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> Brynjolfsson: ”I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer. > Schmidt: Google decided that work life b

> Brynjolfsson: ”I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer. > Schmidt: 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. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is if you go found a company and compete against the other startups — like [we did] in the early days of Google — you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week.” It’s pretty cack-handed to publicly talk about your successor like that. While the WFH part of this got a lot of press I wonder if the free-wheeling side-swipe at Sundar Pichai had more to do with the cringe backpedaling. Also, the humblebrag about his medal!… he’s an investor!… he showed Sam Altman his calculations that OpenAI will need lots of electricity!… he’s an investor!… he wrote a report setting national AI policy that was “only about 752 pages long”!… he’s an investor! Schmidt has done some amazing things and his achievements will eclipse many others but I do wonder if even he feels a bit of the post-FAANG blues where one misses the glory days of ones peak, over performing and telling everyone about it to show you’ve still got it.

nextos 2y ago
Lots of great startups have remote teams so this argument by Schmidt is pretty weak. Google is hybrid, not even remote. Also, I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH. It could be the opposite. Less interruptions are key, as explained in Peopleware. But bad managers love controlling people in open plan offices. Regardless, I found it surprising Schmidt didn't talk about other stuff that differentiates startups. Smaller teams, a lot less red tape, a lot more ownership, less politics... Google should really follow Steve Jobs 2011 advice to Page about focus. Breaking down into a conglomerate was a great idea to bring focus and agility, but it has not been fully executed and lots of the different resulting entities seem dysfunctional.
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  Interestingly, re: red tape, Schmidt has been quoted from this same talk as saying if you get caught stealing IP then just “hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?”
  - quantified 2y ago
    And that doesn't clean it up, it just moves the mess off of your plate to someone else's.
- kamaal 2y ago
  >>I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH. Thats the whole problem isn't it. Years back I was involved in a project(not WFH), like everyone worked at office. But the manager/lead was sort of a totally disengaged person. He would sit in a conf room all day. And come up with some weird things about freedom to work the way people liked. There was no ticketing system, the code repo had no real commit and PR rules, no stand ups, no bug tracking, no feature backlog, nobody measuring how the project was going, and if it was even making progress. Only real visible thing about progress was a odd demo every now and then. To make things worse, there were two senior engineers who seem to make their own power structures and bully people into doing whatever they wanted. The project folded quickly enough of course. Sure if every one was motivated and organised enough, things could have been better. But most people are not. And if people aren't engaged enough they just do whatever they want, or even worse do nothing. If you are keeping lights on in a project, and have lots of old employees things do work fine with remote work. I think building things quickly, especially big things quickly, does require close 1-1 collaboration, and engagement. I don't think its too much to ask. Sometimes thats just how things work.
  - nextos 2y ago
    I agree, but Google is not even remote WFH, they are hybrid. This is ideal. You go to the office regularly to sync with people, but also make long uninterrupted bursts of focused work from your home.
- zooq_ai 2y ago
  can you name successful remote-only startups? Yes, I know gitlab, others?
  - spyke112 2y ago
    Automattic: The company behind Wordpress. https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ 37signals: The company behind Basecamp and Hey. With a founder being the Ruby on Rails creator. https://37signals.com/ https://37signals.com/
  - jemmyw 2y ago
    Aha! https://www.aha.io https://www.aha.io
  - MobiusHorizons 2y ago
    I believe tailscale is remote only. Personally remote doesn’t work for me, I feel my motivation and mental health go into a tailspin after a while, but there is no denying some companies have made it work.
  - SkyPuncher 2y ago
    I have worked for 2. Granted, they're unlikely to be massive, unicorn successes - but they are successes, none the less. My opinion is largely the era of the unicorn is essentially gone. Except for extremely rare moonshots (like OpenAI), markets just don't simply have many multi-billions of value for a disruptive startup.
tialaramex 2y ago
> you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week Huh, I guess I dreamed the first start-up I worked for (a couple of decades ago) where indeed I only came in one day a week. Yes of course you "work like hell". We had a nasty leak bug and I set things up so that day or night if the leak was detected my stereo would go maximum volume and play "Straight Outta Compton". How does commuting count as "working like hell" ? If I'm sat in a car (and once a week I often was) then I'm not working am I? I am useless for several hours each day we do that. Maybe sometimes the CTO (who is in the car, he's driving, he worked from home too) is discussing relevant technology, you know design of our secret sauce schema-less database engine, IP stuff - but then it's also possible we're discussing the album that's playing, or a video game we both enjoyed, or a novel we're both reading.
- panarky 2y ago
  People who sit in their cars an hour every morning, stressed by traffic and pollution before they even set foot in the office, who then attend back-to-back meaningless meetings and email and slack, and then get back in the goddamn car again for another hour if they're lucky, think everyone who doesn't perform this unhealthy and destructive ritual is a slacker.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - jh00ker 2y ago
