No, really, it is the opposite. You're fine as long you as you sit on your computer from 9 to 5. Working from home, there's a constant pressure to produce actual results, because that's what you are judged by. I find it more stressful and there's more tendency to do overtime (you're already home anyway, right?).

I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

There are many ways around this, chat clients being the most obvious. Also, continuously interrupting people can be very counterproductive, specifically if you do intellectual work.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like

There's many people for which working remotely isn't actually a choice, barring a change of employer.

I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same?

I've done consulting jobs both locally and remotely, and if you ask me, in a few years time we'll consider non-remote working (when it isn't necessary for the job) a thing of foolishness.

When you work remotely you don't have 'time in chair' as a proxy for productivity so you have no choice but to prove yourself through your output.

When in an office you can stare at the wall all day and have it considered "work".

Working remotely isn't for everyone. Some people do not have the self-discipline. Don't allow those people to work remotely or don't hire them at all.

There are other benefits to working in the same meat-space: culture, easy collaboration, etc. I don't believe pressure to produce results is one of them. I also think that most of those advantages are disappearing or gone with chat, email, skype, google hangouts, and other collaboration solutions.

More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.

I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content production / design / marketing.

You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?

That's basically my #1 problem where I work: we're in big open-spaces and you get interrupted all the time. Sometimes just having someone talk next to you can be enough to break your train of thought.

That being said, I agree it's very helpful to be able to talk in person sometimes. I think the solution is just something hybrid, you work remotely a certain portion of the time and get to the office for the other days.

I would be interested to hear yahoo's reason for giving up on remote work though. This article is a bit unsubstantial.

That's great that this is the case for you in the situation you were in; but the assertion that "people who work in an office together share instant communication, and people who work remotely have slow communication" is obviously false.

I've worked plenty of real world offices where communication was done only via email and took ages.

On the other hand, the job I work at now, I work remotely 4 days a week and communication is instantaneous. We have a company IRC server and if you're working it's expected you'll be on there. There's always phones but IRC + email work 99% of the time.

Remote work is the future; the reasons to work in an office together are evaporating. As remote video conferencing improves (and as someone who uses it every week, let me tell you, it still sucks) the benefits of being together in person disappear.

This is an idiotic move by Yahoo!, and shows that they have no clue what the are doing.

It really depends on people/culture, but I find a shared IRC channel where people idle and are reasonably responsive to be the #1 way to have relatively friction-free quick coordination, even with people in the same building. Physical colocation is 2nd-best, email/Skype 3rd-best.

In fact, I think local is superior to remote mainly in the opposite case: where you need lengthy meetings, especially with more than two people. In that case, videoconferencing and email get unwieldy. But for routine quick queries I find IRC a lot better than walking over to someone's office, to the extent that someone local who doesn't use IRC (or isn't responsive on it) feels more distant to me than someone remote who does.

Sure the limping fellas can spot land. Maybe hes even good at it. Better than others. However the ship is going down, its time to try whatever possible in hopes of saving it.

I was a remote employee for the last almost two years at Cheezburger with many others. We had a culture of emails not taking forever and a day to respond to and if you needed a response now you could Skype, google talk, jabbr, phone call whoever you needed.

The whole organization was committed to it.

On top of that, everyone I knew worked like mad. There were definitely pros and cons and I'm sure the pros outweighed the cons.

I agree mostly with your point, but the problem is this - the gargantuan size of the company leads to problems, there are always going to be a couple of ass holes who sneak under the radar, the people who do the minimum amount of work possible, working from wherever they want and being paid for it. It's a shame that the actions of these people can make employers naturally suspicious of hiring people to work remotely when I'm sure most are decent and hard working.

Employees can be unproductive in the office just as much as remote employees can be super-productive at home. Yahoo just seems to be taking the easiest to see metric for "productive".

Corporate IM is one solution to this.

As someone who has worked independently and for others in offices and remotely, the above statement is the exact opposite of reality.

When people are in the office non-production is perversely seen as production. Where warming a seat and having lots of busy work meetings and filling white boards full of inanity is "the gears of work".

When working remotely, the sole indicator of accomplishment is actual production. All of the bullshit is pushed aside.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow.

As humorous as that is, your "heed the man" advice is quaintly archaic. A business like Yahoo is nothing but the combined work of a bunch of smart people. We've seen -- time and time again -- that many such companies are driven and succeed because of a subset of those people, so it is dangerous, dangerous ground to offend them. Because they become the upstarts that grind places like Yahoo into dust.

The world has changed. We all have the tools, the technology, the capacity to scale, the communications mediums, and the audience. It is nothing like it was.

EDIT: Places like Reddit, Digg, Slashdot are by far busiest during the North American work day. These are by and large people working in offices.