I decided I would never work for a company that hired Marissa Mayer after that. I screen my employers more carefully than they screen me, and that move showed she didn't give one shit about any of hers.
Disclaimer: I was at Yahoo when she came and implemented this policy.
It irritates me to see uninformed people making such blanket comments. You have no idea what the policy was; I do. Let me explain it, in the hope that you (and others with this mindset) may learn something about it, and maybe even change their views.
There was a group of Yahoos ( < 200 ) who had a permanent work-from-home exemption (if you can call it that; there was never much of an enforced policy earlier). They never came in to an office (except for the occasional IT issue and package pickup). There were a couple of incidents where these remote workers were found to be moonlighting. So a study was done to see how many of these remote workers actually VPNed in. After a month or two, it turned out, a good number of them were actually working part-time. So a blanket ban was issued, with the caveat that if you could make a compelling case, you would still be allowed to WFH. In fact, a colleague of mine continued to work from home after this policy change. A number of strong people continued to WFH; a few were let go; and the rest had to hoof it to office.
Now, the mistake Marissa made wasn't with this policy; but it was in how she didn't go the next step: holding the managers of the shirkers responsible.
Which brings me to my thinking about why it's so hard to turn around Yahoo: the middle management. (Please do me a favor and read PG's excellent post http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html after you're done reading this). Yahoo is filled with managers whose sole contribution is survival. There is no accountability for screwing up. Fucking up products badly has never gotten anyone fired.
Did you know Yahoo went through 3 different iterations of an attempt at a "social network"? Each and every time, sane minds pointed out that the concept was bad, the UX was bad, etc.; and yet the managers prevailed and it went down in flames, as predicted.
The joke in Yahoo used to be: throw everything into version 1.0, because you never know if there will be a version 1.1.
Marissa is failing not because she's a bad CEO (having seen Yahoo CEOs like Terry Semel, I can assure you she's the best they've had in the last 10 years); it's because she has no supporting cast. She trusts people too much. One manager once said to me (about her): meh, she'll be gone in a couple of years; I'll still be around. He had been there since 2001, and had no intention of moving anywhere. Collected fat paychecks by taking credit for others' work. And he was just one of many, many in there. Over the years I encountered so many people like him, where you had no idea what actually they contributed to the company.
/rant
"I want to see you in your seat at your desk, otherwise I don't think you're working" is a sign of a terrible manager.
Obviously the even bigger mistake was not doing a massive company wide re-organization and throwing out all middle management. Middle management is only an asset if it is helping the business, and as is obviously the case in Yahoo, it is not.
She made a knee-jerk reaction and it was a bad call. I think all she had to do was take the actions you describe as her 'next step.' She may be better than those before her but that didn't allow her to succeed.
It may be on any given day you can do your work locally on your laptop, but if you work remotely and never or rarely sign into the vpn, a manager should be empowered to ask why not. And if no reasonable answer is forthcoming, terminate you for cause.
Instead, she punished lots of people because some of them were bad employees; I think she got the rep she deserves.
As far as potential employees go: in my 14 years of interviewing in the Bay Area, I have never, ever been asked about the work-from-home policy. That should tell you how little an impact it has.
Their News aggregator site used to be useful to me until it turned into something akin to a tabloid/clickbait site.
Sorry to hear that the 90s Dot Com mentality is still pervasive within the corporation, but maybe that's to be expected of a company that grew so fast and probably promoted a lot of amateurs into high managerial positions.
If someone is working from home and not meeting their duties they should be fired. Eliminating the policy was a band-aid, having hard conversations and getting rid of the slackers (and their managers) would have been the cure.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/26/us-workplace-flexi...
I ended up quitting because I was tired of watching my boss browse Facebook and sports blogs all day.
They still exist and will probably take another 18 months to wither and die. The experience taught me to look hard for red flags and to hold my company as accountable as myself.
Maybe Yahoo didn't have time to sort through all those cases, but it shouldn't be surprised that:
1. Yahoo might have pushed out many people who didn't deserve it. Many of them are working parents and perhaps people with disabilities.
2. Yahoo might have pushed out "cheaters" without really telling them why, leaving them disgruntled about work-from-home policies instead of embarrassed that they were caught not doing their jobs.
3. Yahoo singled out a certain category of "cheaters" unfairly. I'll bet $5000 that there were at least twenty always-at-their-desks Yahoo employees who "wasted" a significant amount of time on HN, facebook, reddit, Yahoo video, or just talking about hobbies and sports with coworkers. Taking the ax to at-home slackers and ignoring the general slacker problem is slightly unfair. It doesn't project communication and transparency; it teaches employees to hide their routine from their bosses as much as possible.
You know how folks complain about open office plans? Because of the distracting noise and potential for interruptions? Well imagine an open office with coworkers who have no sense of social tact, cannot take care of themselves, and have a constant deep need for your attention. That's what it is like for a parent to work at home and parent their kids at the same time.
So when I hear that parents at Yahoo were using "work at home" as a substitute for childcare, I think that Yahoo did the right thing by cancelling the policy. That is pretty clear abuse of it.