The Marissa Mayer Kerfuffle

I feel as a woman in tech, I have to comment on the recent kerfuffle over Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, telling all Yahoo employees they can no longer telecommute.

As background, I know Marissa, having worked with her at Google, and I also know the Google culture, which certainly shaped her notions of what makes a company productive.

Google is a culture of hallway conversations, shouting over the cubicle barriers to people, etc.  So far as I can tell, the point of the free food (at least originally) was to ensure that people had lunch with their colleagues, chatted over coffee, etc. When I first came to Google eight years ago, face-to-face meetings were critical.  People traveled to other sites just to make sure their voices were heard in meetings (there were zero constraints on travel in those days).  Today Google, with 40+ engineering sites, lives and dies by the video conference, and management has been known to tell people that they should cut down on travel and use video more often.  But it's still not a culture that believes that telecommuting is a good thing, either for the employee or the company. They don't forbid it, but it's definitely not encouraged.  That's the culture Marissa came from.

As near as I can tell, and it's what I hear from others, this pronouncement is an act of something close to desperation on Marissa's part.  She is trying to make Yahoo more than a me-too, second level company.  She needs sharp people who can do creative things and do them fast.   I applaud her for believing that even if she can't attract many of the best and brightest, she can get results from the employees' collective intelligence, if they work together effectively.  I personally don't think it will work (and I have lots of anecdotes from my experience at other companies to support my view, but this blog post will be long enough without those), but if she's going to play it safe and only do things where the consensus is that she's on the right track, she's never going to succeed.

The thing I didn't understand is why this immediately became a women's issue.  In my experience, men take advantage of telecommuting more than women (of course, there are more men in tech than women, but I think that this probably holds even if you take base rates into account).  If you've ever tried to work with a crying baby in the house, then you'd know that most women with small children would rather go to the office while they are working.  They might want part-time work, but that's a different issue.  There is real value in being able to telecommute part of the day when you have school-age kids, but in my experience, men are as likely to sign up for those roles as women.  It's a sad state of affairs when the pundits immediately assume that only women will want the child-related benefits of telecommuting. And I know several men who telecommute part time who have no children or have grown children.  I suspect this is Marissa's experience too.  I'll bet that even though she expected flak for this approach,  it never occurred to her that she would be called anti-woman because of it.

I'd love to see some real research on whether telecommuting or distributed teams (telecommuting being an extreme form of distributed teaming) harm either individual or team productivity.  The one study that everyone is referring to had to do with call center workers, and there individual productivity is what matters (and what was measured).  Engineering teams work differently, and I wouldn't generalize across those boundaries.  It wouldn't be that hard to do this kind of research -- maybe Marissa's pronouncement will inspire someone to do so.

And, of course, if Marissa manages to turn Yahoo around, getting rid of telecommuting will get part/most of the credit, whether it deserves it or not.