    This reminds me of the Dave Barry quote: Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
    - milofeynman 2y ago
      That reminds me of https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-meetings-zoom-virtual-productivity https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-mee...
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
I took this more as Schmidt being disappointed in what Google has become. He really did build Google, its completely valid for him to be mad about the state of the company culture wise.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  But he also was the "adult in the room" that basically destroyed whatever moral core Google had as a startup. It might have the been the correct move from a business standpoint and there was no way they'd keep "don't be evil" as a compass, but Eric Schmidt was there to push it all over the edge. The company's current PR issues[0] is perfectly seeded in his contribution to the company. [0] PS: not counting the company potentially broken up a few years down the line.
- dangus 2y ago
  Or maybe mad that he wasted his life having no work-life balance and then realizing that lots of companies with work-life balance are productive and profitable. I’m ordering something from Europe where the factory is shut down for the entire month of August. I just have to wait an extra month for that item. The company still gets my money because I need the item. I also use a piece of software written by a European company. I will get no releases/patches this month. But that software company still got my money. I need/want the software. I wonder how many hustle culture US tech founders find out that a lot of Europeans just don’t work at all for a whole month and finally start questioning some of this bullshit. Clearly, not enough have come to their senses.
  - golergka 2y ago
    Not working for a whole month just sounds awful. I have a lot of hobbies outside of work, but it is still the most interesting and fulfilling part of my life. Even though I need breaks for it now and then doesn’t mean I won’t miss it. I get to spend time with wonderful people, solving interesting puzzles, building something that people love and that makes their days better. I used to work in game dev, so it brought people joy, but now I make developer tools, and it using better tools makes them love their jobs more, and makes them more effective. Some of the people who use the tools are literally doing cancer research or other very meaningful stuff. How could I get the same feeling of fulfilment from the most amazing vacation?
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Eric has a penchant for saying things he thinks before thinking about how they might be heard. He famously said, "There is no privacy, get over it. If you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about."
- dlg 2y ago
  Wasn't that Scott McNealy? (Though, if I recall your bio from previous HN posts, you'd know far better than me.)
  - benzible 2y ago
    Sure was. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
  - valleyer 2y ago
    Right, Schmidt actually said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
  - ChuckMcM 2y ago
    Just great, now I'm getting so old I'm mixing up my Sun Executives :-). You are correct. I also believe Scott said something to the effect that IT was dead although we all know how good of a prediction that was.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...
1024core 2y ago
> I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer. Correction: this statement was made by the interviewer, Erik Brynjolfsson, and not Schmidt.
- gorgoiler 2y ago
  Thank you, I’ve updated my quotes.
PostOnce 2y ago
At some point, someone is going to realize that people are not going to slave away for the privilege of living in a rental and drinking meal replacement shakes because they're too busy to eat. People who worked at Google early on were always going to get rich, people who bust ass for Google now might wake up to a 10,000 man layoff in the morning. /me shrugs
- grugagag 2y ago
  Then somebody younger will happily do it until they too have the same realization. Then another batch.
  - PostOnce 2y ago
    They're having quite a bit of trouble convincing people to work in the office again, nevermind 6 day weeks or 10 hour days. We raised a generation who learned companies have no loyalty and no consideration for their wellbeing, or the wellbeing of the society they're a part of. I don't think the next generation is always doomed to repeat the past, otherwise we'd never have invented labor laws. Life would still be as horrible as it was, but seeing as it isn't, I would say that is evidence that it can get better, and I think we're now in the process of learning to make it better.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
rodgerd 2y ago
Imagine my complete surprise that the guy in charge of Google when sex with subordinates was rampant, and who gave an exec who was sacked for sexual harassment a ninety million dollar parachute, is upset that there aren't more people in the office.
llm_trw 2y ago
Google did to AI what Bell did to magnetic recording: retarded it's progress for decades because they were afraid it would harm their main product. For those that don't know: >In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message. >Soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives. >AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone. https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-years-5691604 https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye... The same thing was true for google, with the very real threat that something like perplexity will eat their lunch by having a monthly payment and no adds. With google relegated to a second tier API endpoint. 20 years of AI advancements were used for better add targeting in gmail, and in the months after chatgpt came out, a better spell checker.

