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.
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
¿Por qué no los dos?
I too prefer free tertiary education. But that also does not relieve the millions saddled with predatory loans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
