<p>@oldfort, you feel sorry for me that the only reason I can afford domestic help is bcs I’m an expat???</p>
<p>No, I think you are flaunting it just as much as Mayer. I am just puzzle as to why you feel your subsidized life style is acceptable and it is not ok for Mayer. I know when I was an expat (as well as many expats I knew), our life style was paid for by our firms because of the “hardship” we had to endure. </p>
<p>Most expat’s spouse do not work because they don’t have to financially and also it is not feasible due to different career path. It is very rare that both spouse could be working at very demanding jobs outside of US at the same time. I guess you are lucky.</p>
<p>^Or it’s very difficult for the spouse to also get working papers. When my husband got a post-doc in Germany the consulate assured me I could also get work - “No problem”. That was a total lie. I only got work through a very lucky fluke where an American company threatened to hire me instead and have taxes go to the US instead of the German company hiring me.</p>
<p>In Germany I got six months of paid leave to stay home with my first kid. Now that’s a civilized country. :D</p>
<p>I don’t actually begrudge Marissa her nursery at all. She’s between a rock and a hard place. I don’t see how she could avoid not going to back to work almost immediately if she’s going to have any chance at all of turning the company around. I’m even inclined to think that at least as a temporary measure she’s probably right to put a stop to WAH arrangements since it appears they may have been abused.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about parents taking care of their kids when they should be working. Let’s take me as an example. I worked at home 2 or 3 days a week for over 10 years, at 2 different companies. My daughter was in school or day care all those years. But when I worked at home, my daughter (when she was younger) could come home after school instead of going to after school care. I didn’t have to drop my work to take care of her. I’d take 5 minutes to say hi, and get back to work. She got herself a snack and was fine. I worked from 7 to 4 so I was done soon after she got home anyway. As she got older, it was much more convenient to be able to pick her up from after school activities, go to a school activity, etc. I wasn’t depriving my company of my worktime. They knew where I was, and I always got my work done on time. I called into meetings, worked much faster at home without distractions, and appreciated the convenience of not having to dress up or commute. They got MORE work time out of me because it was easier to work. Since my laptop was set up, I could stop, make dinner, and work a little while longer afterwards if necessary. I never did that when I worked solely in the office. Then, the distinction between home and office was much more firmly drawn. Bringing work home seemed a bigger deal. Also, since people were calling my cell phone while I worked at home, of course they would often call after I was done work for the day. And I usually answered. If I had worked at an office, that call would go to voice mail and wait for the next day. My experience - and many other people as well - is that I work more hours at home, simply because the line between home and work is blurred. And that can be a drawback for the employee … But certainly not for the company, which is getting more work out of me.</p>
<p>And of course there are the other reasons for working at home, such as being able to do errands at lunch, saving time and money not commuting, being there for contractors, etc. It truly was a win-win situation. I got excellent reviews all those years. I’m a copywriter (in house, not agency) and I know that people frequently requested me when they submitted a project request. I got the job done. I’m not a slacker. And neither is anyone else I’ve known with a similar arrangement. I know slackers are out there. But I don’t think most are.</p>
<p>@oldfort, the big difference is that Mayer is giving herself a NEW and highly visible perk to accomodate her W/L balance, while at the same time rescinding one for her employees for their W/L balance.</p>
<p>This is very, very poor optics. Not a good way for a new CEO to inspire her employees to work harder to turn Yahoo around.</p>
<p>As for equating her priviliged life w mine… I get the same plain vanilla expat perks as the thousands of other expats here get.</p>
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<p>And once again, the mayor of my hometown and city has confirmed how much of a stiff “corporate suit” he is as my engineering/CS colleague’s would describe inflexible managers/CEOs from more hierarchically conscious and formal fields such as biglaw or banking/finance as opposed to more flexible and less formal/hierarchically conscious fields like computer technology firms with the notable exception of IBM up until the late 90’s/early '00s.</p>
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But not all other local staff get. I don’t know what’s the ratio of expats vs locals for your company, but the company I was with had less than 50 for the whole region, which had thousands of local staff. It was very glaring the kind of perks expats got vs what the local staff got. But if they had local expertise then we wouldn’t need to be there. If someone at Yahoo could be doing what Marissa is doing then I am sure she wouldn’t be getting a new nursery. </p>
<p>Now, lets do some math here. Assuming Marissa’s salary was just a 1 million. She came back to work after 2 weeks, which is probably 10 weeks earlier than most women. It is a saving of $192,000 to Yahoo. Yeah, they could build a nursery for 192,000.</p>
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<p>Has it been firmly established that she is “throwing her private childcare arrangements in the face of her associates”? Or is much being made of it in the media and on message boards?</p>
<p>I agree with whoever said that WAH is not supposed to include taking care of kids while on the clock so to speak. Childcare arrangements should be made during working hours just as you would if you were going to an office.</p>
<p>I can do some of my work from home , but I prefer not to. I feel like I am more distracted , especially from my dogs.
