Yahoo! Employees: Go Work at Automattic

Matt Mullenweg didn’t hold back his opinion when commenting on Yahoo’s apparent decision to ban work-from-home opportunities and working remote:

For anyone who enjoys working from wherever they like in the world, and is interested in WordPress, Automattic is 100% committed to being distributed. 130 of our 150 people are outside of San Francisco – http://automattic.com/work-with-us/

Coming from Marissa Mayer herself, apparently the change is coming in June and will be an opportunity to “get with the program” or quit:

After that, employees who work from home must comply without exception or quit. One top manager was told that there would be little flexibility on the issue.

The anger from impacted employees was strong today, because many felt they were initially hired with the assumption that they could work more flexibly.

I think this is pretty ridiculous and shows that the wheels on the Yahoo! bus are coming off completely. Yes, I understand that it might be a “strategic” move to lighten that bus by forcing talent to jump-ship but if that talent is the good ones then it’s going to back-fire.

The internal memo ends with this classy statement:

Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company — and the best is yet to come.

I’m not sure if that means the best is yet to come for Yahoo! as a company or for the employees who were looking for one final reason to abandon ship – and the fact that they just found it.

Too bad.