It has been all over the press Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has called all of her employees home.   By home I actually mean leaving their homes to come to the office to their jobs.    This has caused an uproar with many people, who have spoken out against her actions and in support of telecommuting – cnn story.   How can a tech company go against the grain and want people to work in the office?

tech

For software development I think Marissa is dead on with this move and here is why:

 

1.  Improving communication and collaboration – when developing software the interaction between the team members is critical.  Its interesting that the majority of the people that think this is a bad idea are not software developers – but rather bloggers or marketing people.  See this CNN video So these people are missing the mark trying to compare their jobs to software development.  Its a completely different process to be successful you have to be in constant contact with the team you are working with.

2.  Determining who is engaged in your success as a company  – Yahoo is struggling as a company, Marissa is trying to get the focus back on the basics and get Yahoo to be competitive again.  To do this she is have to make changes, such as providing employees free food and smart phones to the employees to make them more productive.   See this video story.  The next is to regroup and get those employees that are not 100% committed out of Yahoo, and the only way to tell who is engaged is to see them in the office and how they are working.  See eWeek article.

3. Tackling the competition – its an interesting fact that Marissa is from Google and all of these changes are taking a model more like them.   In all the pundits that this decision is a bad one, I have not seen any of them with a plan to make Yahoo more competitive.   So if this is a bad thing, what then, what is the next step, how does Yahoo be more competitive and start gaining ground again in search and its other products.     See the opinion piece that falls short.  In the tech industry if you are looking to be ahead of everyone else and your looking for work life balance, you are in the wrong place.   The innovators are the ones that do it because they have a love and passion for technology, not because they can get in their daily bicycle ride.

And for those of you not convinced she made the right move – what prompted the decision – she reviewed the VPN logs to see how often employees were logging in and the results were not good.   A testament that sometimes to much freedom is not a good thing and people slack off.   See Business Insider article.

I’ll be tracking Yahoo’s progress and see if they can turn the ship around.