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Comment by MattRogish | Hacker News Reader

Why does pulling people into the office finally give Yahoo the ability to fire under-performers? You don't need to see butts in seats in order to identify people who are not pulling their weight.

If people are coasting at home OR at the office you can tell that by their work output. Where they do their work doesn't enter into it.

Adopting a Results Only Work Environment (http://gorowe.com) would allow them to have folks who work from anywhere and give management the tools to fire under-performers.

If this were only a temporary measure, a "reset" so to speak, then I still don't agree with it (I think you can do that without the disruption), but it would be understandable. As they have not said that this is temporary, I have no reason to think it'll come back in the future, which is the tragedy.

It doesn't have to be like this.

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My impression of what you're saying is that you would pull a metric and fire everyone who does not meet a minimum contribution. My impression of what MM is doing is that she understands that the culture has slipped but there's a way to get it back, cut the bad, and keep the good.

It's easy to look at this from a culture of performance and say "drown them all". It seems to me that MM is trying to salvage the good people who got carried away with the bad culture because she understands that the problem isn't just a few bad apples, it's a mind set.

The way to move to ROWE is not by firing all the employees, it's transformation, no? I mean what do I know, I'm no manager but it seems like there's a way to do this and a way not to, and then there's another way to do it with 14 thousand employees.

This is a bit pedantic, but I believe what you mean is that she understands that the problem is a few bad apples. The full phrase is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch" — it only takes some minority threshold of underperformers to threaten the entire culture.

Absolutely.

Managing people by adopting draconian measures never works. Your talented workers will resent you for managing with an iron fist, while your lazy team members will turn up to work and be just as unproductive in the office.

If you have a problem with quality and productivity, you have a problem with hiring or an inability to measure and manage performance. It should be of no consequence to a CEO of a global technology company if Joe Blow in engineering works from home every Friday.

I like the point someone raised that part of the point is to avoid firing people as that gets very costly. Instead they'll hopefully quit.

Who's going to quit though? The people who care, the people who know they have better options elsewhere. The talentless hacks who still don't give a shit about the company but are willing to go through the motions for a paycheck? They're like barnacles you'll have to get rid of by scraping them off and using a blow torch. The way to get rid of underperformers is by firing them, period, there's no other hack or workaround that makes things easier.

If that's her plan they would need to be careful to avoid running afoul of the concept of "constructive dismissal". If you make the work environment so intolerable as to make someone quit the law generally treats it as if you had simply fired the employee.

Can most claim that actually having to go to work is "intolerable" if they've not so much as logged into the VPN? Probably not. But the stay-at-home moms who can demonstrate they've been producing while teleworking might have a leg to stand on there.

To determine whether people are coasting or not delivering as much value ("work output") as they should be, you need to be able to measure it. Maybe people are under-tasked and teams are too big for the amount of work available (bloated), but in order to hold people to a standard, you have to have a standard in the first place.

>> Adopting a Results Only Work Environment

It needs to be adopted first, and that sounds like another long-term project. Meanwhile the hope is that some under-performers will just quit - faster and cheaper for the company.

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