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.
If he has time to complain about other people, then he is probably not essential to the operation. Maybe he should be fired instead.
Work/life balance, going home early, and working from home is winning.
Cunt
Fucking billionaire luck babies telling others they need to work harder. Such a piece of shit.
He retired? This fuck better not get an appointment in the next administration.
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.
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.
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
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.
Personally I don’t like student loan forgiveness because I think a free public university system is a better investment.
I don’t know man, it looks like the lack of focus started well before 2020.
Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.
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.
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.
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?
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.
