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Former Google CEO blames remote work for company's struggles

60 points by uladzislau 2y ago

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
So anyways, in reality.... us remote workers blame billionaire CEOs for the economy's struggles..
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  How tiny a violin does it take to play a sad enough song to accompany such an oversized "struggle", as Google toils to just barely make a dollar or two? Who knows, if they can't come up with anything brilliant that sticks to go along with search, they could always try turning it from a search company that has a few ads, into an ad company that's not so big in search. lol. Just to see how it goes, with that much money and no acumen at all a regular company would have no trouble affording things that no other could dream of, without having to lay off anybody. Sometimes a scapegoat is pointed at and blamed for an untoward chain of events, other times blamed for a lack of miracles occurring.
scblock 2y ago
Bullshit.
austin-cheney 2y ago
The most brilliant thing about remote work is that you can remain constantly productive without deviating from the subject matter of employment. 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. What makes working from home different? Personal equipment by personal learning not restricted by employer policies.
- Inityx 2y ago
  > Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. You must not have been working for Amazon then.
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  > Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. This blows my mind. I don't know if I've ever been so surprised at an HN comment. The last time this happened to me was during a college internship where my role was fairly well boxed, and that was 30 years ago. There's always something to do to make the product better. I've never been in a situation where the backlog doesn't grow faster than it is dispatched. I've never been in a situation where assigning "P3" to an issue didn't essentially mean saying "never", because P0, P1 & P2 consume all available resources. (Not quite true because you always opportunistically deal with P3's when they overlap with higher priority issues). Is this a big company thing? I've only spent a few months working at one of those.
  - austin-cheney 2y ago
    > Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability. From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity. In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.
  - austin-cheney 2y ago
    So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity? This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work. So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room. That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process. But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle. To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort. Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.
npalli 2y ago
Nothing can be said publicly.
- ggm 2y ago
  ... said nobody, who actually does this work, ever. Look, it's an opinion, ok? You think this. There's zero evidence either way, that only f2f constant labour will solve ai problems, or any other kind of problems. It's hard to weld a ship from home. All intellectual labour can be conducted anywhere a mind is. Better or worse is subjective.
- smt88 2y ago
  > Important frontier and game changing work like AI can be done only in person Doesn't seem to have stopped university researchers, who often collaborate across continents and time zones to do groundbreaking work. Also doesn't seem to be stopping the FOSS community in a lot of different fields, including Gen AI.
Terr_ 2y ago
> “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] Hold up, so stuff like WFH policies are to blame for the company losing its edge and not being head-to-head with "other startups"? 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! [0] Bonus video context for quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s
- kvemkon 2y ago
  > Bonus video Now, only few hours later: > This is a private video.
  - lancesells 2y ago
    I don't care what Schmidt's opinions are but at least stand by your comments. Stanford you're just as bad.
paxys 2y ago
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. Poor leaders will blame everything but their own failures. When was the last time Google had a coherent product vision?
- 1-6 2y ago
  You can have unlimited PTO or flexible in-office hours but you can’t have both.
  - benterix 2y ago
    And the reason for this is...?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - randomdata 2y ago
      Presumably he is speaking in terms of policy. Flexible in-office hours is a subset of unlimited PTO. Where there is unlimited PTO there is also flexible in-office hours by virtue, so, yes, technically you can have both. If you have unlimited PTO you can't not have flexible in-office hours. However, if there is a flexible in-office hours policy in force, that does mean you can't have unlimited PTO. The additional restrictions placed on flexible in-office hours – those which narrow it to being a subset of unlimited PTO – would violate the grander unlimited PTO. If an organization claims to have both a flexible in-office hours and unlimited PTO policy, there is a contradiction. While you can pretend to have both, you don't really have both. One ultimately has to supersede the other.
  - cosmotic 2y ago
    Why not?
- microtherion 2y ago
toomuchtodo 2y ago
Lucky old retired executive shares opinion and makes excuses for poor management without evidence in the pursuit of relevance. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
microtherion 2y ago
Meanwhile, Anthropic is hiring engineers with a WfH policy and a "4 day workweek": https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-claude-ai-anthropic-799921 https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-cl... And Tesla's record of innovation has not been particularly stellar in recent years.
- dtquad 2y ago
  For companies like Anthropic and OpenAI the "software engineer" role is of secondary importance and they extensively use remote engineers for full stack and frontend development. However their strategically important AI researchers and engineers are in the office.
- nebula8804 2y ago
  >And Tesla's record of innovation has not been particularly stellar in recent years. What makes you say that? The teardown of the CyberTruck is showing an unbelievable amount of innovation and risk taking. The final product might suck but thats not the employees fault, its the guy at the top. That organization continues to perform excellent R&D.
  - microtherion 2y ago
    As you seem to agree, the final product seems rather questionable, with incredibly poor reliability and build quality for a $100+K car. The innovation and risk taking mainly seems to consist of cutting corners at the expense of the customer experience. Meanwhile, the other models are fairly stagnant. At least the "D" part of their R&D seems to be wanting. And for all the hyperbole from the leadership, the "R" is not all that great either. The supposedly "self driving" car cannot even reliably get its windshield wipers to work automatically, it's not particularly good at parking itself, and it seems to be not much closer to autonomous driving (which was supposed to have been achieved in 2017) than 8 years ago. Meanwhile, competitors have released products with actual, if severely geofenced, autonomy. And the robot seems to be pure demoware.
