok. Previous job had informal work from home for decades (dumb terminals and old time modems!). I can't imagine returning to not ever working from home - especially with a long commute.
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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 BlogI'm not sure I'm with you on that Marc. The alternative is to set up processes that ensure that all necessary communication occurs. I'm pretty suspicious of process. An analogy I often use is this:
In a cell, things like ATP production in mitochondria occur because, even in the Krebs cycle, enzymes float around and make certain reactions more likely to occur than not. Its not a bunch of gears and levers. If you put a project manager in charge of ATP production, all life on earth would end instantly because they would insist on well defined gears and levers. They'd say "we can't depend on 'chance encounters' and changes in probabilities for something as important as cell energy production."
I guess my point is that the asking people to be physically together and thus capable of interacting and communicating somewhat randomly has a systemic effect that is positive. Whether you call it 'cross pollination of ideas' or the 'watercooler effect', it has a real and valuable effect. Yes there are things you can do (like daily meetings) to mimic its effect when people are remote from each other, but I don't believe it is as effective. There are folks at my work who are considering moving from remote locations back to the Bay Area because they feel left out of the mix. No-one is trying to do that to them and they are absolutely included and welcomed into conversations and meetings, but it isn't the same.
Tom Clement Serena Software, Inc. www.serena.com articles[^]
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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
I like the flexibility of setting my own hours at home. Yes I do. But my employer pays me and has the right to say how I should work. If I don't like it, I can find another job. Grow the heck up. I am very productive when I work at home as a sole contributor. It's always quiet and I have total control over my environment, and it happens that I'm not a time-waster. But that's as a sole contributor. I have worked in teams that allowed substantial work-at-home time. It is a fantasy that IRC is in any way a substitute for a face-to-face meeting. It's adequate for low-stakes meetings like status updates (in fact we developed the habit of pre-typing our status report and copy/pasting it into IRC, causing this meeting to take 60 seconds. When you try to do difficult, creative tasks like software design over IRC, a couple of senior, fast-typing voices dominate and you never hear from the junior or quiet or slow-typing colleagues that often have good insights when you can ask them in a face-to-face, "So what do *you* think?" It is a fantasy that the tiny, jerky video windows and grotesque distorted audio of skype or google talk is any substitute for a face-to-face meeting. In my experience it is barely acceptable for low-stakes meetings. The very best possible results with skype and google talk are much better, but that requires every participant to have a high-speed data link, a quiet workspace, a headset/mic, and enough experience using this tool to mute their mic when they have a sniffling cold. In the more common case where participants are in a conference room using a laptop mic and webcam, the results are ludicrous. We had to designate in-office days on which we could do the heavy lifting of design. That didn't suit some teammates' desire for total freedom plus their fat paycheck. Because some people are never satisfied. Grow the heck up. Yes there are open source projects that make progress with no office and no face-to-face meetings. And the egos and political gaming in many open source projects are well documented. With no group norms and no mechanism to control egos, what do you expect? Is this the optimal way to complete a project of a given complexity? Don't think so. Some employers (like my current one) are geographically distributed. We put up with skype because we *have to*. We have an open office in an old building because we can't afford better space today. We are not deluded enough to think the current situation is optimal. We attempt to compensate by hiring very senior people through a c
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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...
I've worked in open-area workspaces before. Please shoot be before I have to work in another. I need at least some privacy to concentrate properly. Currently I'm in a half-height cube in a short row in a smaller office space, which offers at least some seclusion. As to your assertion that working in the office means only working during working hours....OMG. What industry do YOU work in? I've been taking work home to do in virtually every job I've had long before work-at-home became popular and widespread. Even when work-from-home was more restricted here in my current position, I would get calls and problems requiring work on nights and weekends. One of the best things about working from home is that I can control the distractions at home, but not at work. One of the best things my boss likes about me being in work is he can walk over to my desk at any time to distract me. It's also when some of our more productive sessions take place, because we're usually talking about something that we haven't spent time talking about in meetings (otherwise, he wouldn't be walking over to ask me). However, when I know what I'm doing, I'd just as soon do it without anyone (especially my boss) jogging my elbow while I'm doing it. Currently I'm working from home all the time because I'm restricted from driving for medical reasons. Thus, I've worked a few weeks from home, rather than a day or two per week as I usually do. I finally convinced my wife to drive me in for at least two days per week. The fact is, I was missing things happening at work that did not affect my current job assigments necessarily, but that impacted me personally - for instance, I just happened to come back to work the day they had a mass layoff, and so by chance I was able to say goodbye personally to a couple of people I'll probably never see again. None of which impacts the decision at Yahoo. This is obviously a decision of desperation by someone who needs to prove to a doubtful board of directors that they are, indeed, doing something to change things at Yahoo. Only someone in desperation would unilaterally and universally lay down such a policy, because no possible justification comes close to countering the amount of outrage such a major change will cause among Yahoo's employees, even the ones who actually do show up at an office. Such a change could have been worked in quietly, with first one group then another being told they need to come into the office. Politically, it's an invitation to disaster and brain-drain.
