Video of Eric Schmidt blaming remote work for Google’s woes mysteriously vanishes
Video of Eric Schmidt blaming remote work for Google’s woes mysteriously vanishes
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Because Google was so focused and strategic before the pandemic rollseyes.
The issue is Google’s broken governance and incentive system, which gives product owners and executives incentives for new products and actively disincentivizes maintaining and improving existing products...and that was a thing from well before the pandemic hit.
It's why Google launched three pay systems and had five messaging systems at the same time.
And, finally, this is all because of the strategy set by senior leaders.
a) you're right. Everyone who says this is right
b) If the senior leaders have designed their own ivory towers to force obsequious behaviour from their own people, they sure as shit won't listen to totally reasonable analysis from people who don't work for them. As such, they have engineered their own demise. I wish them well with it.
Yeah and they make ad revenue hand over fist. So anything else is just “experimental” to them aka a cost center. Since they don’t commit to these side products they don’t become profitable and inevitably get cancelled.
Also the ads are just so obscenely profitable that anything else will always just be a small side project. Google ad revenue is $200 billion/year.
If a new product has revenue of $500 million/year it’s still peanuts that are just a distraction and can be canceled with zero impact.
It honestly took me a while to figure out why people were criticizing him. I read his remarks as a positive and didn't realize he thinks having a work-life balance is a bad thing. Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired. "You work, I live. Things are balanced."
Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired.
I'd suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.
Of course, of course. It can't possibly have been management infighting, lack of direction and destructive short term greed. No, it was people wanting to see their kids that are to blame.
The suits have taken over and are cannibalizing the current portfolio. Search is being transformed into a large AI powered advertisement billboard to pump up the profit. Now they're all surprised search is less used and realize that search is the gateway to their other services. And the management blame storm begins.
I don't know man, it looks like the lack of focus started well before 2020.
He's complaining that googlers aren't killing products faster anymore because of the remote work. It was easier to just say "hey how about we kill gtalk" over on campus coffee shop discussions, but now they've to do that on Google meet and it limits the imagination of what all they could kill next week.
Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.
I wish Eric Shit was on this list ⚰️
If he has time to complain about other people, then he is probably not essential to the operation. Maybe he should be fired instead.
He retired from his role at Google a few years ago so yeah…
But he is still a typical C-Suite asshole. Blame workers for strategic corporate failures (Googles competition all offer WFH) and take personal credit (and bonuses) for any and all successes.
Also taking huge salaries, bonuses and golden parachutes for any failures, while employees pay the price and you brag about being the one who takes all the risks.
He's far from a typical C-suite.
He's decided to use his 25 billion to create a startup for AI powered zero-coms suicide attack drones.
That's not normal.
He's retired, hasn't been involved with Google for years. He's just insanely rich, and still holds billions in Google shares.
Work/life balance, going home early, and working from home is winning.
H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.
It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face
Cunt
They have nap pods, full restaurants, and snack bars, and "fun" office spaces so you don't want to leave the office.
Someone I knew worked there and wouldn't actually buy groceries. He just at at the office for all his meals. He didn't own a car. Rode his bike down or used public transportation.
It saved him like several hundred per month.
They know this and will try to use it as a way to suck you in and keep you in the office longer.
It saved him like several hundred per month.
If you live within biking distance of Google, you are spending a ton of money on rent. Work from home is way cheaper, especially since you can just live somewhere with sub-million houses.
Depends on which Google office you mean.
It's pretty easy to be in the office and not working. Especially with all those different places to get lost. I really doubt that works out the way they want it to
Part of the plan (a big part) is that any big ideas you come up with when you're in the office and not working belong to Google.
Scenario 1: It's 5pm so you go home, after dinner you hang out with a bunch of friends, many who work at other companies. While you're hanging out, someone has an idea for the Next Big Thing in tech. Everybody talks about it, gets excited, and a year later everyone quits their jobs to start NBT.com.
Scenario 2: It's 5pm so you go to the on-site gym, you stay on campus for dinner, and you hang out with a bunch of cow-orkers / friends, all of whom work at Google / Meta / Amazon. While you're hanging out, someone has an idea for the Next Big Thing in tech. Everybody talks about it, gets excited, but since you all work for the same company you don't quit. The company has ways for employees to work on projects like that while not having to quit. And, if you did quit, they might be able to sue you since you came up the idea on company time, and used company resources to develop it.
Sounds like you could practically live there like you would from home almost
I have heard from many sources that at least the past ~4 years, if you are seen using the fun office things, you're seen as not busy enough and will be pipped/fired
told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.”
Yeah, so I know for whom I wouldn't want to work after graduating.
and nobody in the Stanford audience had the balls to yell out "IT FUCKING IS" at him after he said it. Cowards and sycophants, all.
It's Stanford. Protests are to be had against middle America, not those who actually hold power, else you might not get the network effects the school all but promises
You assume they were listening.
That's why people like ES only give talks at places like SU.
Sounds like someone should have been minding their no-no words!
Did some companies really go back to the office100%? We sure did not, going to the office is more of a social thing, maybe for all hands meetings, customer presentations and that kind of stuff.
The company wins because they can have a shiny office in the city that does not need to have workplaces for all employees but maybe 20% of them at a time.
With all the weird stuff that people do at home, productivity is still higher. In times of crunch working from home has saved me more than once. Etc blabla is this really still a discussion nowadays?
I think it's been proven time and time again that return to office mandates are a way to avoid severance packages. People end up leaving voluntarily. In the age of tens of thousands of layoffs at all the big tech companies this has to have saved them thousands of salaries worth of compensation packages.
They don't care about the "quality" of workers because if someone is truly important they get exceptions, everyone else is imminently replaceable.
In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.
There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it's WFH the company managers and owners don't have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that's the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.
How do you work the office only having space for 20% of employees? Makes a lot of sense but would be annoying to hot desk. My office only has us in two days a week but has not cut down on the number of desks at all, giving up the potential savings.
If the company grows they don't need to have desks for every new person, so they won't run out of space as quickly, saving the cost of relocating to a bigger office for further down the road.
My last two companies have been mostly fully remote, we've done all hands meetings, we've done regular scheduled meetings, and everything in between all remotely. It works well, employees are happier and we produce better work as a result.
We do a day a week just to catch up and remember how to speak.
We might occasionally have to come in for a few days if the owner is in the country. That's like once or twice a year.
I was asked how I felt about coming back full time and I told them straight. There's lots of places that don't demand that, and they pay more than we do. Don't lose good staff to nonsense policy.
cmon, it is the internet, a copy must be somewhere
Did the students boo him? I hope so.
Of course not. They were taking notes as they expect to be next in line to grind the peasants.
Anyone got a mirror?
Fucking billionaire luck babies telling others they need to work harder. Such a piece of shit.
lol what a fucking dipshit. I cannot believe he thought that would play well.
He retired? This fuck better not get an appointment in the next administration.