Yahoo! is getting bad press

But maybe it shouldn't be.  There has been a lot of discussion about the end of the work from home program at Yahoo! but I was pretty convinced that there was a business case for it by these two points:

"A lot of people hid. There were all these employees [working remotely] and nobody knew they were still at Yahoo."

Mayer is happy to give Yahoo employees standard Silicon Valley benefits like free food and free smartphones. But our source says the kinds of work-from-home arrangements popular at Yahoo were not common to other Valley companies like Google or Facebook. "This is a collaborative businesses."

The first sounds like a very tough HR problem to solve without bringing everyone in so that they can be integrated into the business.  The second is an excellent business case for doing so as a way of enhancing productivity.  The piece that is always hard about working from home arrangements is that people are very defensive about them.  And they should be -- it is a very nice benefit.  But it also makes it a lot harder to collaborate with others and to manage reports. 

The framing of it as a blow to working parents seems to be a bit odd to me.  I would be much more concerned about parents who are working in low wage employment situations without the resources to access things like daycare.