Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI - And Remote Work Is Why (msn.com) 113
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, said his former company is losing the AI race and remote work is to blame. From a report: "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said at a talk at Stanford University. "The reason startups work is because the people work like hell." Schmidt made the comments earlier at a wide-ranging discussion at Stanford. His remarks about Google's remote-work policies were in response to a question about Google competing with OpenAI.
No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
Google laid off everyone that actually mattered. Nobody is left.
What a moron. Google is going to die a spectacular death and it is going to be hilarious. They aren't too big to fail.
Re:No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Please don't give me hope.
Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:2)
Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:4, Insightful)
2019, Google in Mountain View was an active place from 9AM to 6:30PM. I regularly had diner with coworkers after wrapping up. My department had very high voluntary RTO before the badge tracking and this largely returned. The layoffs killed this goose. In the last 20 months I have learned that staying late, putting 100% effort, and competence and necessity is not protection from being laid off. The entire company learned this and it's why buildings start clearing out by 5PM and it's a ghost down at 7PM. We went from having employees present for over 9 hours to closer to 8 and most of us have adopted a 'look after yourself' policy. 15% reduction in daily work + 15% reduction in workforce adds up to a large output drop and this is before considering the efficiency aspect.
Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:2)
Re:No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Have some pity for the poor man, he only has around 22 billion USD in assets - he clearly needs to make Google spank their workers a little harder to get those stocks up!
Re:No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
And he became an ex-pat to save that stash, this after screwing up at Sun, then Novell, then robbing the world of its privacy values-- where that stash was made.
Sadly, he's right about the AI failure, but is wrong about the reason. The cash cow is dying. There are no new cash cows, save the ill-monetized YouTube, and the total mess of Google Cloud.
Brilliant minds have gone elsewhere, as cited elsewhere.
It's not WFH that is killing Google, It's their wicked cash cow, now mooing its last moos, and the management like Eric that had no vision, just the need for greed.
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It's not WFH that is killing Google, It's their wicked cash cow, now mooing its last moos, and the management like Eric that had no vision, just the need for greed.
Their cash cow is dying because they have been killing it a little at a time. They fed it shit and act surprised the milk tastes bad.
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Their cash cow is dying
Here's Google's profit by year [macrotrends.net].
The cash cow is alive and well.
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Here's Google's profit by year [macrotrends.net].
The cash cow is alive and well.
Than doesn't mean anything. When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, half of all smartphones sold in the world were Nokias. Their downfall [statista.com] was pretty quick after that.
If your mojo is gone, good luck in maintaining your lead...
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How ironic. AI requires human slaves to come into existence.
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Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:2)
Re: No, you fired everyone you idiot (Score:2)
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I'm personally glad the founder can't understand what went wrong. It was the same with Bill Gates - he puzzles over why they lost the mobile market, even though that was also breathtakingly simple. Time to move over and let someone else enjoy some time in the sun.
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With you to the last statement. Now you got me worried. The whitehouse visitors log from 2012-2016 show hundreds of visits by google. You can bet your ass they are in bed with our alphabet agencies. Which means we may see them declared too big to fail. Fuck. Spying on its own citizens is full time job for the government nowadays.
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Well, the parent company is called "Alphabet", after all...
(Not entirely joking.)
Yeah ok, "Eric" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the guy that was "parental supervision" while Google was "growing up".
Given how Google turned out and acts these days, he was clearing a shitty "parent".
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He appears to also have tuned out the constant layoffs google has been doing and it's continued shift to moving its workforce to India, a country that is 12 hours out of phase with the continental US and is essentially impossible to work with during typical in-office hours anywhere in the US.
But sure, people don't want to work any more, thigns were better in the old days, etc. etc.
Get Off My Lawn!! (Score:3)
And the reason they work like hell (Score:5, Insightful)
...is because there's a chance, however distant, of striking it rich.
That's no longer possible at a large company, you are just paying employees.
You could simulate start-up culture by breaking up the company and have the parts compete with each other - like we wanted to do with Microsoft before GW Bush undid their monopolist conviction. All you want is the economic benefits of being a purchased monopoly, hugely comfortable.... AND for your employees to be racing themselves like Death is an inch behind them.
