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.
maybe he just hated his family
CEOs sometimes think like this, but they seem to forget how much more they are paid when it comes up.
I’m on a business junket to [Miami Beach, Las Vegas, Jackson Hole, wherever] where I will [ski, drink, go to the beach, take a fishing boat, whatever] at an all-expensed resort or hotel, and have a couple meetings or attend a business conference, too. I’ll take a private jet and be there for a week. Everything is a business write-off. I’m getting paid while I’m doing this.
Next month will be another business trip.
Vs
Some family saved for years to visit Jackson Hole, take a hike, go fly fishing, and stay at a modest hotel or camp out. They’re not getting paid, everything is out of pocket, and they can’t write any of it off.
There’s a huge difference in not just pay but how their lives are structured financially. Tons more opportunities to write off and business expense things vs a normal person where everything is out of their personal money.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
Yeah, same reason I don’t like insulin, I want a permanent cure for diabetes… In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
/S in case people are confused
In the meantime fuck diabetic people, am I right?
Student loan forgiveness with no other action is completely counter-productive. Just like allowing drug companies to charge anything they want for Insulin, and then just having the government pay them is completely counter-productive. The answer to spiraling insulin prices (when not due to a shortage of some key ingredient) is to cap prices, not just pay whatever ransom drug companies are asking.
College costs have spiraled out of control because laws were passed to prevent you from escaping student loan debt through bankruptcy. From a lender perspective there’s almost no risk to giving students as much money as they want to borrow. Colleges in turn realized they could just keep raising prices because students could “afford” pretty much any tuition price through loans. If you just “forgive” all student loan debt, you’ll just encourage colleges to jack up prices even more. Why not? Come one come all, the government is going to foot whatever the bill ends up being!
If you’re going to forgive student debt, it needs to come with 3 things:
- A hard cap on public university tuition tracking inflation
- Student loans need to go back to being forgiven as a part of bankruptcy.
- A long-term plan to make public universities “free”
You want to find a middle ground with conservatives? Make tuition free for the occupations we have a shortage of to encourage people to go to school for a degree in which there will be a job waiting when they’re done.
We need more teachers? Teaching degrees are free for the next decade. You want to be a marine biologist? You pay whatever the (reasonable) capped state tuition is.
I know people who have fully embraced that they will never be able to pay off their student loans and are just letting them default. It’s often easier to get out of wage garnishment and wrecked credit than it is trying to pay back tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So yeah, the government paying off its own loans is just kicking the can down the road. Accelerating a process that’s already happening.
whoosh
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
Curing diabetes will make the world a better place in the future for everyone. Insuline is just for people who want to eat candy all day because they hate themselves
/S
Ps: it’s hilarious how quickly you showed the true colours you pretended to hide in your first post
100%
PS: Huh?
I’m genuinely confused by this? I know CompSci and engineering majors that are having trouble with loans and are you saying that they should have tried a more profitable degree… What?
I’m saying people made choices.
And I’m saying they were coerced into it because of the poor handling of public funding for universities thus making it the governments fault that sometimes people got fucked by loans no matter what degree they got.
To advocate for fixing a systemic problem and not also advocate for fixing what the systemic problem has caused is weird. Fixing these issues aren’t exclusive like you seem to think they are.
I’m saying people made choices.
Normally we call that ‘victim blaming’; even when the victimization is financial by the univer$ity.
I get you have this “do the crime, do the time” thing for people choosing to spend on education; but aside from multi-decade reform plan that isn’t even as marketable to voters as “let’s just consolidate healthcare and save money”, what do we have that’ll help people avoid the looming debt trap that has such a chilling effect on others entering post-secondary education?
You do NOT get a choice about getting an education in a vast, vast majority of life paths in the developed world.
I know a lot of people and exactly two of them are working in the field they got degrees in. You cannot always control the direction of your life, anything from medical issues to family emergencies to economics in your region can profoundly impact your chances of landing a career in your chosen study field, or even just getting a simple job that can pay back tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars as the interest snowballs.
Free education will make the world a better place in the future for everyone.
This is true.
