Scales to what? I don't understand how this argument can be made when most companies have multiple, globally distributed offices, which turns their workforce effectively remote on the grand scale.

On all on-site jobs I've done so far, the remote offices were effectively other companies as far as communicating is concerned. People who're used to in-face communication have a huge barrier to overcome. This is a big difference from working remote, where it doesn't matter, because the communication channels are set up.

I simply don't see how this claim can stand even basic scrunty.

Firstly, working from an office doesn't not exclude a flexible work schedule. I've gone through phases where I don't get into work until 3pm.

This works fine until something urgent comes up and a meeting is called at 11am, and management wonders why you are "late". Maybe Google is better at avoiding this than your average company, but maybe at some point in your career you'll find they're not :)

The rest of your argument is either very questionable (false negatives are OK as long as the result is positive - a more positive result is better than a barely positive one), or very squishy (camaraderie, team cohesion, culture) with no hard data to back it up, so no point in arguing over it.

Trying to scale a company were everybody is remote and on their own, is a very tough task.

So when working remote (as in from home) and your project manager calls you for something urgent at 10am but you are still sleeping/doing stuff with the kids etc. How would that be different to not being in the office ? Meetings/communication dont go away just because you work remotely.

The question was about scaling up. It's obviously possible to manage entire teams that are offsite, as many companies now do it. Is there some other way to scale up than to have other teams? You aren't seriously suggesting to have bigger teams, are you?

If you accept you need teams in multiple teams & locations (due to labor-market limitations, physical limitations, cost of office space in some areas, etc), then companies that are organized for remote work have a massive advantage because they are much better at communicating between them.

Trying to scale a company were everybody is remote and on their own, is a very tough task.

What arguments are supporting this statement? Is there any? What does "on their own" even mean here?

So when working remote (as in from home) and your project manager calls you for something urgent at 10am but you are still sleeping/doing stuff with the kids etc

I put down the phone, turn on the PC and am available 2 minutes later, instead of 60 minutes later while I commute. Exactly the same thing as when an emergency happens outside office hours in an on-site job, except that I'm actually guaranteed to have all the stuff I need for work available at home.

Some of the arguments here make it sound as if these are fairytales, yet this is exactly how work is and has been done for years, at least at some of the more enlightened employers :)

Worth noting that working from home does not mean you work any different hours from anyone else. In fact, your point is more of an argument FOR telecommuting than against it. At any given time that you're not "at work", it's far faster to switch to being "at work" for a telecommuter than for someone that has to head to the office to do so.

Having multiple offices in different location isnt working remotely. The teams that work together still actually physically work together.

All i am saying is, having for example a team of 15 engineers, marketing guys, sales guys who all work from home creates more communication overhead per person. Add to that totally flexible schedules where the people i need to talk to often arent available and vice versa, i dont think it scales well. Its a total mess.

>> I put down the phone, turn on the PC and am available 2 minutes later

What if you have decided to go grocery shopping, take your kids to school, your dog for a walk when something urgent happens ? It basically the same as not being in the office at that point, you just are not available, no matter if on-site or remote.

I have been working remotely for several years, but i enjoyed working in a team with other engineers and the overlap of private and work life doesnt really leave me feel relaxed at home. So its not for everyone and remote-work certainly isnt the one-fits all future of work imo.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I was going to say that it could perhaps be true for sales/marketing (not my area), but I just realized that at my last on-site job the sales guys were actually the only ones remote. So my practical experience seems to point the exact opposite as your claim.

Add to that totally flexible schedules where the people i need to talk to often arent available

Don't confuse flexible schedules with working remotely, they really are entirely different things. I already pointed out how flexible schedules cause problems for on-site work in the parent posts.

Different time zones are even more of a pain for both local and remote, but I'd rather stay awake late at night for a meeting if I can do so at home.

I've found that I really enjoy this arrangement. I still feel like we have team cohesion while at the same time I can get done my transactional work two days out of the week without being disturbed. We schedule meetings where we need to collaborate for M-W-F. If we do need to get together on T-Th then we fire up a Google Hangout.

For me it seems like the best of both worlds. I reduce my commute and transportation costs 40% without really losing a lot in return.

- Working in the office every day is a complete productivity drain for me.

- Working from home every day makes it more complicated to collaborate with coworkers (especially over highly visual whiteboarding situations.