    - nebula8804 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kentich 2y ago
[flagged]
- strongpigeon 2y ago
  You seem to be pushing this on every comments you make. Could you not?
  - manuelmoreale 2y ago
    He made the app and probably thinks that spamming it everywhere is a good marketing strategy. I think it’s a terribile plan but who am I to judge.
  - kentich 2y ago
    No, not on every comment, only when I see a relevant story. By the way, feel free to read this blog post of mine explaining why the virtual frosted glass is a creative solution to the out-of-mind, out-of-sight problem that plagues remote work and causes CEOs to talk like in this story: https://open.substack.com/pub/meetingglass/p/how-virtual-frosted-glass-can-fix?r=39w9l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/meetingglass/p/how-virtual-fro...
    - dang 2y ago
      I agree that it hasn't been on every comment because I found these two, and only these two, that weren't somehow connected to promoting your own stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41243157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41243157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768166 The other 98% or so of your posts have been promotional in some way. This is far over the line at which we ban accounts on HN. I'm not going to ban your account right now, but your self-posts shouldn't be even close to 50% of what you're doing here, so please reduce that drastically going forward. In fact it would be best if you'd drop that altogether and simply use HN for intellectual curiosity, which is how it's intended. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
halfcat 2y ago
Friction and velocity is what’s important. 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. 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. 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. I sometimes wonder if that’s the whole reason some startups get acquired, just because you’re getting employees who are ambitious.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  But after the acquhire gets a bazillion dollars, suddenly their ambitions are directed differently than working for the man...
- otteromkram 2y ago
  If you're bottleneck involves waiting on five people to approve something all at once, then that sounds like a project management problem. That also assumes that your 17 second hallway traversal results in all five employees being in the same ares and not off doing other projects or in meetings. > There’s a limited supply of ambitious, talented people, and you need this group. Yikes. Well, if that's the case and those people are so in-demand, guess where they'll want to work? (Hint: Wherever they wsnt.) The people bending over and coming into an office? They have no other option.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >That also assumes that your 17 second hallway traversal results in all five employees being in the same ares and not off doing other projects or in meetings. Or at the coffee machine at the other side of the building, or in the bathroom, or wandering around the building looking for an open bathroom because the one near their desk is overcrowded...
synicalx 2y ago
> Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning 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".
more_corn 2y ago
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.
- chongli 2y ago
  Google search is getting disrupted by ChatGPT. High school kids don’t even bother using Google to look things up. They just ask the LLM. To them, it’s a personal tutor that can explain any topic. They love it! Google on the other hand is just more work for them: a chore they need to go through to get links and citations to make their teachers happy. Google never built ChatGPT because they knew it would cannibalize search. So they let OpenAI build it instead. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma.
mgarfias 2y ago
Schmidt can go kick a rock
milankragujevic 2y ago
Everything just not to blame management and bad company pratice around product development.
tivert 2y ago
Eric Schmidt is right: WFH has been a moral disaster. The absolute, most important thing in the world 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. Good people are in-office and 100% engaged at delivering value to the company. Anything less is violence.
- badestrand 2y ago
  Well, there are real drawbacks to remote work. It hinders creativity and practically limits exchange between workers. Whether it's still worth it for the company or whether they can mitigate the downsites is another question but there definitely are downsites.
  - benterix 2y ago
    As someone who has been working remotely for a worldwide organization even before the pandemic, I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > It hinders creativity and practically limits exchange between workers. Exactly! Those things are essential to delivering the most value to the company and ultimately to its shareholders, and there's nothing in the world more important than that. Those pompous, selfish, self-important WFH workers need to understand that.
  - blindriver 2y ago
    I personally hated working for a remote-first company. I was paralyzed because my coworkers were never online and then they would only pop in to reply briefly to my questions or requests and then disappear again. It was extremely isolating as well never leaving my house, and I was glad to go to a company with actual offices. Separating work life from home life was something I didn't think I needed, but over the long term it really does affect you.
    - 2y ago
thefz 2y ago
I want to know how much time does he spend in an office, let alone a cubicle or in an open space.
rlupi 2y ago
I think cutting out all but "business-critical" travel has done far more damage to innovation than any WFH disconnect. 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.
- piva00 2y ago
  It's the McNamara fallacy all over again. There are some practices workers know will help to deliver better/faster, those are really hard to quantify and get approval from the management chain, so they are disregarded because are hard to quantify, if it can be quantified it's deemed unnecessary.
nomilk 2y ago
Video interview the article is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA Key quotes: > Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. > 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. Timestamp of quotes (10m 24s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s
hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
I'm disappointed he didn't blame the hardware architecture, undocumented migration (of people), or helicopter parents. /s
28304283409234 2y ago
"And the startups, the reason startups work is the people work like hell.” And who wants to live in hell?
- disqard 2y ago
  The overlords want their minions to. Eric's views, Jack Ma's (in)famous "996" exhortation, are all part of the same pattern.
JamesLeonis 2y ago
I am, once again [0], asking for evidence. 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] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... [2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Resigns-from-Apples-Board-of-Directors/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Res...
KT8D5 2y ago
Interesting that all other companies also had remote work, but are doing better than google. I wonder where the problem could be?
thefujin 2y ago
He’s not attributing it only to remote work, but to the way G handles work life balance in general

