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The polarization around remote work comes as no surprise
How you feel about remote work depends on who you are
The big story of the week was Marissa Mayer’s ‘no remote work’ dictate at Yahoo, hands down. That sparked a huge conversation in the tech world, ranging across Yahoo’s troubles, feminism, Silicon Valley, work culture, and the good, bad, and ugly of remote work. Or maybe it’s really about the polarization in thinking about work culture, and Mayer’s action just triggered a huge catharsis in the social discourse about that, and a number of posts here (see Yahoo’s Mayer thinks that remote workers are… too remote, What Marissa Mayer’s ‘no remote work’ dictate means, Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and Jennifer Magnolfi on Marrisa Mayer’s ‘no remote work’ edict). Let me see if I can can first recap what took place, and then try to characterize the polarization going on.
As I summarized on Monday last, Yahoo’s PR head, Jackie Reses, sent out a company-wide email announcing that, effective in June, there would be no more remote work at Yahoo. Employees will have to start working out of official Yahoo offices, and if necessary, relocate to do so. After this story broke, there was a huge outburst of commentary, to which Yahoo responded with one press release saying,
This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo right now.
Nonetheless, this event has become the point of leverage in a growing dialogue about what used to be called ‘telecommuting’ and which has been cast negatively by Yahoo as ‘remote work’. Working ‘remotely’ sounds bad: it sounds like a hermit hiding in a cave while all the normal people are working in the office. I personally like the term ‘distributed work’ since it doesn’t focus on the people working outside the office as the basis of the term, but instead looks at the totality of work, with various people working in different places.
But leaving aside the signal that is sent by ‘remote work’, there seem to be a variety of camps with very different views on distributed work:
Business-As-Competition — One community was very supportive of Mayer’s move, which I characterize as the business-as-competition school of thought. This commentariat argue that business…