nextos 2y ago

Lots of great startups have remote teams so this argument by Schmidt is pretty weak. Google is hybrid, not even remote. Also, I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH. It could be the opposite. Less interruptions are key, as explained in Peopleware. But bad managers love controlling people in open plan offices. Regardless, I found it surprising Schmidt didn't talk about other stuff that differentiates startups. Smaller teams, a lot less red tape, a lot more ownership, less politics... Google should really follow Steve Jobs 2011 advice to Page about focus. Breaking down into a conglomerate was a great idea to bring focus and agility, but it has not been fully executed and lots of the different resulting entities seem dysfunctional.

gorgoiler 2y ago
Interestingly, re: red tape, Schmidt has been quoted from this same talk as saying if you get caught stealing IP then just “hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?”
- quantified 2y ago
  And that doesn't clean it up, it just moves the mess off of your plate to someone else's.
kamaal 2y ago
>>I don't think that well motivated and engineers work or produce less while WFH. Thats the whole problem isn't it. Years back I was involved in a project(not WFH), like everyone worked at office. But the manager/lead was sort of a totally disengaged person. He would sit in a conf room all day. And come up with some weird things about freedom to work the way people liked. There was no ticketing system, the code repo had no real commit and PR rules, no stand ups, no bug tracking, no feature backlog, nobody measuring how the project was going, and if it was even making progress. Only real visible thing about progress was a odd demo every now and then. To make things worse, there were two senior engineers who seem to make their own power structures and bully people into doing whatever they wanted. The project folded quickly enough of course. Sure if every one was motivated and organised enough, things could have been better. But most people are not. And if people aren't engaged enough they just do whatever they want, or even worse do nothing. If you are keeping lights on in a project, and have lots of old employees things do work fine with remote work. I think building things quickly, especially big things quickly, does require close 1-1 collaboration, and engagement. I don't think its too much to ask. Sometimes thats just how things work.
- nextos 2y ago
  I agree, but Google is not even remote WFH, they are hybrid. This is ideal. You go to the office regularly to sync with people, but also make long uninterrupted bursts of focused work from your home.
zooq_ai 2y ago
can you name successful remote-only startups? Yes, I know gitlab, others?
- spyke112 2y ago
  Automattic: The company behind Wordpress. https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ 37signals: The company behind Basecamp and Hey. With a founder being the Ruby on Rails creator. https://37signals.com/ https://37signals.com/
- jemmyw 2y ago
  Aha! https://www.aha.io https://www.aha.io
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago
  I believe tailscale is remote only. Personally remote doesn’t work for me, I feel my motivation and mental health go into a tailspin after a while, but there is no denying some companies have made it work.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  I have worked for 2. Granted, they're unlikely to be massive, unicorn successes - but they are successes, none the less. My opinion is largely the era of the unicorn is essentially gone. Except for extremely rare moonshots (like OpenAI), markets just don't simply have many multi-billions of value for a disruptive startup.

tialaramex 2y ago

> you're not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week Huh, I guess I dreamed the first start-up I worked for (a couple of decades ago) where indeed I only came in one day a week. Yes of course you "work like hell". We had a nasty leak bug and I set things up so that day or night if the leak was detected my stereo would go maximum volume and play "Straight Outta Compton". How does commuting count as "working like hell" ? If I'm sat in a car (and once a week I often was) then I'm not working am I? I am useless for several hours each day we do that. Maybe sometimes the CTO (who is in the car, he's driving, he worked from home too) is discussing relevant technology, you know design of our secret sauce schema-less database engine, IP stuff - but then it's also possible we're discussing the album that's playing, or a video game we both enjoyed, or a novel we're both reading.

panarky 2y ago
People who sit in their cars an hour every morning, stressed by traffic and pollution before they even set foot in the office, who then attend back-to-back meaningless meetings and email and slack, and then get back in the goddamn car again for another hour if they're lucky, think everyone who doesn't perform this unhealthy and destructive ritual is a slacker.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jh00ker 2y ago
  This reminds me of the Dave Barry quote: Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
  - milofeynman 2y ago
    That reminds me of https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-meetings-zoom-virtual-productivity https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-mee...