Honestly, sir, you are awful.
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The Sad World of Tech Bros (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it sad how google went from an exciting new place in 2007-2008 to a dystopian meat grinder in less than 20 years?
Why would anyone ever want to work there now?
We see this pattern over and over. A young startup has a new idea, and it's actually good. Users flock to the product or service. Eventually, this dries up. Instead of coming to terms with the fact that the early bird got the worm, and now you're in a different landscape (with lots of birds), tech companies think it's the fault of the employees who just aren't working hard anymore.
News flash.
They are working at the same pace they always were, but now the stress of eking out a few fractions of a percent on retention is becoming unbearable because their bosses can't seem to figure out that the easy money is gone now.
Why is it that these people can never adjust their expectations?
Re:The Sad World of Tech Bros (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that these people can never adjust their expectations?
I assume because they want to impress shareholders. Good product or not, shareholders just want the value of their investments to increase. It's a pretty terrible system.
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Not only this, shareholders expect phenomenal growth.
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When your stock is being traded publicly, you're leashed to shareholders.
Not a single company out there that is publicly traded is above being craptastic in some way. There are no good guys on Wall street. Not on the floor and not on the screens.
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Isn't it sad how google went from an exciting new place in 2007-2008 to a dystopian meat grinder in less than 20 years?
According to Schmidt, Google is a place that pays employees huge salaries, gives them great perks and benefits and doesn't make them work. Is that a "dystopian meat grinder"?
I don't think either of those characterizations is accurate but they're clearly incompatible.
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According to Schmidt, Google is a place that pays employees huge salaries, gives them great perks and benefits and doesn't make them work.
WFH has become the perkiest of perks.
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Are you confused that my opinion about what Schmidt said is not the same thing as Schmidt's opinion? So weird.
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Are you confused that my opinion about what Schmidt said is not the same thing as Schmidt's opinion? So weird.
You didn't express an opinion about Schmidt's opinion, you expressed an opinion opposite to Schmidt's opinion, but apparently (based on context and the fact that you didn't call out any disagreement with Schmidt) in support of Schmidt's opinion.
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I think the context of my comment flew over the cuckoo's nest.
umm (Score:5, Insightful)
"The reason startups work is because the people work like hell."
82% of startups fail....
Re: umm (Score:2)
look at the top not the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is any single thing you can consistently say about Google for the last decade it's that they are aimless - starting and killing new products on a whim and mostly pursing change for the sake of change rather than any value add (The debacle with messaging apps is a good example of all 3). If I worked for that company I'd slack off, in person or remote, because I would know nothing I would do would matter. Indeed, if I was forced to work in the office at such a place, I'd be all the more eager to look for somewhere else more motivating to work, so if anything "return to work" would be likely to hurt the company than help. Assuming I'm actually a useful contributor ;-)
Re:look at the top not the bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
They start and kill projects so fast that it has hurt their ability to actually make new projects. They will make project X, claim this time they won't just kill it, that you should adopt it and a year maybe two later it is dead. At this point I am better off with Microsoft. Their stuff is more likely to be supported long term such that by the time I finish building my project the tools will still be supported.
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Silverlight was pretty much a nonstarter, so I shed no tears on that, and I don't for one recall that many other people complaining either. I rate that as a good business decision.
VB, for all of it's haters, filled a niche and was somewhat unique and it's pretty surprising they treated it so badly. That said, they would claim that they didn't kill it (vb6) but rather modernized it (vb.net). In my mind mismanagement is different from active antipathy. Did they finally kill VB.net? given how unpopular that di
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I think they have always been aimless. It just has become more obvious. Once they had ads powered via search and email, that was it and they stopped acting strategic. Android was an accident, they clearly would have killed it by now if they dared.
Without slave labor - can't achieve much (Score:1)
Eric Schmidt trying to recruit new employees...t
Re: Without slave labor - can't achieve much (Score:2)
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I wonder why made man billionaires like Dr Schmidt always want everybody else to work harder?
It is the only thing they have. They basically failed at life.
