I’m not asking you to buy it. I know what I think and how I feel. I think children are important and people should only have them if they are going to treat the raising of them at least as seriously as they take their careers. I WOULD think twice about a male CEO who declared that everybody had to work in the office and could not work at home any more. If he had kids that were being raised by hired help I would feel the same. It may not make news, but I know I’d be asking about his outlook on raising a family.</p>
<p>You, however, are also allowed to have your own opinions as long as you’re not telling me that mine are wrong.</p>
<p>The “we” was a cultural “we” not a personal “we”. I think about it, too, as I intend to have a SAHD. </p>
<p>Even in my early 20s, people still raise eyebrows when I say I want to work and my SO wants to be a SAHD. No, we haven’t come nearly as far as we think we have. </p>
<p>Oh and FWIW, Mayer has said that her priorities are God, family, and work- in that order.</p>
<p>Both of my parents were teachers, I went to daycare, and I don’t feel like the people at daycare raised me any more than I feel like my teachers at school raised me. My parents are my parents. Their values, their lessons, their love is what was passed on through tremendous effort and countless hours.</p>
<p>I too bristle at the notion that my mother, because she was working, did not “raise” me, and that she shouldn’t have had me at all if her intention was to put me in a daycare.</p>
<p>And to be fair, we’re not looking at her productivity levels - we’re not reviewing her metrics and her revenues. Perhaps she determined there was a pattern of non-productivity due to a lack of face to face collaboration. I can tell you that on-line collaboration is not the same for everyone. Some people function better with face time. She made a business decision - it’s a business. I believe she opened a daycare at/near the work location so that parents could be close to their children during the work day. I see nothing at all wrong with what she did. The only reason it’s news is because it’s giant YAHOO.</p>
<p>I don’t care to get into anyone’s parenting decisions! Yikes, what if an onlooker decides to start looking over my shoulder!?</p>
<p>Having said that, I do have to take a minute to remember my very strong reaction to a male supervisor’s offhanded statement that he personally (no mention or acknowledgement of wife at all) homeschooled his children. I bristled, thinking, what?? You have a full-time, not flexible, job with inflexible, extra-heavy hours! How are you homeschooling your children while doing that? <em>I</em> don’t even have time to read for pleasure but you’re designing a course curriculum, supervising the instruction, and correcting the work?? Really ****ed me off. So I guess I’m not completely nonjudgmental.</p>
<p>We have no evidence that she based this on any study or any empirical data. If you have people who are unproductive then <em>they</em> need to be managed. </p>
<p>Not a blind policy applied to all of the workforce.</p>
<p>“You, however, are also allowed to have your own opinions as long as you’re not telling me that mine are wrong.”</p>
<p>That seems an odd argument, as you (and some others here) seem to be telling others that their viewpoints are wrong, in defending this CEO’s decision to choose to continue to work. </p>
<p>For raising our kids, we did opposite schedules for about 20 years, so there was always someone home with the kids. No daycare, very occasional babysitter. We each worked a part time schedule for most of that time so we could be home with the kids. It was wonderful for my husband, as our income wasn’t dependent upon just him, and he got so much time with the kids. But we were lucky to have the type of job that gave us this flexibility. And this was our choice, it was how we decided to live. I wouldn’t possibly declare that everyone should do what we did. People should do what they feel is best for their family, and it is wonderful when families can have good choices, whether it is to have a parent stay home or both work.</p>
<p>My issue is that such a massive deal has been made about this CEO daring to have a child and go back to work. It shows that sexism is alive and well.</p>
<p>I agree, cromette. And to reiterate what I said earlier, beyond productivity issues, I believe she is thinking that it will be easier for her to cement the message of a new Yahoo by having it concentrated in the office community. Like it or not, the dynamics in the office are different from those outside. It may well be that after the new work culture and new approaches are assimilated, work from home may resume.</p>
<p>I understand that her rationale was that more creativity and collaboration will occur when people are face-to-face and having informal interactions than when they interact solely through phone calls and emails.</p>
<p>argbargy, and we have no evidence that she did NOT. YAHOO has been bleeding for 3 years. I’m sure there was some investigation as to why. She’s looking for a change - again a business decision. And she’s given them until June 1 to adjust. Many will likely leave to go to work in some other Tech company, as well they should if the adjustment doesn’t work for them. If she’s wrong, she’ll be fired - and I’m sure she knows it.</p>
