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The Work-from-Home Debate.
halkun
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
In recent tech news, Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer, decided that employees could no longer work from home. They had until June to start working from the office, but if they are unable to relocate, they would no longer be working for the company. Shortly after this, Best Buy implemented this policy too. What has come out of this is cacophony of yelling and screaming from people in the tech industry that killing work-from home is a bad idea and will kill Yahoo’s already anemic productivity.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Marissa looked at the VPN logs and found many employees not even logging in while they were at home. What came from this is another round of yelling and screaming that looking at VPN logs is not a good metric for productivity and if the work is getting done, there not really a need for metrics at all.
Here’s the odd bit. At my company I recently was given the *privilege* to work from home. For me to even get this I had to keep my metrics in 90% area for about a year. Now I don’t have a home office or anything. My apartment is actually 9x12 feet (I do have my own bathroom though, so that’s cool!)
To even log into my office from home I need a special cable connection (That my company is paying for), that gives me a LAN address. I also require a special router that will only work when it’s physically connected to my work laptop. From here, I log into the office using a WoW-like authenticator, then fire up a remote desktop session to a virtual machine and start my day. My software phone is the only application my computer runs “natively” and even that goes though the router.
Working from home and not connecting to VPN is completely alien to me. How can you not? How is there any accountability? If the computer’s not connecting back to the office, you might as well not even be at work. Now I admit, I do work for a company that deals with lots of secure info, but VPN is an encrypted connection to allow you to get company resources. If you are not even using the company infrastructure at work, then what are you doing? Am I not seeing the same thing Marissa is seeing?
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Marissa looked at the VPN logs and found many employees not even logging in while they were at home. What came from this is another round of yelling and screaming that looking at VPN logs is not a good metric for productivity and if the work is getting done, there not really a need for metrics at all.
Here’s the odd bit. At my company I recently was given the *privilege* to work from home. For me to even get this I had to keep my metrics in 90% area for about a year. Now I don’t have a home office or anything. My apartment is actually 9x12 feet (I do have my own bathroom though, so that’s cool!)
To even log into my office from home I need a special cable connection (That my company is paying for), that gives me a LAN address. I also require a special router that will only work when it’s physically connected to my work laptop. From here, I log into the office using a WoW-like authenticator, then fire up a remote desktop session to a virtual machine and start my day. My software phone is the only application my computer runs “natively” and even that goes though the router.
Working from home and not connecting to VPN is completely alien to me. How can you not? How is there any accountability? If the computer’s not connecting back to the office, you might as well not even be at work. Now I admit, I do work for a company that deals with lots of secure info, but VPN is an encrypted connection to allow you to get company resources. If you are not even using the company infrastructure at work, then what are you doing? Am I not seeing the same thing Marissa is seeing?
halkun on
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It all depends on what you do and what tools you need to do it.
Eventually you'd need to sync with source control and such. But if you synced your laptop before you left you could be productive for a day or two with no connection for sure.
I think the real problem is she's CEO of a company with no real reason for existing. I honestly doubt she thinks she can turn Y! around, she's just there to look important for a couple of years, make her money, and get the heck out of dodge before it finally goes banko.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
two things about Mayer that I think really sum up what she is like as a manager of people:
1) She was complaining that since the parking lot emptied out after 5 PM there must not be much work getting done.
2) She recently had a kid. Which is a big thing for a CEO. Glass ceiling and all. So she had a full nursury built in the room next to her office and has it staffed. And with that much at her disposal in terms of resources likes to complain about "feminists" who can't get their jobs done and have a kid.
Your company email doesn't require you to use the VPN?
or do you use your phone?
I work from home occasionally and the culture at my company is, when you login in the morning you give a quick "Red 5 Standing by" to the boss and a "Fuck dis shit. Imma watch Girls. Peas!" when you're done.
If you aren't connected, I don't know you're actually doing anything or even available via email. VPN logs on their own aren't a good metric of anything other than potential fucking off.
every place I've worked doesn't require a full VPN connection to access email. They have web portals or whatever.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Why does it matter if they are?
Keep in mind that in traditional office environments, telecommuting tends to grow from the techs used to support road warriors like mobile salespeople.
Road warriors have to be able to connect across a huge diversity of remote networks (unless you're giving them mobile broadband cards, but those are expensive) and sometimes VPN clients just don't work. Maybe the necessary protocols are blocked, maybe there's another technical reason, maybe the connection is just too flaky.
So there's kind of a push in IT to get away from old dial-up style PPTP VPNs into always-on encryption like SSL. (Example: Microsoft DirectAccess.)
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I shouldn't be surprised that this joint is behind the tech curve, lol.
Part of Mayer's problem is that she's trying to use "look, I'm a new mom and I'm still coming into the office" to defend herself, while expecting everyone to ignore that she had things set up at Yahoo so she could.
Exactly.
here's the thing - in my job, I get a lot of questions about telecommuting that basically boil down to, "How do we know the employee is actually working during their shift?"
