Funny then how every single company that has leapfrogged Google in AI (Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic) has the exact same or even more lenient office policy. All they all did their most critical work during the Covid years when every single employee was working from home full time.<p>Poor leaders will blame everything but their own failures. When was the last time Google had a coherent product vision?
> “I’m sorry to be so blunt [...] But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.” [0]<p>Hold up, so stuff like <i>WFH policies</i> are to blame for the company losing its edge and not being head-to-head with "other startups"?<p>I thought it was because Alphabet Incorporated wasn't directly competing with "startups" was because it was a structurally different kind of company that works in fundamentally different ways because it's publicly traded (GOOG) and employs ~150,000 people! How silly of me!<p>[0] Bonus video context for quote: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s</a>
Eric Schmidt is right: WFH has been a moral disaster. The absolute, most important thing in the <i>world</i> is that companies be able to successfully extract maximum value from their workers. Something is seriously wrong if workers end the work day with even a little bit left for their families.<p>Good people are in-office and 100% engaged at delivering value to the company. Anything less is violence.
Friction and velocity is what’s important.<p>For executive teams, in-person interactions cut down friction, and result in an order of magnitude higher velocity. Every bit of friction adds up, scheduling a Zoom meeting or waiting on 5 people to reply to an email is way slower than a 17 second walk down the hall to get a thumbs up from those same 5 people.<p>But for developers or anyone doing deep work, their friction is interruptions, and if they’re interrupted every 30 minutes, they never reach a high velocity. Or if you have a headache, taking a nap might actually be the fastest path to building something complex.<p>Then there’s the majority of workers, who aren’t interested in “working like hell”. There’s a limited supply of ambitious, talented people, and you need this group.<p>I sometimes wonder if that’s the whole reason some startups get acquired, just because you’re getting employees who are ambitious.
Meanwhile, Anthropic is hiring engineers with a WfH policy and a "4 day workweek": <a href="https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-claude-ai-anthropic-799921" rel="nofollow">https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-cl...</a><p>And Tesla's record of innovation has not been particularly stellar in recent years.
I am, once again [0], asking for evidence.<p>Speaking of worker issues, while he was CEO of Google Schmidt oversaw the illegal collusion between other large tech companies, including Apple, to not poach their employees [1] while also sitting on the Board for Apple [2]<p>[0]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Resigns-from-Apples-Board-of-Directors/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Res...</a>
The most brilliant thing about remote work is that you can remain constantly productive without deviating from the subject matter of employment.<p>I was never able to do that working in an office without serious ethical violations. Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. So, what about the rest of that time? I suppose I could read research papers while at the office, but to be a better developer I actually use that time to write original software to solve real problems from real life.<p>What makes working from home different? Personal equipment by personal learning not restricted by employer policies.
I think cutting out all but "business-critical" travel has done far more damage to innovation than any WFH disconnect.<p>I can think about several situations that could have been solved 6-12 months earlier (IMHO) if L4+ were allowed to travel as it was before 2020, and I work on ML low-level infrastructure. The savings would have been significant enough to show up on finance/CFO radar, but it was impossible to quantify and thus seek approval for those travels as it was not a well-defined deal / project.
Video interview the article is based on: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA</a><p>Key quotes:<p>> Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.<p>> The reason startups work is because the people work like hell. And I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.<p>Timestamp of quotes (10m 24s): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s</a>
Lucky old retired executive shares opinion and makes excuses for poor management without evidence in the pursuit of relevance.<p><a href="https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of" rel="nofollow">https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...</a>
> Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning<p>I mean... yeah? If you don't do those things, guess what's going to happen to your best people; they're going to leave because someone else is going to treat them like people rather than "resources".
That must be it. Not their spectacular failures to build reliable AI. Distain for their users, selling out of search quality or their other myriad bullshit.