<p>Whatever you think of Marissa Mayer, she does seem to get us talking. When I first heard of her decision I didn’t get it, after all she worked from home during her maternity leave. Then the story came up on the Today Show and the work at home person defending the rights of work at home people was a mother of three children and we got to see her picking them up at the school bus. I don’t know, if you’re working at home you’re supposed to be working. I’m skeptical that a parent can get much work done with three kids at home.</p>
<p>Well in the absence of ANY evidence that this policy is based on data there is no reason to try to rationalize that it is. </p>
<p>Here is more info from the original site:</p>
<p>"But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.</p>
<p>Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)
"</p>
<p>Ugh- so she just shot from the hip based on impression. </p>
<p>I’d say that the problem here is the people who are in the office- not the WFH. If you are WFH then your car isnt in the parking lot in the first place. </p>
<p>“Are our goals getting accomplished”- thats the proper way to manage. Not based on physical presence.</p>
<p>That’s hilarious. I worked in an office in a management job for many years and there was plenty of time wasting. No one’s ever on Facebook at your office, sits around chatting for awhile on work time, or is late getting back from lunch? </p>
<p>Conversely, I can never escape work at home. It’s always here, and if I have a deadline I’m up working on Saturday night. Are you in the office on Saturday night? And I don’t waste time and burn up oil driving back and forth to work.</p>
<p>This morning I got up early to WFH and got in a little later than usual because I was making some nice progress. I submitted my test run and then did my morning routine before coming in. Sometimes I leave at 3 PM, 4 PM or 8 PM. It depends on my schedule, what I’m working on at the time and whether I’d be better continuing work on something or taking a break. The latter can be dictated by testing runs that can take one or two hours. This is why a work schedule that runs for a long day but has me doing non-work stuff is sometimes optimal.</p>
<p>So maybe she wants people to come into the office earlier and stay later instead of doing some stuff from home in the morning and at night?</p>
<p>It does seem that this is a shoot-from-the-hip thing. My understanding of the traffic in Silicon Valley is that there are some benefits to going to the office very early or after the heavy traffic. That may be true in the afternoon too. I don’t know why Googlers get in early and stay late - maybe it’s the people, perks, morale, demographics?</p>
<p>I don’t know why so many are evaluating this from the perspective of the work-at-home person being a mom at home with her kids. I’m sure that’s the case for some of them but certainly not all of them and maybe not even most of them. I doubt the CEO is making the decision with the thought in mind that all those work-at-home people aren’t productive because they’re distracted by kids needing attention.</p>
<p>I don’t see this as black and white. Some people can certainly be as productive at home as they are in the office but some aren’t. There are a lot more distractions and distraction temptations at home than there are in the office. It takes a certain discipline to be able to work as effectively at home as at an office location and it puts more onto the immediate management to make certain their people are really being productive while at home. For some jobs, like many customer service jobs, this is fairly simple to do (evaluating the number of calls taken, etc.) but for some other jobs it’s more difficult and I think software development is one of those since it’s not as easy to track progress.</p>
<p>Regardless, Yahoo has some serious problems and the CEO seems to think their at-home-workers is a generalized problem and I doubt she concluded that on her own without a lot of discussion with her management staff. It could seriously be out of control. Some former employees say it is out of control but that’s anecdotal. The other factor is that assuming they’re looking to reduce staffing anyway, this may be a way to get some people to leave voluntarily. </p>
<p>I don’t know how this would even logistically work since I assume a lot of these at-home-workers don’t work in an area where there’s a Yahoo office to go into and even if there is, there might not be enough room for them (outside of the HQ which might have plenty of space right now ).</p>
<p>My last job was mostly wfh and I worked harder and longer there than any other job I’ve had. My boss lived 1000 miles from me. We communicated by IM, phone and email and were very productive. She had a toddler and would sometimes need to take an hour or two in the afternoon to take her to the doc or some other errand. But then she’d work late to make up for it. One of the first things she said to me was that she didn’t count the number of hours anyone was in, as long as they did good work and met deadlines. Unless we gave her a reason not to trust us, she trusted us. She was the best boss I ever had.</p>
<p>I thought she caused a little uproar when she said that she rarely spends more than 8 (or some rather less impressive number) hours in the office during her career? I wish I could find that article.</p>
).</p>