The answer is: you don't, but they end up working more anyway. And here's what I tell business owners (execs and managers):
Think about your typical workday in the office. You commute in, which probably takes about 45m. You have some coffee, do some work for a few hours - during that time, are you equally as productive for every moment, or do you have slumps? You probably have slumps. Everybody does.
A telecommuter has those slumps too - an experienced telecommuter knows to take a break during that slump. So maybe at 10:30, the telecommuter gets on her exercise bike or watches a half-hour of TV.
But that same telecommuter will be online again after dinner, at 9:30pm, when her husband is watching a movie and her kids are in bed.
There is a ton of data that shows that the average telecommuter ends up working more hours per day overall, and spaces them out longer. The telecommuter is always on-shift; any time that they're alert, the tools for them to be productive are literally in their home. When you let a good employee work from home, on average you will get 10-12 solid hours of productivity, broken up into chunks from 6am when that employee rolls out of bed to 10pm when she gets in her pajamas.
You will know when a telecommuter isn't doing their work. It will be obvious. A bad employee's productivity will drop off and their communications will be less prompt. At that point, you can revoke their telecommuting privileges, or take other disciplinary action. But it happens far less often than people think it does.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
All of a sudden, bosses get more controlling, more micromanaging, old privileges get revoked. It's a company in crisis mode.
LinkedIn and DICE and the rest of the professional IT world are running these articles like, "Is Yahoo's telecommuting ban the way of the future?"
No. Nothing about Yahoo is the way of the future. Yahoo is history.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Are you a Blackberry-only company?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The cost of having people work from home vs. the cost of having facilities for those people was a no brainer. I've been out of my house for the last two years (VPN connected, but I work with call software) and it's been fine. I miss social interaction, but I don't think that's the reasoning for Yahoo on this one.
Now I do IT work for a financial company's home office too. The field staff don't have to jump though as much hoops, but they still need VPN to get thier email (Connect to the exchange servers) and access the client database.
Palm...
Out of the box, Microsoft Exchange supports encryption via SSL and remote access via HTTPS.
The way a plain vanilla Exchange server communicates with an iPhone or Android in the field is via HTTPS - in many small-business cases, the address that the phone connects to for email is running on the exact same server as the web-based email portal.
So a user who wants to use the web portal to check email would go to https://mail.company.com while his phone would go to https://mail.company.com/ActiveSync.
The authentication method and encryption level are functionally equivalent.
And in fact newer versions of Outlook do exactly the same thing - in certain common implementations, they wrap up all client-server communication with HTTPS. This is almost invisible to the user - I have users right now who can go to any location with Internet access, open up their laptops, enter their network password, and use Outlook as if they were in the office.
There's really no need for a VPN at this point. All privileged communication is wrapped up in robust encryption. If accountability is an issue, I can just check the Exchange server logs for user activity.
There might be other software in use at a company that doesn't have native features for encrypting authentication and client-server communication; those platforms will require a VPN for secure remote access. But a lot of major enterprise software is creeping towards HTTPS & SSL as the baked-in default method for client-server communication.
That doesn't mean that VPNs are going away entirely, it just means that the old model of tunneling all traffic to and from a device through a VPN is shifting more towards per-application encryption. It's like having multiple small simultaneous encrypted connections, instead of one huge tunnel.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Read the thread. You have two companies in crisis doing the exact wrong thing, and making a mess of it. The Yahoo CEO really stepped in it, due to her using her new motherhood as justification while expecting the rest of us to ignore the nursery she had installed into her office.
That's nice. Keep on guessing I suppose.
I did. A few things:
1. WFH and kids - If you are employed full time at a company, you cannot be watching your kids while working, you have to hire a nanny. Any remotely sane company requires this.
2. Marissa comes from Google, which has a strong campus culture to foster good work. These steps are probably part of an overall plan to improve the work product of the company. I can say for software dev, things go exponentially faster during design if everyone is in the same place.
3. If there is poor management, having people in the office helps expose it vs. employees not doing work. If they're working from home, every manager can fall back on "they're not doing their jobs even though I'm assigning work"
4. It could just be that they want a lot of people to quit without having to pay them proper severance.
Note that I'm saying these things as someone who works from home full-time.
Yes, I think some degree of WFH is ideal, as it lets people do shit in their lives way more easily. That said, it takes an institutional commitment to good communication to make it work, which most companies can't even manage when everyone is in the office.
Also yes, that's a shitty way to shed staff, but it's a way that lets them do it without saying "layoffs".
This is a good post. Number 4, in particular, was corroborated by an 'unnamed source' via Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-told-remote-employees-to-work-in-an-office--or-quit-2013-2
The BI article also illustrates something else about Yahoo that is... well... quite interesting:
When you're telecommuting, you have to be actively engaged with your coworkers or your boss every single day. This isn't just for accountability, this is also because the best way to keep on your company's good side is to continually demonstrate your value. An invisible employee doesn't get promoted, at least not in the US.
So if Yahoo had a lot of telecommuting employees who were effectively invisible, that says something about the company's management structure.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
working from home is a great way of letting some people work in a way that is vastly more conducive to actually getting shit done, but it has the downside of terrified managers being unable to keep an eye on everybody
which is exactly the fuckin point doggz