- Splitting the difference has worked really well. Generally we picked one day where we were always in the office (as much for social interaction as meetings). In addition, each of us was perfectly willing to come in 1-2 other days a week if there was a need.

Splitting the difference is by far my favorite mode.

It worked so well that I am trying to get it implemented at my current place. If I ever become a manager, I will probably implement this among my team, too.

Then say that. Say it loud and proud.

Say we want to build an engineering culture of excellence. Talk about how programmers will rule the roost once more. Talk about the open sourcing of the Yahoo libraries, how Yahoo will never let a piece of code go without review and tests.

And then say "In my opinion as the CEO we can only do this by being in the office at the same time, no flexi-hours, no mucking about, everyone in."

One could respect that.

This, this is just "I'm in charge, everyone in because I say so"

I doubt it's like this. From all the articles I have read, everyone seems to just be vilifying Mayer in standard linkbait form. Mayer could have said that ("In my opinion as the CEO we can only do this by being in the office at the same time, no flexi-hours, no mucking about, everyone in.") but it wouldn't matter because everyone would twist her words.

Even the whole issue is sort of overblown. AFAIK, Mayer has only said you can't always work at home. There is nothing she said about cutting flexi-hours, or working from sometimes.

  YAHOO! PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION — DO NOT 
  FORWARD

  To become the absolute best place to work, communication 
  and collaboration will be important, so we need to be 
  working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we 
  are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions 
  and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, 
  meeting new people, 

1. If we take as read that working in physical proximity increases communication (often, not always certainly) then why have multiple offices? Who exactly is supposed to work together with whom? Why is the San Francisco office not the one and only office? Why have a Beijing office if people there cannot work with people in Bangalore

2. I hope I am not villifying Meyer - I think she has taken on a difficult high profile role. I have never run a 10,000's people company. Its probably quite difficult.

3. Scaling remote working. No organisation seems to effectgively scale past the dunbar number - communication and collaboration drops alarmingly. (Its not intra-group comms that drops, its the inter-group comms.)

It's a wide strategy with its real target a set of managers. I'll bet money on it.

The secondary benefits and even the primary touted reason are great things to have, but they aren't the main goal.

This is based on what I'm seeing from looking at CEO in a non tech firm doing.

The aim of a new report or designation being created so far has is always aimed at getting and succeeding to get, multiple targets achieved, with the real target being buried somewhere inside and discrete.

Do you have any data on this? What about organizations like Canonical who are almost all full remote workers? Surely Canonical cannot have less than 150 workers.

With that statement, you're really highlighting the trust your company has with you. Unfortunately, it seems Yahoo is communicating that it no longer trusts any of its employees working from home. And there may be valid reasons, such as significant lost of productivity, but punishing the "good" employees with the "bad" sends a negative signal.

Companies in yahoo's state don't necessarily care about current output (what good is more of what isn't working?)

A report I reviewed in the past indicated remote workers are more likely to walk away when a bad changes are occurring. For yahoo, that means now and/or soon.

I don't now that doesn't seem like the purpose behind this.

If the people overseeing the work teams have to resort to making sure that everyone is in their seats for roll call in order to manage them, Yahoo has some much deeper problems than remote workers that need to be addressed.

It may well be true that it's easier to enforce cultural homogeneity on colocated teams, which makes it easier to treat individuals as interchangeable cogs that can be transplanted between different parts of the wider machine.

Whose interest that's in is an interesting question. It's a obvious win for the employer. And employees who want to work for an "apex predator" employer are better off because in their case, utility for the employer is utility for the employee.

The point of the 37signals post is that only "apex predator" companies like Google can legitimately demand this sort of dedication. Given your statement that you actually work at Google, I think perhaps it makes sense that your opinion is what it is.

My point - to sum it up - is that productivity and cultural homogeneity aren't the only important metrics to optimise for.

I might be going way out on a limb here, but I think this kind of thing is a subtle driver of age/family discrimination.

What kind of workers are more likely to live by the office, and thus able to drop in on a moment's notice? Young, single workers.

What type of workers are less likely to do this? Older workers or workers with families who have to deal with commute/spouses/children/etc.

If I were living within 7 minutes walking-distance from work, I sure wouldn't mind coming in, especially if work is so flexible that I can come in at 3pm and nobody lifts an eyebrow.

My workplace is actually not that far away, around 25-30 minutes of public-transport commute. I still see lots of benefits for remote-working. Striking a balance is the key. I wouldn't want to exclusively work from home either.

