I've seen this happening with other companies recently. There may be a small trend away from remote working. I agree its unfair to the employee who was hired on flexibility, but I don't think it is a bad move for Yahoo. It takes a very specific type of individual to work at home with the same efficiency as in an office.
> It takes a very specific type of individual to work at home with the same efficiency as in an office.
Does it? If I want to slack off I find it just as easy in the office as I do at home. Heck I can even have music on at work or stream a video.
Frankly for me I find home working far less distracting than work. Work is noisy, people are coming and going, there are calls all around me, at home it is just me in a dark office only interrupted by things aimed specifically at me (Skype, e-mail, etc).
But this all boils down to the same old 1900s time mythos. You take intellectual workers and hold them to standards created for factory workers.
The theory goes that if I work longer I am more efficient. If they restrict access to distractions then I am more efficient. If they can look over my shoulder I am more efficient.
Personally I think this is all nonsense. The only way to track my efficiency is with milestones. The nice thing about milestones is that they are metrics which are flexible. If you fail to meet them you have a two way discussion about /why/.
I second this. I've been working out of hours a lot recently and find that my productivity is boosted dramatically when I am alone. Open plan offices need to go the way of the dinosaur.
My optimal work environment is working with one or two coworkers in a coffee shop. I'm something like six times more productive (in terms of code/feature points/tasks) than working strictly remote (as I do most of the time).
It's a reason why I'm looking to hire remote developers who are mostly geographically located near me--main office is in Nashville, I'm in Boston. WFH when you want, head into a coworking space when you want some company. Seems the best of both worlds to me.
There's a lot of research suggesting that people overestimate their productivity in remote working environments and that in general, max productivity comes from small, in-person working environments.
My guess is almost all of this is totally dependent on the environments you are discussing. Some people have built very productive home work environments but most have not. Most people's office environment is probably better than what they have at home (maybe they have multiple monitors, supplies, a nice chair and desk, etc) but I don't think there's anything specific to office vs. home aside from the investment into productivity of that space.
My guess is some of the folks on here hollering about being way better workers at home are right. They also probably spent several thousand bucks on a nice workspace, keyboard, extra monitor, stand up desk, whatever they need....
The research that I've seen supporting small in-person environments has all been carried out with low-skill workers (typically undergrad volunteers) on tasks that do not require deep critical thought or creativity. It's not at all clear that it generalizes to the sort of work that a senior technical staff member does.
I am not a researcher in the field, so its entirely possible that there is good work to support your claim, but all the research I've seen cited on HN in past discussions was crap or simply not relevant for the stated reason.
I've yet to see research that compares a modern distributed workflow with github/trac/unfuddle, IRC/campfire, IM, Skype, etc. compared to on site. Some of the remote developer studies are hilariously out dated.
Maybe there's a generation gap (People who grew up with IM/IRC can naturally use it communicate better?) or my experience is too colored by working only remote my whole career, but between the places I worked without distributed workflows and those I hear about from my friends in the industry, my anecdotal evidence says distributed teams are far far more effective.
Same here. Not everyone can focus at home though. I know I can get a TON of work done at home compared to office, but my girlfriend cannot get anything done at home. Definitely depends on the person :)
More than a specific individual, it requires a very specific type of workplace organisation.
Remote workers can be successful if and only if the communication and processes support it: all discussion within the teams must be electronic, on wikis, mailing lists, IRC or skype chats. Knowledge must be written down, not available via "ask Bob to fix the build on your computer". Now, these processes are useful on their own (more documentation, less interruption for all workers), but they do require effort by the on-site workers to avoid making decisions at the coffee machine. As a result, I believe remote work can work out well only if a sufficient fraction (perhaps over 50%) people are remote, not a small minority.
However, most discussions of remote vs. on-site assume that the people are the same. Yes, having the same team in a room is probably more productive than having them distributed. But by accepting remote work, companies have a much wider pool of talent available. Most people over 30 have partners with local jobs, kids in school, a house, relatives, and a set of friends they would not give up to move for a small improvement in salary or job satisfaction. Instead of comparing remote vs. on-site, it makes sense to compare an amazing remote team to an average on-site team.
In the Yahoo case, I expect that many of the developers will quit and find a job with a more local company, instead of moving or commuting for hours. Is that really an improvement of total productivity?
E.g. -- someone posted a link here to an article in which they describe using Google Hangouts for everything. There's a permanent one that everyone is on all damn day. There are special, throwaway hangouts for asides and meetings and anything else that might be needed.
You don't need to be in person, and many people would surprised how effective teams can be even when they're not in the same room. All it takes is good communication, and by that I mean: 1- good communication technology, like a good net connection and good chat software and good cameras, 2- good use of technology for communication (IM software is not sufficient), and 3- good communication practices (which amounts to: communicate early, communicate often).
