I think yahoo found something like 35% of its wfh staff hadn’t logged in for weeks or months. (I can’t find a source for the number, so maybe I’m off, but vpn logs were used to justify ending wfh, which is… an imperfect approach for many reasons).
Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.
It baffles me how that's possible - in 25+ years working for software companies all my co-workers have been people I interact with basically daily (certainly more than once a week) - so how could someone not log in for weeks and it not be an issue?
I work for a company where the VPN sucks so much that we find ways to work outside it. Shadow IT is a thing here. I'd say some of our most productive and value-creating employees may go months without logging in internal systems, because things that are inside the company are able to pull their work that they do outside, so they don't have to deal with the shitty Windows-centric IT.
But are you talking software development? And if so, is that because key systems like source control/ticketing/chat/meetings etc. are all cloud-hosted and don't require logging into the domain/VPN etc.? If so, I'd still count that as "logging in", in the sense, they're online and interacting with other co-workers.
Most of our work is about interacting with entities outside the company.
Bots usually take source code that is hosted outside the company do do things internally, such as QA, and then publish the result externally or to some internal channel that is accessible from outside the usual IT systems (IT workarounds). It's complicated to tell you without going into details.
As long as everyone in a team feels like other team members are collaborating effectively (vs holding each other up) that doesn't sound like a problem, but it's hard to imagine how that's possible without regular communication between team members which implies some sort of "logging in", even if it's just via WhatsApp...
I've heard from some people in tech companies/remote first companies that once the company gets to a certain size (by employee #) it becomes extremely easy to float through. I know of people that have essentially outsourced their entire job by just hiring cheap freelancers to do their work for them. Those roles include designers, SWEs, marketers, etc... And throughout it all managers and finance and payroll and any sort of checks on employees all approved them all the way through and never.
Find yourself with the right manager/employer and you can get away with a remarkable amount of coasting.
You reach a certain kafkaesque threshold where making any move at all requires coordination outside your team with at least four other teams, you end up in gridlock. That said when i've been in such a position I have sometimes just fallen into gold-plating the hell out of whatever I was working on. Far beyond what was useful, just too keep myself sane.
That very much to me sounds like the wrong manager/employer! I just can't imagine working in an environment coworkers aren't genuinely keen on actively contributing towards building/ maintaining products and features. It's surely the reason you get into software development in the first place.
Overall, I don’t think the plan at yahoo was to fix anything, but just asset-strip it, which worked well for stockholders.