60 points by uladzislau 2y ago

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago

So anyways, in reality.... us remote workers blame billionaire CEOs for the economy's struggles..

fuzzfactor 2y ago
How tiny a violin does it take to play a sad enough song to accompany such an oversized "struggle", as Google toils to just barely make a dollar or two? Who knows, if they can't come up with anything brilliant that sticks to go along with search, they could always try turning it from a search company that has a few ads, into an ad company that's not so big in search. lol. Just to see how it goes, with that much money and no acumen at all a regular company would have no trouble affording things that no other could dream of, without having to lay off anybody. Sometimes a scapegoat is pointed at and blamed for an untoward chain of events, other times blamed for a lack of miracles occurring.

scblock 2y ago

Bullshit.

austin-cheney 2y ago

The most brilliant thing about remote work is that you can remain constantly productive without deviating from the subject matter of employment. 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. What makes working from home different? Personal equipment by personal learning not restricted by employer policies.

Inityx 2y ago
> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. You must not have been working for Amazon then.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> Never have I, in my development career, been so overloaded with assignments as to be continuously engaged with actual work. This blows my mind. I don't know if I've ever been so surprised at an HN comment. The last time this happened to me was during a college internship where my role was fairly well boxed, and that was 30 years ago. There's always something to do to make the product better. I've never been in a situation where the backlog doesn't grow faster than it is dispatched. I've never been in a situation where assigning "P3" to an issue didn't essentially mean saying "never", because P0, P1 & P2 consume all available resources. (Not quite true because you always opportunistically deal with P3's when they overlap with higher priority issues). Is this a big company thing? I've only spent a few months working at one of those.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  > Is this a big company thing? Yes, kind of. There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability. From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity. In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity? This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work. So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room. That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process. But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle. To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort. Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.

npalli 2y ago

Nothing can be said publicly.

ggm 2y ago
... said nobody, who actually does this work, ever. Look, it's an opinion, ok? You think this. There's zero evidence either way, that only f2f constant labour will solve ai problems, or any other kind of problems. It's hard to weld a ship from home. All intellectual labour can be conducted anywhere a mind is. Better or worse is subjective.
smt88 2y ago
> Important frontier and game changing work like AI can be done only in person Doesn't seem to have stopped university researchers, who often collaborate across continents and time zones to do groundbreaking work. Also doesn't seem to be stopping the FOSS community in a lot of different fields, including Gen AI.