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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 BlogI think it largely depends on what you are working on. If you are working on an individual task, or based on previous decisions you just have 20 or 30 hours of coding to bang out, then it doesn't really matter where you do that. I find with the stuff we work on though, things evolve rather dynamically and these independent coding stints don't usually last that long. We tend to gather around the workspace area whiteboard and bang out interface layouts or discuss code strategies multiple times a day. Transitioning seamlessly between gathering around the whiteboard, to splitting off and having a senior dev pair program with a junior guy to show him a few tricks while another dev goes over the object tree structure with the designer so she can setup her bindings properly, to all working independently and someone just turning around and throwing out an idea to discuss...it's magical. You can kinda "simulate" these types of interactions with software, but it just isn't the same, not by a long shot. We are currently all working from home as we are moving offices, and let me tell you, the collaborative ecosystem has been stiffled considerably. People don't want to keep calling people into video chats because it's more disruptive than just talking to the guy next to you in an offce, so there is less "work in progress" sharing going on. This means that people tend to share their work after it is finished, and by then revisions and changes are a lot more expensive and time consuming, and people feel like they are throwing away large portions of their work. That said, sometimes a dev just gets a well defined task that we know will take 2 or 3 days to complete...in which case, do it from wherever you like! Hell, feel free to leave early if you have several hours of number crunching or whatever to do and you don't want to sit at the office doing it. I have no problem with working from home in situations like that.
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I'm not sure I'm with you on that Marc. The alternative is to set up processes that ensure that all necessary communication occurs. I'm pretty suspicious of process. An analogy I often use is this:
In a cell, things like ATP production in mitochondria occur because, even in the Krebs cycle, enzymes float around and make certain reactions more likely to occur than not. Its not a bunch of gears and levers. If you put a project manager in charge of ATP production, all life on earth would end instantly because they would insist on well defined gears and levers. They'd say "we can't depend on 'chance encounters' and changes in probabilities for something as important as cell energy production."
I guess my point is that the asking people to be physically together and thus capable of interacting and communicating somewhat randomly has a systemic effect that is positive. Whether you call it 'cross pollination of ideas' or the 'watercooler effect', it has a real and valuable effect. Yes there are things you can do (like daily meetings) to mimic its effect when people are remote from each other, but I don't believe it is as effective. There are folks at my work who are considering moving from remote locations back to the Bay Area because they feel left out of the mix. No-one is trying to do that to them and they are absolutely included and welcomed into conversations and meetings, but it isn't the same.
Tom Clement Serena Software, Inc. www.serena.com articles[^]
Tom Clement wrote:
I guess my point is that the asking people to be physically together and thus capable of interacting and communicating somewhat randomly has a systemic effect that is positive.
But that same hypothesis can lead to negative outcomes as well.
Tom Clement wrote:
Yes there are things you can do (like daily meetings) to mimic its effect when people are remote from each other, but I don't believe it is as effective.
I believe that formal code reviews provide that effect explicitly. It allows cross domain knowledge transfer, provides technical knowledge transfer and domain knowledge transfer. When done well it would be hard to see how that couldn't happen. Where random path crossing might have the impact it is only likely to do so when the people involved already have a social (not professional) relationship.
Tom Clement wrote:
There are folks at my work who are considering moving from remote locations back to the Bay Area because they feel left out of the mix.
There are places that are wonderful to work for and places that are nightmares. On average however most places are in between. So most solutions should fit those and not the extremes. What do you think would be the impact to the culture of your work place if management told you next week that everyone would be required to work from home full time one month from now? Would everyone be "thats a great idea"?
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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.