<p>What stuns me is her decision to dump all those cars with one Yahoo employee each in them onto the highways of Silicon Valley. I thought the tech companies were supposed to be trailblazers in having employees telecommute & cut CO2 emissions, as well as making their lives better.</p>
<p>On the WAH debate–my husband works at home every Thursday. He sleeps in till 6 and works all day, then he works more in the evening. He also works at home after he gets home on the other days. On the days he takes the train to work for his 1.5 hr each way commute, he gets up at 4:30 & arrives home at 6:30. He works on weekends, too. His backside is parked in the chair & he is working. Telecommuting if that is what you want to call it. He has never had a job from which he went home in the evening & did not work more that night before he returned to the office. Everyone in his division of his company does exactly the same thing. They are in pharmaceutical research. </p>
<p>When we have had bad snowstorms, everyone in the dept stays home but works there all day. It is much safer for them & also saves what would have been a very long commute. </p>
<p>When Sandy disrupted our state’s transit system for weeks (months in some places), those who had electricity worked from home after the company re-opened one week after the storm. We did not have electricity for 2 weeks so my husband worked from the local firehouse, which had a generator. </p>
<p>My son in law does the same thing without the lengthy commute — goes to work, comes home, eats & then back to work, from the sofa.</p>
<p>My daughter worked from home after her first baby’s maternity leave, and went into the office one day every week or two to meet with her supervisor while her husband watched the baby in the cafeteria (they worked at the same place but not the same dept). </p>
<p>When she had the second baby (they are 4 & 1.5), that was more than she could handle (she is nursing/nursed them) & she “retired” for a few years. She intends to return to either that job or something very like it once the baby is in nursery school. She is a computer scientist. </p>
<p>So I don’t understand what Ms Mayer has against telecommuters. The people in my family who do it work their butts off.</p>
<p>It’s sad that so many intelligent and well educated people continue to perpetuate ideals of outdated gender roles.</p>
<p>Both parents should be held to equal standards in parenting. People questioned Katie Couric when she went to Iraq but apparently have no problem with all male journalists.</p>
<p>Romani, you needn’t go as far as Germany. Hop on over to Ontario and you’ll be entitled to 37 weeks of paid parental leave through EI payments, and many employers will offer to top it up so that you will receive more than that. My D who is a teacher got a year and a half and her job was guaranteed in the same school. It really amazes me how little parental leave is offered in the U.S.</p>
<p>We had an interesting convergence of weather and unplanned WAH today.</p>
<p>Basically, we got hit with a snowstorm that started in the early morning hours. Some schools in rural areas closed, but most in our city and its suburbs did not. So most people gamely took to the slippery roads and got to work more or less on time.</p>
<p>But then there was this email awaiting all of us from a recent hire in our department–someone who manages to find an excuse to not work a full week just about every week.</p>
<p>Subject line: “X will be working at home starting around noon.”</p>
<p>Message: “As the snow continues, I’ll be heading out before my truck cannot handle the roads.”</p>
<p>Just before he left, the HR department sent an email around to the company saying, “to help people avoid slow commutes during rush hour, please feel free to leave at 3:30.” He left anyway, just after lunch.</p>
<p>The only evidence of him working at home during the afternoon was when he replied to someone’s email about a dentist appointment saying “happy dentistry.” </p>
<p>We have people who drive in 45 minutes to an hour or more each day, either from the other side of town or from way out in the country. Today their commutes would have doubled, with white-knuckle conditions.</p>
<p>He lives five minutes from the office. And he is a supervisor. He left without making sure any of his eight direct reports needed him or also needed a special dispensation to leave. Nice, huh?</p>
<p>'There are Federal notice regulations when you fire above a certain number of people."</p>
<p>There’s nothing that’s a real impediment to firing as many people as you want. If this is actually the reason she’s hanging on to nonperformers, she needs a new legal staff.</p>
<p>“What stuns me is her decision to dump all those cars with one Yahoo employee each in them onto the highways of Silicon Valley. I thought the tech companies were supposed to be trailblazers in having employees telecommute & cut CO2 emissions, as well as making their lives better.”</p>
<p>What stuns me is that some seem to think that the primary purpose of a company is to make life easy for their workers and save the environment, among other idealistic dreams.</p>
<p>The purpose of a for profit company is to make a profit. If they can accomplish many other worthy goals, including improving quality of life for employees, that’s wonderful. If they don’t make a profit, they go out of business (unless they’re a car company, then they get propped up by the govt forever).</p>
<p>Best Buy just announced the same policy for their corporate workers. They are now expected to work from the office for 40 hours per week.</p>
<p>I can’t see this in our company (our company is doing really well and it’s well distributed) but I wouldn’t have a problem with it were it to happen.</p>
<p>I have no problem with Yahoo existing to make a profit; I just think it’s poor management to slice off all the WAH workers – whether productive or not – instead of identifying the bad seeds and dealing with them individually. That’s why there are layers of management.</p>
According to the careers section of the Yahoo website it appears they have dozens of locations across the USA, 14 states (and 4 of the locations in California are outside of the Bay Area) plus DC, not just the Bay Area.</p>
<p>Also - one can’t assume it’d be a bunch of cars with one employee each - there could well be some of them who’ll use mass transit and some who’ll ride share but, there probably will be a lot of cars with a single person in them.</p>
<p>"Best Buy has decided to end its own work-from-home program. It’s not really as bad as it sounds. Some of the 4,000 nonstore employees who enjoyed the widely popular Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) program that allowed them to make their own flexible schedules or work from home may still be permitted to do so; they just now need to get permission from a manager. “It used to be a right about which a manager had no say. Now it’s a conversation,” a Best Buy spokesperson explained. “We believe in employee flexibility but are looking for it to come in the context of a conversation between that employee and their manager.”</p>
<p>this makes more sense to me, as it recognizes the importance of the manager agreeing to and “managing” the wfh arrangement…</p>
<p>We’re in mid-snowstorm here, and most of the people at my company are working from home today. I “attended” a meeting-turned-into-a-conference-call earlier this morning at which everyone was present but only one participant was actually in the office.</p>
<p>In fact, so many people are working from home today that it’s slowing down the work-from-home portal, leading to frustrating delays in response times on our computers. The IT people are trying to do something about it.</p>
<p>I mention this because it wouldn’t be happening if people weren’t actually working. In a company that manages work-from-home properly, people really do work.</p>
<p>My grandparents lived with my parents, and my wife’s parent(s) lives/d with us and took care of the kids when we were out. It’s not unusual for kids to be as close to or closer to the grandparents than the parents, and towards the end, while they were in HS, they were taking him out. Several of my friends are in a similar situation where they live or spend a lot of time in their childrens’ homes. And then there are some where the kid has been told by the spouse that the parents are welcome in person during Thanksgiving and in a photo stand the rest of the year…</p>