Debt forgiveness is just for people who don’t want to pay their bills because they studied something that doesn’t pay.
This is utter garbage. Judgemental much? Maybe your own experiences and feelings aren’t the same for everyone.
I do not have a degree. Still here and happy. Make better choices.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
Not all loans were predatory, some people just made dumb choices all on their own. If anything there should be a reasonable limit on the interest rates and the loans should be refinanced.
And, as for why not both, we actually can’t afford either. Investing for the future is a better deal for society than fixing people’s personal mistakes.
What do you mean we can’t afford either? Are you telling me that somehow all other developed countries are able to afford free or cheap higher education but somehow the US cannot? We could also slowly start to cancel current student debt. Sure, it is at $1.77 trillion right now but that does not have to be wiped away all at once. Prioritize getting rid of predatory loans, then those those with financial hardship, then go from there.
Yes, we can’t afford it, because we chose to spend all of our money on the military.
This sounds like we could afford it, we just need to take that money back from the military…
We could switch to Medicare for All and save a couple hundred billion a year to do it.
But…if you think free public university is a good thing…isn’t not giving loan forgiveness analogous to saying “folks should stay in jail for trumped up marijuana charges until it’s legal Federally”? IMHO people shouldn’t have these loans in the first place.
If we can’t afford loan forgiveness, we can’t afford free public university. We can simultaneously fix the problems of the past while trying to improve things for the future.
until it’s legal Federally”?
it would be worse actually, it would be the equivalent of federally legalizing weed, but then doing nothing for all the existing weed charges and just letting them roll out their time.
The marijuana comparison is not even close to the same thing.
In terms of harm done, no. Principle? Yeah? It’s best to stop further harm, but undoing past harms as well is even better.
It’s also important for dumb choices to have consequences. The systemic racism that brought the majority of the marijuana convictions is not even close in comparison to someone who borrowed money to get a degree that was never going to make a decent income.
The assumption that you should only do things that are profitable is faulty. I don’t want to live in a world where that’s true, and if you thought about it longer you probably also don’t. Assuming you like books, art, music, culture, etc.
Except the system is so fucked that even terrible low paying jobs routinely ignore applicants without degrees.
So free University only for majors you deem worthy? Or only for profit minded disciplines? MBAs yes, but art history no?
Besides, economic desperation makes people make poor choices, and I’d wager that most people taking on debt for education don’t consider it a poor choice. Often higher education is key to economic success, but given tumultuous economic conditions in the past decades…things haven’t panned out for everyone, which makes those decisions look worse in hindsight.
You can’t claim everyone with student loan debt has it because they’re a worthless hippie art student. The increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees made it more competitive to get jobs requiring those degrees, meaning people need to get them just to compete…so people wind up shackled with debt.
It’s free to be sympathetic to people who are in a tough situation, even if they bear some responsibility for it. We all do.
Doing illegal drugs is at least as dumb a choice as getting into debt to get an education.
Well, when you say it like that, I can only believ— wait a minute. Show me the receipts. The ‘missing middle’ is real.
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.
If only people had worked more unpaid overtime, none of this would had happened.
none of this would had happened as fast
They always forget that part. Stupid executive decisions will still bring everything down.
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.
I wish Eric Shit was on this list ⚰️
Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.
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
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!
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.
That’s not really how IP works. Just because you think of something while eating a sandwich that Google paid for, that doesn’t mean they own it. Your brain is not “company resources”. The sandwich was not necessary for the brainstorm.
It’s smarter to think up good ideas away from the office, but it’s completely legal to take knowledge and experience with you when you leave the company.
Just because you think of something while eating a sandwich that Google paid for, that doesn’t mean they own it.
Ok, feel free to argue that against Google’s lawyers. The law may be on your side, but the lawyers aren’t.
In California it’s totally fine. That’s why there’s so many tech startups there. It’s not taxes.
That may be the law, but Google isn’t likely to just accept it without fighting it.
It happens all the time. Almost everyone who starts a new tech company has worked in a different one.
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
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.
You book a desk in an online tool a week in advance or so. Not sure I get the question. Maybe it’s 30% I made that number up.
I think you got it and effectively answered it, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
