Yahoo is a company that did poorly with WFH. By the time they forced everyone back into the office, they were too far behind to recover.
Google would be foolish to continue to pay people Silicon Valley salaries to sit at home. Google's employees need to go back to the office, or they will be replaced by workers in the Midwest or Mumbai.
The story behind remote work at Yahoo! has never been honestly covered by the media, nor did it have anything to do with Yahoo!'s demise. For example, from totally ignorant reporting at the time:
"Mayer has apparently been combing through the company's VPN logs to discern just what, exactly, its remote employees have been up to. And, as it turns out, a number of employees weren't even signing into to the company's VPN – which is to say, they weren't working unless they had some magical, yet-unheard of connection to the company's network that doesn't require any kind of external validation."
The issue here is that Mayer had *zero* clue how remote employees connected to the network, and apparently neither did Kara Swisher, who "broke" the story. As someone who worked remotely for Yahoo! (thankfully prior to the disaster that was Mayer came along), I will note that the vast majority of remote employees avoided the VPN like the plague as it was an endless source of broken connections and other issues. The majority of employees used an SSH bastion host with SSH key authentication to do their work and simply used something like FoxyProxy if they needed access to web resources. Thus, while Mayer was "correct" that there were very few logins to the VPN, it was not related to whether or not remote employees were actually doing work for Yahoo!. If Mayer had bothered to talk with the her employees about *how* they worked, she would have found all of this out. Instead, she basically foretold what was to come under her mismanagement of Yahoo! - Bad business decisions driven by complete ignorance.
Personally, I've been a WFH employee since 2008, and it's been great to see many companies now recognize that WFH is the future. Not only that, the improvement in worker productivity brought about by WFH is backed up by multiple studies
Finally, when you think about companies like Google and Apple wanting to force their employees back into the office, remember that they've invested *billions* in their offices that are going to be a worthless investment unless they force employees into them. The smart companies are ending their leases and supporting their employees.
Hope that helps!