Re:Without slave labor - can't achieve much (Score:5, Interesting)
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” https://www.msn.com/en-us/mone... [msn.com] Eric Schmidt trying to recruit new employees...t
There guys have no clue. During the work from home era I worked all sorts of hours. During "come to the office or else" times, I tend to work while in the office, then fuck-off the rest of the day and do what I need to do for myself. I know some work less when WFH, but tech folks, programmers, etc, have the ability to work as much as they want when you let them take the work home. If they have an incentive to work, they'll work. If they get constant morale beatings when they work harder, they don't. I know C suites think that morale beatings are good for employees, but it turns out that employees are, hang on C suites, humans. And humans need a little tiny bit of motivation to work beyond just a paycheck. And no, fucksticks, company T-shirts and mugs is *NOT* incentive. It's just more reminders of what a shit-head you work for.
Startups vs. well established companies (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a general vibe to a startup, people work hard, but also tend to be given stock options or SOMETHING as extra compensation, with the idea that, "if we all work hard and the company manages to go public, all those stock options will potentially make you millions. So, the idea is, "work hard, and you will be compensated if you stick around and we go public". Then, you get into the corporate mindset, work hard, and...you get very little recognition, no chance to move up(unless you are friends with an executive), and no matter what you do, you just get taken advantage of.
Companies with GOOD management can escape that trap, but for the most part, these corporations have people with a business degree running things, and they take the employees for granted.
Re:Startups vs. well established companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Came here to same something like that. People choose to go work for a startup because they hope to get very rich, and they are ready to work hard for that to happen. Other people choose to work for a large corporate because they want a comfortable 9-5 job. Google can't have it back as a startup, it's not remote work that makes that, it's the different population, age class, career expectations of people who choose to work for corporate vs. startups.
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This is where GOOD management could make a difference, if these people with an ivy league MBA would be pushed out of the way. Good management can give stock rewards to employees in different groups or divisions that are doing good work, but in the majority of corporations they don't do that. Picture working for a company where yea, you may have special projects that require a fair amount of overtime, but when those projects are completed, the employees are given stock options. That's a fair encouragem
I'm going to venture a guess. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm gonna venture a guess -- Schmidt has tons of office real-estate making a giant sucking sound in his wallet right now?
Boo, hoo, hoo. Cry me a river. No sympathy.
Full support for remote work. Full disdain for the old "chain your workers to the desk" mentality.
I know I suffered 20 years in that kind of environment, and it isn't conducive to well-being.
1 startuper is worth thousands of googlers? (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenAI employees: 1,500
Google employees: 180,000
(According to Wikipedia)
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's somewhat possible the root cause here is something other than one of those groups working sensible hours and the other killing themselves with overtime.
Re:1 startuper is worth thousands of googlers? (Score:4)
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's somewhat possible the root cause here is something other than one of those groups working sensible hours and the other killing themselves with overtime.
He built the culture [slashdot.org] that demands workers to be chained to their (non-home) office desks, else his portfolio won't hold, which will make him cry out in agony in his "speeches".
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OpenAI employees: 1,500 Google employees: 180,000 (According to Wikipedia)
Call me crazy, but it seems to me that it's somewhat possible the root cause here is something other than one of those groups working sensible hours and the other killing themselves with overtime.
Well... Google does do one or two things other than AI.
Why stop there? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not keep people at the office 100% of the time?
Seriously, though, if you think remote work is a problem, then you're probably just not doing it right.
He wasn't in his office (Score:3)
Schmidt made the comments earlier at a wide-ranging discussion at Stanford.
Hey Eric, get back to your fucking office instead blowing hot air at Stanford. Is this a side gig because I doubt he showed up to speak for free.
Eric Schmidt has a point (Score:5, Insightful)
His point is that he sucks at performance managing employees and that they only way he can tell if someone is working is if they attend a specific building.
It's probably not the message he intended to share, but that's the message that came across.
AI Startups (Score:4)
Every AI startup I've seen lets high-talent people work remote all they want.
