In the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, he uses Mayer's firing of remote employees as an example of a toxic work culture that values signalling over production. Here's the excerpt:

> In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

"Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.

> "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."

Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:

1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;

2) Sat back in thought a lot;

3) Spoke with my colleagues.

I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.

> thinking

This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.

That's how corporate culture works - it does not necessarily reward actual work, but it does reward being visibly "busy" as in quickly responding to e-mail, attending meetings etc.

This is precisely how corporate culture works. /sigh

I take back what I said. I hadn't seen this before, thanks for sharing.

Once a company has hit the ... point of maturity to where signaling is more important than production, there's not a lot you can do about it. Because in that case, the signaling probably is more important.

And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.

Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.

Not only is that terrible management, it's audacious micromanagement that the CEO went to great personal lengths (based on the story anyways) to gather evidence to go after remote workers. That probably paints the best picture for me of why yahoo failed: a company with great institutional and market issues, had its CEO conducting an unscientific survey of the effectiveness of remote workers

To me it reads more like she didn't like the policy and went out to find a reason to justify removing the policy. Whether it made sense or not was irrelevant.

VPNs are used for a lot more than checking email. They are used to access source control, build/CI systems, QA servers, etc.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if the data Marissa looked at was skewed because the corporate Yahoo VPN was atrociously terrible.

People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.

The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

> The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.

Are you suggesting that people should have worked directly on production servers instead of using the VPN to work in a development environment?

I'm stating the fact that when I worked at Yahoo, one did not need to utilize the VPN to connect to production (which is where most staging / pre-prod environments existed as well).

Someone whose job pertains to operations does the bulk of their daily work on actual production hosts, for instance. Some tools (like the bug tracker) also didn't require use of the VPN.

and she had a nursery built by her office so she could see her child, pouring salt into the wound

That's horrible management. It's the busy body mentality.

what was the reason she gave?