Well, yes. CEOs get to decide the conditions under which they work, and the conditions under which you work, too.yeah, it's not like the employees could ever, like, get together and, and like collectively bargain over what kind of working conditions they should get or anything.
In a way, Mayer and Yahoo are incredibly lucky that people are focusing on the perceived hypocrisy of a working parent CEO. Why? Because it diverts from the real story, which is that this is a company which was so poorly managed, it was bleeding money on unproductive workers both in-house and remotely when nearly every study out there says that worker productivity improves and increases with flexible and remote work, and that worker retention rises.My guess is that while that might be true at some places, it might not be true at a company like yahoo that's so far away from the cutting edge that a lot of the most ambitious and hard-working people might have already left and a lot of the people still there might be more likely to be slackers, using "work from home days" as extra time off.
Let's be serious: if significant portions of Yahoo top performers were "stay@home" coders, testers and project management telecommuters, do people really think Mayer would arbitrarily issue edicts guaranteed to alienate them? It's possible. But that would imply Mayer hasn't learned very much about her company's best people, best performers and culture since joining last July. Most successful technical leaders I know avoid getting in the way of their best people's productivity. But what do leaders do when even very good people aren't being as productive as you want or need them to be? Challenging them to be better onsite collaborators hardly seems either unfair or irrational.posted by chunking express at 10:48 AM on February 27 [2 favorites]
I'm guessing this is a corporate culture thing. Anybody who's ever worked at a big tech company knows people who 'slip through the cracks'. You know who I'm talking about. Chronically underperforming individuals who generally could not give a fuck about their work. They do the bare minimum to get by; if you give them something hard, they fuck it up; they put no effort into upgrading their skills; they're basically just there to cash a paycheck.That's exactly what I was thinking. And there probably are a lot of slackers out there. Like I was saying, it depends on the company at some places, like Google or Facebook or wherever you're going to have highly motivated employees who actually like their jobs so much they'd do them in their spare time anyway. On the other hand, there are probably lots of fat and bloated old companies where things go well enough that some lazy or half-ass employees don't cause too much of a problem.
I still don't get how Yahoo has remained open for the past 6 or so years. What, really, do they do? Their 'web portal' front page is outright execrable. Yahoo Answers is the blind leading the blind. The only good thing they've done is Flickr.It's like AOL. Pure momentum. I read the other day that shut down husk of megaupload - still gets millions of hits a day, since there are so many (now dead) links out there for files.
Perhaps that's exactly what she has, and she's doing away with telecommuting because working at home, and serving the demands of your family, is not serving Yahoo's needs.Sure, but let's keep in mind why this is a "feminist" issue. You have people like Sheryl Sandburg (Facebook COO) saying stuff like women don't succeed because they don't "want it" as much - Remember Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" thing, along with his statement that he tried to make his governorship more women friendly by allowing flexible hours?
She's not there to make employees happy. She's there to make Yahoo successful. We often confuse the two, but they are not the same, and Yahoo is failing to execute in a pretty major way. Bringing everyone back into the office, when the corporation is doing so poorly, may be exactly the correct decision.
I had more than one single mother bartender co-worker who worked until 3am while her child stayed with someone else. How do you propose we balance this for more than just those with a computer science degree?Well, those jobs typically have more flexible hours, or at least they should. And with a higher minimum wage, people wouldn't need to get as many hours as they could to make rent.
No. She just doesn't care. And, not caring about how things are perceived out on the Internet is the very core of Yahoo's problems.Oh please. A little Bad PR on tech blogs is the least of yahoo's problems. It could be good or bad for employee morale/productivity, we'll have to see.
I didn't mean it that way. I mean that it typifies a sort of stodgy, pre-2000 mindset. Yahoo, after all, is a survivor of the first internet bubble, and not exactly, today's big thing. That'd be a very hard thing to take back, and I don't see anything here that makes me expect it.Yeah, but you can't really say that Marissa Mayer is stodgy and has a pre-2000 mindset? I don't know that I'm personally a huge fan of hers, but she obviously was a huge influence at google and thus on the entire post-2000 internet itself.
I've used various task tracking apps as part of Agile. They were forced upon us by a certified Scrum Master. In that case tasks are created as part of sprint planning. Tasks were bite sized chunks of a feature, meant to take less than 8hrs each. Creating tasks and estimates were left up to the developer, they could be as granular as you wanted.That certainly sounds annoying, and any time you come up with metrics to try to measure productivity, you're going to get people trying to game the system, for sure. And it's certainly true that programmer productivity can be difficult to measure.
All this planning introduced its own overhead, if a sprint was 14 days, we were spending 3 planning it.
She's not a feminist; she just believes that women should have the same rights and career choices as men.I think anyone who gets to the position that she has is going to be part politician, so I think she's probably saying what she thinks will help her out in the tech world, which is interesting.
So I'm not a woman and I'm not going to deny anyone's experience if they tell me it's different than mine, but in my experience the only thing I ever saw slow women down on the career ladder was not being in the office.But, if a woman were to quit her job and stay home for a decade to raise kids, how would you see it? I've seen various studies that show it can be a problem for women advancing in academia - and obviously most companies are not going to publish studies about why they don't have many female managers.
Ms. Mayer says she relies on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people.However, that is not the case being shown.
Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager’s expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn’t changed in several quarters.Again, I don't mind a criteria being used but do be honest about it's nature.
“She is looking for a way out,” Ms. Mayer says.
New York City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn is single-handedly blocking a bill that would ensure paid sick days for all workers in the city. This news item, which should be at the heart of the work-life balance conversation, has rarely been noted as we huff and puff about Sandberg’s circles and Mayer’s nursery. “While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement,” British feminist Laurie Penny once wrote, “and the basement is flooding.” Have you read much about the domestic workers’ strike in California, much less participated in a Twitter debate about it? Me neither. The “mommy wars” is like a discourse borg that manages to absorb and distort all conversations about women and work.posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:36 AM on March 8
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Let's try it: "Yahoo! CEO Mark Mayer, the first man to have fathered a child while CEO of a corporation, has ordered all telecommuting employees back to the office."
Yep. Sexist as hell.
posted by R. Schlock at 11:01 PM on February 26 [56 favorites]