Haters Gonna Hate Marissa

What rock stars we developers are! There aren't enough of us to go around and we know it. We can demand high salaries for playing with our vaporware file cabinets all day long and the perks don't stop there. We are such princesses that we don't see why we shouldn't be able to just stay at home one day and week while still getting paid. Don't our employers know how special we are?

I saw news break at cnn.com today that Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, is putting an end to the silly work-from-home thing that poisons productivity at her company. A quote from her is: "To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side," to which I agree, philosophy-wise, completely. And yet, I checked Twitter for reactions by searching for "marissa" to find what I expected: Most of us are spoiled.

Sigh. Well, there are two ways this can go for Marissa and either way the haters are gonna hate.

1. Marissa turns Yahoo around. This is not an easy undertaking. I don't know why she picked a sick company to jump to from Facebook to begin with. Maybe she likes the Herculean challenge. This will really make her if she pulls it off. It is not going to be easy. She is going to ruffle a lot of feathers in making tough choices just like this one.
2. Marissa fails and Yahoo fails. As it all goes badly all of her tough choices are pointed to as examples of what a buffoon she was. She drove off all of the good people with her insistence that employees actually put on clothes when they work. Damn her.

Hmmm... there is always room for character assassination, believe me. Consider this guy:

Good:

• fought and won the first world war, and especially so by trying to stay out of it
• gave us income tax which IS better than tariffs
• created the Federal Reserve
• envisioned the League of Nations, a forerunner for modern day NATO
• monopoly-busting stuff includes the Federal Trade Commission
• child labor laws

Bad:

• 19th century era opinions of black people, women, and immigrants

Well, we won't be making any statues of Woody any time soon. What a loser! It can be the same thing (fate) for Marissa too if our community chooses it. Haters gonna hate.