”We’ve checked and some people who work from home haven’t even logged into the VPN…”
Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up. I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be poached from Google.
This is when you start going up the chain to see where it's broken. If some random leaf node employee isn't online, that's a problem. The fact that someone else didn't notice it until now is also a problem. This person's "manager" is clearly in need of review. This may continue to that person's manager (because they didn't notice their report not checking on the VPN person) and so on.
It sounds like it's time to break out the chainsaw and start lopping off dead limbs. This is good stuff.
I haven't been a Yahoo! employee for 7 years, but back in my days (dusts off his old cane to tell the kids to stay off the lawn) the product was run by product management, while engineering was responsible for development and maintenance.
With top management shakeups every week or so I'd imagine the product management part of Yahoo! being in a state of disarray, with some people leaving on their own, some getting the boot, random new people showing up, but nobody sticking long enough to make any product decisions.
Reliability is the only remaining thing on the engineering plate, and with good infrastructure a lot of smaller projects from here http://everything.yahoo.com/ just run themselves most of the time.
Well, I don't know if they checked this but when I worked remotely for Yahoo I didn't use the VPN either -- there's a ssh gateway you can proxy through which works just fine. I assume they are aware of this...
To be fair when I worked from home for a company that had a VPN I almost never logged into it either, simply because I rarely needed to.
I assume they have other things they can check, if they are a developer are they committing code and writing on the issue tracker? If they are in customer service are they answering the phone and replying to emails?
At some companies the only way to get email is to log in through VPN. It seems like such a strange concept, but I know for a fact that this still exists today.
Every network service offered by a company -- mailserver, Samba, proprietary web applications for internal use, whatever -- needs to be locked down pretty hard if it directly faces the Internet. It takes time and engineering talent to make sure everything's configured securely. If you don't believe this, take a look at the length and complexity of the top Google result for the terms mailserver howto [1].
Servers still should be secured if they're accessible on the VPN, but limiting access to employees vastly reduces the likelihood that an insecurely configured server will be hacked. (Compared to an identically configured server with an unfiltered Internet connection, that is.) Not having servers connected directly to the Internet also provides another level of protection against zero-day exploits. And if something does happen, the VPN's login credentials can point you in the direction of who's responsible [2].
[2] Bad guys can still get on your VPN if they compromise someone's credentials with malware. To mitigate this, many companies that use VPN's either require client machines to run regular virus scans and keep their OS up-to-date, and/or only issue login credentials for company-issued machines.
If that's the case, pulling people in is still stupid. You're going to drive off good remote workers who don't want to be in the office just to cut the chaff.
How many good remote workers? They're already calling the lax attitude and loss of productivity a cancer and we all know killing cancer also means losing some healthy cells along the way.
I'm fairly certain they'll be able to pinpoint the problem actors immediately and those needing more flexibility will receive it after review. And by the looks of it, those dedicated employees understand why this is necessary for the survival of the company.
FYI, I do work mostly from home except when I need to go see a client or if I'm training someone. Slacking off is still impossible since a lot of my work is needed on very specific deadlines that can't change under any circumstance. In that regard, my work location is flexible, but total time spent isn't.
Wow. The WFH ban is starting to sound like the beginning of a bigger shake-up. I suspect Yahoo will want get rid of a ton of its unproductive employees and rebuild around a small core of talent, some of which will presumably be poached from Google.