Terr_ 2y ago

> “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] Hold up, so stuff like WFH policies are to blame for the company losing its edge and not being head-to-head with "other startups"? 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! [0] Bonus video context for quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s

kvemkon 2y ago
> Bonus video Now, only few hours later: > This is a private video.
- lancesells 2y ago
  I don't care what Schmidt's opinions are but at least stand by your comments. Stanford you're just as bad.

paxys 2y ago

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. Poor leaders will blame everything but their own failures. When was the last time Google had a coherent product vision?

1-6 2y ago
You can have unlimited PTO or flexible in-office hours but you can’t have both.
- benterix 2y ago
  And the reason for this is...?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Presumably he is speaking in terms of policy. Flexible in-office hours is a subset of unlimited PTO. Where there is unlimited PTO there is also flexible in-office hours by virtue, so, yes, technically you can have both. If you have unlimited PTO you can't not have flexible in-office hours. However, if there is a flexible in-office hours policy in force, that does mean you can't have unlimited PTO. The additional restrictions placed on flexible in-office hours – those which narrow it to being a subset of unlimited PTO – would violate the grander unlimited PTO. If an organization claims to have both a flexible in-office hours and unlimited PTO policy, there is a contradiction. While you can pretend to have both, you don't really have both. One ultimately has to supersede the other.
- cosmotic 2y ago
  Why not?
microtherion 2y ago

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Lucky old retired executive shares opinion and makes excuses for poor management without evidence in the pursuit of relevance. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

microtherion 2y ago

Meanwhile, Anthropic is hiring engineers with a WfH policy and a "4 day workweek": https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-claude-ai-anthropic-799921 https://remoteok.com/remote-jobs/remote-software-engineer-cl... And Tesla's record of innovation has not been particularly stellar in recent years.

dtquad 2y ago
For companies like Anthropic and OpenAI the "software engineer" role is of secondary importance and they extensively use remote engineers for full stack and frontend development. However their strategically important AI researchers and engineers are in the office.
nebula8804 2y ago
>And Tesla's record of innovation has not been particularly stellar in recent years. What makes you say that? The teardown of the CyberTruck is showing an unbelievable amount of innovation and risk taking. The final product might suck but thats not the employees fault, its the guy at the top. That organization continues to perform excellent R&D.
- microtherion 2y ago
  As you seem to agree, the final product seems rather questionable, with incredibly poor reliability and build quality for a $100+K car. The innovation and risk taking mainly seems to consist of cutting corners at the expense of the customer experience. Meanwhile, the other models are fairly stagnant. At least the "D" part of their R&D seems to be wanting. And for all the hyperbole from the leadership, the "R" is not all that great either. The supposedly "self driving" car cannot even reliably get its windshield wipers to work automatically, it's not particularly good at parking itself, and it seems to be not much closer to autonomous driving (which was supposed to have been achieved in 2017) than 8 years ago. Meanwhile, competitors have released products with actual, if severely geofenced, autonomy. And the robot seems to be pure demoware.
  - nebula8804 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kentich 2y ago

[flagged]

strongpigeon 2y ago
You seem to be pushing this on every comments you make. Could you not?
- manuelmoreale 2y ago
  He made the app and probably thinks that spamming it everywhere is a good marketing strategy. I think it’s a terribile plan but who am I to judge.
- kentich 2y ago
  No, not on every comment, only when I see a relevant story. By the way, feel free to read this blog post of mine explaining why the virtual frosted glass is a creative solution to the out-of-mind, out-of-sight problem that plagues remote work and causes CEOs to talk like in this story: https://open.substack.com/pub/meetingglass/p/how-virtual-frosted-glass-can-fix?r=39w9l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://open.substack.com/pub/meetingglass/p/how-virtual-fro...
  - dang 2y ago
    I agree that it hasn't been on every comment because I found these two, and only these two, that weren't somehow connected to promoting your own stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41243157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41243157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768166 The other 98% or so of your posts have been promotional in some way. This is far over the line at which we ban accounts on HN. I'm not going to ban your account right now, but your self-posts shouldn't be even close to 50% of what you're doing here, so please reduce that drastically going forward. In fact it would be best if you'd drop that altogether and simply use HN for intellectual curiosity, which is how it's intended. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

halfcat 2y ago

Friction and velocity is what’s important. 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. 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. 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. I sometimes wonder if that’s the whole reason some startups get acquired, just because you’re getting employees who are ambitious.