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago

I took this more as Schmidt being disappointed in what Google has become. He really did build Google, its completely valid for him to be mad about the state of the company culture wise.

makeitdouble 2y ago
But he also was the "adult in the room" that basically destroyed whatever moral core Google had as a startup. It might have the been the correct move from a business standpoint and there was no way they'd keep "don't be evil" as a compass, but Eric Schmidt was there to push it all over the edge. The company's current PR issues[0] is perfectly seeded in his contribution to the company. [0] PS: not counting the company potentially broken up a few years down the line.
dangus 2y ago
Or maybe mad that he wasted his life having no work-life balance and then realizing that lots of companies with work-life balance are productive and profitable. I’m ordering something from Europe where the factory is shut down for the entire month of August. I just have to wait an extra month for that item. The company still gets my money because I need the item. I also use a piece of software written by a European company. I will get no releases/patches this month. But that software company still got my money. I need/want the software. I wonder how many hustle culture US tech founders find out that a lot of Europeans just don’t work at all for a whole month and finally start questioning some of this bullshit. Clearly, not enough have come to their senses.
- golergka 2y ago
  Not working for a whole month just sounds awful. I have a lot of hobbies outside of work, but it is still the most interesting and fulfilling part of my life. Even though I need breaks for it now and then doesn’t mean I won’t miss it. I get to spend time with wonderful people, solving interesting puzzles, building something that people love and that makes their days better. I used to work in game dev, so it brought people joy, but now I make developer tools, and it using better tools makes them love their jobs more, and makes them more effective. Some of the people who use the tools are literally doing cancer research or other very meaningful stuff. How could I get the same feeling of fulfilment from the most amazing vacation?

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Eric has a penchant for saying things he thinks before thinking about how they might be heard. He famously said, "There is no privacy, get over it. If you're not doing anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about."

dlg 2y ago
Wasn't that Scott McNealy? (Though, if I recall your bio from previous HN posts, you'd know far better than me.)
- benzible 2y ago
  Sure was. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/ https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
- valleyer 2y ago
  Right, Schmidt actually said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  Just great, now I'm getting so old I'm mixing up my Sun Executives :-). You are correct. I also believe Scott said something to the effect that IT was dead although we all know how good of a prediction that was.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution...

1024core 2y ago

> I asked Sundar [about Google losing the initiative]. He didn't really give me a very sharp answer. Correction: this statement was made by the interviewer, Erik Brynjolfsson, and not Schmidt.

gorgoiler 2y ago
Thank you, I’ve updated my quotes.

PostOnce 2y ago

At some point, someone is going to realize that people are not going to slave away for the privilege of living in a rental and drinking meal replacement shakes because they're too busy to eat. People who worked at Google early on were always going to get rich, people who bust ass for Google now might wake up to a 10,000 man layoff in the morning. /me shrugs

grugagag 2y ago
Then somebody younger will happily do it until they too have the same realization. Then another batch.
- PostOnce 2y ago
  They're having quite a bit of trouble convincing people to work in the office again, nevermind 6 day weeks or 10 hour days. We raised a generation who learned companies have no loyalty and no consideration for their wellbeing, or the wellbeing of the society they're a part of. I don't think the next generation is always doomed to repeat the past, otherwise we'd never have invented labor laws. Life would still be as horrible as it was, but seeing as it isn't, I would say that is evidence that it can get better, and I think we're now in the process of learning to make it better.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

rodgerd 2y ago

Imagine my complete surprise that the guy in charge of Google when sex with subordinates was rampant, and who gave an exec who was sacked for sexual harassment a ninety million dollar parachute, is upset that there aren't more people in the office.

llm_trw 2y ago

Google did to AI what Bell did to magnetic recording: retarded it's progress for decades because they were afraid it would harm their main product. For those that don't know: >In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message. >Soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives. >AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone. https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-years-5691604 https://gizmodo.com/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-ye... The same thing was true for google, with the very real threat that something like perplexity will eat their lunch by having a monthly payment and no adds. With google relegated to a second tier API endpoint. 20 years of AI advancements were used for better add targeting in gmail, and in the months after chatgpt came out, a better spell checker.