Eric Schmidt is a liar or a brainlet
When I work like hell, I do it at home (Score:4)
Since I work 100% from home at an all-remote small software business, I'm kinda scratching my head here. Offices are nice and all, but I need my afternoon nap and I need to work late to get all my work done. When I worked at an office, I was the last person to leave and rested at 2PM on the concrete of a top-floor stairwell.
I built a SNES emulator in high school, then built the open-source MilliKeys keyboard for PalmPilot while earning my degree, and then I designed and built an optimized GPS/map/turn-by-turn-directions system from scratch (for a 400MHz machine with 16MB RAM, with antialiased graphics + super fast routing) and started Loyc.net because I like to design programming languages and standard libraries as a hobby. Then I applied to work at Google because I wanted to work on WebAssembly more than anything else in the world, but they turned me down, maybe because I couldn't solve every last brain teaser puzzle? Oh well, I expect to earn over a million in equity in my current job.
Google tends to be bad at the things I do well, so it seems to me that it's not about remote work, it's about bad management.
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Google tends to be bad at the things I do well, so it seems to me that it's not about remote work, it's about bad management.
They have had that for a long time now.
DEI Workplaces like Google (Score:1, Insightful)
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They don't have to work with racist assholes. (Score:1)
He just had to (Score:3)
Re:He just had to (Score:5, Insightful)
If you blame remote workers for slacking, you're giving yourself a course of action and not accepting blame for cutting valuable staff.
It's a CYA statement.
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Indeed. It serves to shield him from facing his own mistakes. What a failure as a human being.
You don't like ... (Score:3)
"The reason startups work is because the people work like hell."
Wait until your AI employees do a calculation in 10 mS on the pay back of your current project, compare it to its cost in kWh and reallocate most of the VMs assigned to you to a project with a proven positive ROI.
Early? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said
By "going home early" I assume he really means "going home on time rather than working unpaid overtime".
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He is one step away from saying he wants slavery reinstated for the glory of capitalism.
Overtime (Score:3)
Salary can mean you get overtime, you have to take local laws and agreements into account. I have always gottenovertime in a salary position. I read up on US federal laws and you seem to be correct that it is not a requirement, but I promise you it is part of many agreements.
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Maybe that's the case where you live but in most of the civilised world a salaried employee works for a restricted number of hours. In Europe (including the UK) that is legally restricted to 48 hours per week. (Overtime is possible, but mandatory overtime is, essentially, illegal.) See the European Working Time Directive.
Blaming remote workers? (Score:2)
How about blaming the AI? I bet it's not actually in the office either, probably off working remotely from its home too -- in its pj's. :-)
He's right, BUT defines winning like a sociopath (Score:5, Insightful)
"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," Schmidt said at a talk at Stanford University.
It really depends on how he (and his ilk) define the word "winning". To them it's marketshare, profits, influence, power, information. Which is great if you're a shitty human being clinging to outmoded (and disproven) models of work effectiveness, and without empathy or concern at all for your fellow humans, appreciating life, the environment, etc. That's how sociopaths and narcissists look at life. That's why Schmidt and Thiel and Bezos and Musk and Zuck and Dyson are all such shitty examples of human beings. Their idea about what winning is.
That's not my definition of winning. I'll take my home office in a quiet, small community, being able to look out into my backyard vegetable garden when I want, being able to get up and take a mental break without having the annoying constant hum of "the office" in the background, walking to the kitchen at 5PM to start cooking dinner, being able to pet my cats during the day, and earning just a modest salary that supports me and the ones I care about over anything Google or this kind of managerial BS has to offer.
Could I make my salary x3 working at Google? Sure could, was told about a position that I'm the perfect fit for just a few months ago and had a potential in to. It's Google though, and I had no interest whatsoever. Winning is being human and living well in the moment, not what Eric and that lot think winning is. He can keep his billions because they aren't important, my cats beat that shit every single day just by purring in my lap in my home office. Honestly? You could not pay me enough to work for any of them, given this kind of BS they spout.
And newsflash for Eric ... some of us are actually *more* productive working from home. Imagine that. Wait, no, they can't.
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Well said - this pretty much summarizes why I would never want to work with that type of toxic management companies like Google, Apple, Meta[stasize] and all their ilk have.