readthenotes1 2y ago
But after the acquhire gets a bazillion dollars, suddenly their ambitions are directed differently than working for the man...
otteromkram 2y ago
If you're bottleneck involves waiting on five people to approve something all at once, then that sounds like a project management problem. That also assumes that your 17 second hallway traversal results in all five employees being in the same ares and not off doing other projects or in meetings. > There’s a limited supply of ambitious, talented people, and you need this group. Yikes. Well, if that's the case and those people are so in-demand, guess where they'll want to work? (Hint: Wherever they wsnt.) The people bending over and coming into an office? They have no other option.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >That also assumes that your 17 second hallway traversal results in all five employees being in the same ares and not off doing other projects or in meetings. Or at the coffee machine at the other side of the building, or in the bathroom, or wandering around the building looking for an open bathroom because the one near their desk is overcrowded...

synicalx 2y ago

> Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning 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".

more_corn 2y ago

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.

chongli 2y ago
Google search is getting disrupted by ChatGPT. High school kids don’t even bother using Google to look things up. They just ask the LLM. To them, it’s a personal tutor that can explain any topic. They love it! Google on the other hand is just more work for them: a chore they need to go through to get links and citations to make their teachers happy. Google never built ChatGPT because they knew it would cannibalize search. So they let OpenAI build it instead. It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma.

mgarfias 2y ago

Schmidt can go kick a rock

milankragujevic 2y ago

Everything just not to blame management and bad company pratice around product development.

tivert 2y ago

Eric Schmidt is right: WFH has been a moral disaster. The absolute, most important thing in the world 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. Good people are in-office and 100% engaged at delivering value to the company. Anything less is violence.

badestrand 2y ago
Well, there are real drawbacks to remote work. It hinders creativity and practically limits exchange between workers. Whether it's still worth it for the company or whether they can mitigate the downsites is another question but there definitely are downsites.
- benterix 2y ago
  As someone who has been working remotely for a worldwide organization even before the pandemic, I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement.
- tivert 2y ago
  > It hinders creativity and practically limits exchange between workers. Exactly! Those things are essential to delivering the most value to the company and ultimately to its shareholders, and there's nothing in the world more important than that. Those pompous, selfish, self-important WFH workers need to understand that.
- blindriver 2y ago
  I personally hated working for a remote-first company. I was paralyzed because my coworkers were never online and then they would only pop in to reply briefly to my questions or requests and then disappear again. It was extremely isolating as well never leaving my house, and I was glad to go to a company with actual offices. Separating work life from home life was something I didn't think I needed, but over the long term it really does affect you.
  - 2y ago

thefz 2y ago

I want to know how much time does he spend in an office, let alone a cubicle or in an open space.

rlupi 2y ago

I think cutting out all but "business-critical" travel has done far more damage to innovation than any WFH disconnect. 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.

piva00 2y ago
It's the McNamara fallacy all over again. There are some practices workers know will help to deliver better/faster, those are really hard to quantify and get approval from the management chain, so they are disregarded because are hard to quantify, if it can be quantified it's deemed unnecessary.

nomilk 2y ago

Video interview the article is based on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA Key quotes: > Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. > 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. Timestamp of quotes (10m 24s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m24s

hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago

I'm disappointed he didn't blame the hardware architecture, undocumented migration (of people), or helicopter parents. /s

28304283409234 2y ago

"And the startups, the reason startups work is the people work like hell.” And who wants to live in hell?

disqard 2y ago
The overlords want their minions to. Eric's views, Jack Ma's (in)famous "996" exhortation, are all part of the same pattern.

JamesLeonis 2y ago

I am, once again [0], asking for evidence. 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] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434455 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... [2]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Resigns-from-Apples-Board-of-Directors/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2009/08/03Dr-Eric-Schmidt-Res...

KT8D5 2y ago

Interesting that all other companies also had remote work, but are doing better than google. I wonder where the problem could be?

thefujin 2y ago

He’s not attributing it only to remote work, but to the way G handles work life balance in general