[Bartweiss]

I've always suspected that people took that decision too much at face value. Yahoo needed to make staff cuts, and too many layoffs are bad for the share price. Convincing all the remote employees to quit lets you claim "there's a plan!" while quietly thinning the ranks. The catch is that it doesn't work if you state your real reasons.

[jpmattia]

That would be about the worst form of leadership possible.

By relying on attrition, you can pretty much guarantee that the people with the best offers waiting on the outside are going to leave, and that's pretty highly correlated with the people that you actually want to keep.

If layoffs are required, there is no other way than to take the bull by the horns and make hard decisions about who has to go and who has to stay. Sometimes that involves making decisions about what programs are going to go/stay, which consequently leads to letting good people go when you shut down some of those programs.

I'd also guess that shareholders have learned the lesson many years ago, which is why active layoffs often increase share price. Layoffs tend to increase near-term profitiability; whether long-term profitability is increased depends on whether you get the layoffs & refocusing done right.

[gaius]

That would be about the worst form of leadership possible.

Not quite. The worst would be to do that, then have a office suite converted into a nursery for just your own kids.

[ng12]

The problem is many of the remote employees were the truly valuable ones. Talented engineers get spooked pretty quickly and a flexible work schedule is a very good reason to stick it out at a struggling large company. The more of those reasons you take away the more you'll find yourself with less desirable engineers.

[Bartweiss]

Definitely - I don't think this was a good decision.

The only reason it might have looked good enough to take is that axing remote at a stroke gets pretty much everyone, good and bad. I suppose a few young/single/unemployable people might move to the office, but my memory was that Yahoo lost most everyone who was remote.

That's marginally better than the usual "make the workplace intolerable" option, where you lose exclusively the good. Of course, it's still much less good than actual dismissals, where you (hopefully) keep the good engineers in particular.

[mrslx]

At my company, we only approve remote employees who are proven to be dependable and self-directed. usually senior hires who are willing to take paycut because they want to live where their spouse can work or care for family/kids.

Not just engineers. sales and ops folks who are close to clients/vendor offices are also prime for remote work.

seems like a sad knee-jerk response by y!