I have to make a lot of phone calls and my dogs wrestle with each other and can be noisy…also I don’t like my phone number from home showing up on anyone’s caller ID. I forward calls from our office phone and give THAT number , but people often times just call back on the home line …sometimes at terrible hours .</p>
<p>I’m a data analyst, and have been a full-time WFH for a Fortune 50 for the past 8 years. We have to sign a WFH agreement that whatever child/elder care we would have had if we were in an office, we will have when are working from home. We are all connected by an instant messenger buddy list that flags when our computer has been idle for 10 minutes. Not only that, it tells everyone – not just your manager – how long you have been idle. 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. </p>
<p>Face-time with my coworkers and internal customers is impractical, as we are all remote from each other and we don’t have a travel budget to speak of. I am in Florida, my manager is in Connecticut, her manager is in Texas, my coworkers are in Georgia, Pennsylvania, California, my customers are coast-to-coast. I’ve yet to meet my (new) manager in person, and since this is a year-long temp assignment for her I may in fact never meet her. She is a GenY and totally unfazed by her virtual team.</p>
<p>I find I am much more productive at home than in the office, where (full disclosure) I tended to be a bit of a social butterfly. I also work more hours, since I am working during the 2+ hours I would normally be commuting. </p>
<p>As a result of my experience I had always been a great proponent of WFH, until I was put on a temporary assignment for a new implementation. Everyone on the team was together in an office across the country, except for me – I was the only one who was remote. It was horrible. Because of the nature of the project, there was a lot of brainstorming, over-the-cubicle chatter and collaboration – very different from the independent project work I was used to. My team would be discussing something together, when they would stop and say “Wait! We need to include Chuwo in this conversation!” Then they would march off to find a conference room, call me on the phone and loop me in, and we would chat until someone knocked on the conf room door with “We had this room scheduled”. So then my team would have to hang up, march off to find another conference room, etc etc etc. They bent over backwards to accommodate me, but they shouldn’t have had to make that kind of effort. I am forever grateful to them for it and was never so happy when that assignment ended and I could go back to my old job.</p>
<p>So now when people ask me about how good WFH programs are I say “It depends”. For my job, it’s fabulous, it works well for everyone on the team and for our customers too. But for another job it may be disastrous. You definitely don’t want to be the only person on the team who is WFH.</p>
<p>TL;DR WFH is great for some jobs, not so much for others.</p>
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<p>LOL. I have lived this. I don’t WFH now but still, it seems that any time I’m on the phone at home, my dogs start barking their idiot heads off about something or nothing, and I have to go into the bathroom and shut the door to have any hope of continuing the conversation.</p>
<p>I worked from home for 10 years. My kids grew up knowing when the phone rang they had to keep it down and they never called for me in the house. They had to make sure I wasn’t on a call. </p>
<p>One instance came to mind was when I took the kids to Disney by myself, I had to be on a conference call and I forgot to mute it. Everyone on the call heard, “We are now at the Mickey stop, please watch your step getting on and off.”</p>
<p>YHOO stock is up about 9% since the announcement.</p>
<p>Hi
Same sort (or worse?) happened to the protagonist during Euro Disney visit with two kids (plus nanny).