However, if your job is "software engineer" or any other job which 100% of the work can be done over instant message, email, teleconference bridge, screen sharing, etc then No, I don't agree that you should be on-site the majority of the time.

The decision that a manager makes to allow one of their staff members to work remotely is done on a case-by-case basis and is done on the merits of their work and their previous ability to get the work done remotely or off-site.

Funny, I feel it's almost the opposite. Remote work can be very difficult for a small business or startup, especially for the early team. Generally speaking, you want everyone within earshot and available for ad hoc ideation sessions, discussions, debates, or projects.

The larger the company, the more likely it'll be organized into discrete functions, work scope, teams, deadlines, and so forth. And hence, each employee will have a clearer sense of what he or she is accountable for on each day, with less moment-to-moment variance. This situation makes remote working easier and more scalable.

Absolutely. But changing terms and conditions after a person has been employed is different, and, in the UK at least, may be illegal. I suspect it is the change for existing employees that surprised people.

It could be that Yahoo didn't set up their remote work procedures very well and so it lead to poor productivity from remote workers.

Obviously they're willing to risk losing employees so I would guess they put some thought into it.

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Why...

I'm getting the picture that US has few employment rights! It will be interesting to see if any of those directly affected by this break cover and discuss it in public.

That's pretty condescending. If I don't share your view then I don't understand the situation?

I do prefer working from home but I perfectly understand the disadvantages, and I understand the advantages of working in an office. That doesn't mean that they weigh out to the same preference for me as they do for you.

> Firstly, working from an office doesn't not exclude a flexible work schedule.

You can have a flexible work schedule while working in an office, but that does undermine the major reason companies usually want people to work in an office; being accessible. If you're not there while other people are there you might as well not be there at all. In fact, if you are remote but working the same hours as your coworkers, you are more accessible than someone who is working in the same building but at different times.

> As far as not being bothered, this can certainly be true. This is actually part of the reason why I often wear headphones. Noise-cancelling headphones do a pretty good job of filtering out a lot of noise but just the act of wearing headphones I tend to find acts as a psychological barrier from others bothering you.

Again, if you're going to make yourself more isolated and inaccessible, why work in an office to begin with? You're citing reasons you should be working from home rather than reasons why working at an office is advantageous.

> The other issue, and this particularly applies to large companies, is one of culture. Culture like team cohesion is orders of magnitude easier to spread when physically colocated. For a company the size of Google (my employer), IMHO this is far more important than any individual perceived benefits about permanent remote work.

There are plenty of companies who work in person that either have toxic or no real culture. OTOH, there are plenty of companies that work remotely that have a great culture. You can do plenty while working remotely to spread culture; it's either there in everything the company does or it's missing.

There's nothing special about working from an office w/regards to culture, especially when personnel are working random hours and wearing headphones to isolate themselves.

> Also, I disagree with the position that this "punishes" good employees.

Well, you're wrong, and this goes far beyond working remotely or not. If you hire somebody with a given benefit -- whether that's the opportunity to work remotely, free cafeteria, health care, paid overtime, etc. -- and then you take that benefit away, that's punishing your employees. There's no two bits about it. Whether you personally would take advantage of that benefit or not does not matter. It is punishing the people who did take advantage of it, and that's simple fact.

But this:

"Again, if you're going to make yourself more isolated and inaccessible, why work in an office to begin with?"

Working with headphones signals "don't bother me unless important" and does provides protection against a degree of interruptions and noise but still provides accessibility and potential closeness that you can't get when working remotely.

Microsoft has an in-person team whose Win32 user land APIs are confusing, some of which came from Win16 bolted to the side of Win32. Which is made bigger with the WinRT APIs, which also keep all the Win32 APIs thereby making Surface unwieldy. And I imagine Ballmer likes to keep his team on site for chair throwing...

And yet Linux is eclipsing many kernel projects not just in share but performance. Hell, Torvalds is fully capable of flaming people to tears via email! They're half a world apart and he can still rip a new one :)

It tallies with my experience that remote workers, integrated into a mostly office based environment does largely end up being transactional. Another problem is that there can be transactional workers in the office, and I would characterize those folks as usually the least likely to participate with remote workers too. So you can get a double hit.

However, the best remote setups I've seen have been where someone who largely works remotely is heavily social usually using their occasional time in the office effectively.