&gt; I saw the writing on the wall when she cancelled the work from home policy<p>Disclaimer: I was at Yahoo when she came and implemented this policy.<p>It irritates me to see uninformed people making such blanket comments. You have no idea what the policy was; I do. Let me explain it, in the hope that you (and others with this mindset) may learn something about it, and maybe even change their views.<p>There was a group of Yahoos ( &lt; 200 ) who had a permanent work-from-home exemption (if you can call it that; there was never much of an enforced policy earlier). They never came in to an office (except for the occasional IT issue and package pickup). There were a couple of incidents where these remote workers were found to be moonlighting. So a study was done to see how many of these remote workers actually VPNed in. After a month or two, it turned out, a good number of them were actually working part-time. So a blanket ban was issued, with the caveat that if you could make a compelling case, you would still be allowed to WFH. In fact, a colleague of mine continued to work from home after this policy change. A number of strong people continued to WFH; a few were let go; and the rest had to hoof it to office.<p>Now, the mistake Marissa made wasn&#x27;t with this policy; but it was in how she didn&#x27;t go the next step: <i>holding the managers of the shirkers responsible</i>.<p>Which brings me to <i>my</i> thinking about why it&#x27;s so hard to turn around Yahoo: the middle management. (Please do me a favor and read PG&#x27;s excellent post <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;yahoo.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;yahoo.html</a> after you&#x27;re done reading this). Yahoo is filled with managers whose sole contribution is survival. There is no accountability for screwing up. Fucking up products badly has never gotten anyone fired.<p>Did you know Yahoo went through 3 different iterations of an attempt at a &quot;social network&quot;? Each and every time, sane minds pointed out that the concept was bad, the UX was bad, etc.; and yet the managers prevailed and it went down in flames, as predicted.<p>The joke in Yahoo used to be: throw everything into version 1.0, because you never know if there will be a version 1.1.<p>Marissa is failing not because she&#x27;s a bad CEO (having seen Yahoo CEOs like Terry Semel, I can assure you she&#x27;s the best they&#x27;ve had in the last 10 years); it&#x27;s because she has no supporting cast. She trusts people too much. One manager once said to me (about her): meh, she&#x27;ll be gone in a couple of years; I&#x27;ll still be around. He had been there since 2001, and had no intention of moving anywhere. Collected fat paychecks by taking credit for others&#x27; work. And he was just one of many, many in there. Over the years I encountered so many people like him, where you had no idea what actually they contributed to the company.<p>&#x2F;rant