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Film does not do justice, try the book.</p>
<p>This Wednesday, it’s supposed to snow about five inches – a paralyzing amount for the Washington, DC area. (Go ahead and laugh, northerners, but this is the way things are here. We don’t know how to drive in the white stuff, and our governments don’t know how to get it off the roads. Life comes to a screeching halt as soon as you can’t see black pavement.)</p>
<p>Everyone in my office will probably work from home. The parents of young children probably won’t be able to put in a full day (they’ll be switching off child care with their spouses), but they will at least accomplish something and will reply to their e-mails and phone messages every hour or two. The rest of us will be as productive as usual unless our power goes out. We can log in to our office computers from home, and we mostly communicate with each other and our clients by e-mail or phone anyway.</p>
<p>I have to “attend” two meetings on Wednesday, at one of which I will make a presentation. We have the technology to make this possible, even if I and most of my colleagues “attend” from home. </p>
<p>Let it snow! I’m not worried, and the people who need me to finish projects with tight deadlines don’t need to worry, either.</p>
<p>How can anyone argue that this is wrong?</p>
<p>“A woman I read about, a high powered lawyer, admitted that while she never missed her kids’ sporting events (even the after-school ones) she also didn’t ever make breakfast for her boys. The nanny/housekeeper did.” I am struck by the use of the word “admitted,” as if this woman’s smart use of her household help is something to be ashamed of. I wonder if her husband had to “admit” that he didn’t make the kids’ breakfast either. Or if any working fathers on CC “admit” that they don’t make the kids their breakfast."</p>
<p>Pizza girl – perhaps ‘admitted’ was a poor choice of verb. She wasn’t ashamed. In her view, you really couldn’t have it “all.” That you had to give something up – she gave up some household chores like cooking and cleaning (she even admitted never once making a Halloween costume for her kids.) That gave her some much needed flexibility - less time doing chores, more time for work, which in turn allowed her some leeway to make it to her boys’ sporting events. She was making a point about getting the help you need. This was in a book that profiled highly accomplished women, on top of their professions, and how they ‘did it all.’ This attorney’s answer: she wasn’t doing it ALL.</p>
<p>I have worked from home ever since I started my nonprofit in 2007. I do it for many reasons including the tremendous savings of not having to rent a space. I am very productive and enjoy being able to have conference calls while in my pjs. </p>
<p>If I had to have an office we’d have to spend to s more time raising funds to pay the rent and other expenses. I feel I’m much more productive than a lot of larger and better funded orgs. Sad that misuse of WFH ruins it for those who are productive with it.</p>
<p>Even before 2007 I did legal research at home and was paid by the job and hours a thallus worked. It was ok but much hairier working at home with H and young kids around. Now with just H and me, our home is a very conducive place to work.</p>
<p>Here is my admission as a working mom…My kid volunteered me to make some Chinese food to bring to her 2nd grade class. First of all, I couldn’t cook (only simple stuff for my kids), much less Chinese food. Instead of disappointing her, I ordered Chinese take out from some very authentic (expensive) Chinese restaurant. I emptied the food out of the containers and put it on my own plates to bring to school. Not one of proudest moments.</p>
<p>It’s ok Oldfort. I do that with potato salad and cole slaw in the summers!</p>
<p>When this story first broke, I was appalled that Marissa Mayer was being such a hard nose at a company like Yahoo, which is competing with the start ups that offer a lot of perks like WFH. When I heard more details, I understood. She did obtain data that showed that a significant number of people who were supposedly working from home were not even connecting to the network. It sounded like it was too many to fire. That didn’t leave her much choice, IMO. </p>
<p>I’m grateful we have some flexibility at my job. I don’t think I’d enjoy working from home exclusively though. I need the social interaction. I could go days never leaving the house if I worked from home exclusively. I like having a place to go. At the same time, I like having the flexibility to work at home during a snow storm, when I have to wait from 8 am til 4 pm for a contractor who won’t show up until 4:30 pm anyway, etc. If I have a doctor or dentist appointment, I can get more work hours in before and after the appointment without commuting an hour each way by working at home. Those are nice perks and I truly appreciate them. I also won’t give co-workers my germs when I have a cold that is annoying, but not debilitating. Most days though, I am in the office and I like it that way.</p>