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Incentives...how do they work?
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Indeed. All these people have is unlimited greed and on the way they are wasting their chance to live. And then they try to do this to as many others as possible as well, to validate their broken, crappy lifes.
So, Eric... (Score:2)
How many working hours a week are you putting in right now then?
Are you going to lead from the front, or are you just going to lecture us while reclining on your giant pile of money?
Sociopaths in charge. (Score:4, Insightful)
That statement about work-life balance, as if that's a horribly dirty concept, screams sociopath.
At what point did C-suites stop giving a fuck publicly? They used to sort of polish themselves when in public, even if they were absolutely shit human beings behind closed doors. Is this a natural reaction to having the constant womanizing and alcohol (among other chemical enhancers) consumption being gutted over the last decade or so? "If I can't have my private fun? I'll just come out and tell you how awful I am! TAKE THAT!"
I just don't see how publicly shaming employees for wanting a work-life balance is a long-term healthy strategy. I hope he got egged on his way back to his car.
Sure, sure... (Score:3)
Tell him to wipe next time he pulls uninformed quotes out of his butt.
why don't they just ask the ai for the answer (Score:2)
sounds too canned (Score:2)
He should be replaced by an AI asks save some money
Re: sounds too canned (Score:2)
And, not ask. I made a typo and didnâ(TM)t proofread. Maybe I should be replaced with an AI.
Re: sounds too canned (Score:2)
And now my apostrophe is trashed. Maybe I will just give up on slashdot for another five years.
Google was right, for once... (Score:2)
"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning," said Schmidt
If we maintained the work-life balance we'd still have the innovation eventually, without having to throw boatloads of workers under the bus while we continue to strengthen the corporatocracy's stranglehold on our lives. "Winning" is not the be-all and end-all - especially when the penalty for "losers" may range from subservience and poverty to death.
Why should workers sacrifice such big chunks of their very limited lifetimes not getting to know and nurture their families, just so that assholes like Schmidt and various other parasites can have it easy? Innovation doesn't have to be so fast - and maybe if it had been slower it would have left fewer victims and corpses in its wake.
Because of other ongoing transgressions against the social contract, I still say "Fuck Google". Now I can add to that a hearty "Fuck Eric Schmidt". And most especially, fuck his apparent attitude that he's some kind of wise oracle who deserves to be held in special esteem.
Actually the opposite (Score:1)
Incorrect (Score:2)
Eh... (Score:5, Informative)
I know for some people working from home doesn't yield productivity. But for some of us it really does. My kid is grown and out of the house, my wife works from home on occasion and we know how to leave one another alone to work, and we each have dedicated work spaces with multiple monitors and comfortable chairs. Spending 90 minutes a day fighting traffic really doesn't add to my productivity.
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Spending 90 minutes a day fighting traffic really doesn't add to my productivity.
BigCompany Pty LLC Inc doesn't care and they're not paying you to commute 90 minutes a day in your own car at your own expense. They have long leases on expensive city-centre offices and they want you there under direct managerial surveillance to justify their jobs. Meetings per month is a job metric for managers and Zoom calls aren't the same thing.
"Moonshots" book disagrees... (Score:2)
There is a hard limit on a group size that works for research purposes. About 150 people. More than that and you need to be too regimented to have the flexibility + connectivity that it takes to really create anything importantly new.
Meaning... he needs to be the innovation that others would make. Or get out of the way enough... Like not mandating return to office because it makes you feel powerful.
996 culture (Score:2)
Startup workers (Score:2)
Already walked back (Score:3, Funny)
Slash story should be updated.
Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO and executive chairman at Google, walked back remarks in which he said his former company was losing the artificial intelligence race because of its remote-work policies.
“I misspoke about Google and their work hours,” Schmidt said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “I regret my error.”
Startups DON'T work. (Score:2)
90% of startups fail. So working like hell has a 90% failure rate.
Google is falling behind on AI because Google is a gigantic bureaucratic enterprise. All gigantic companies move slowly and don't innovate. You don't have to work people to death to have innovation, but a huge institution is always going to be slower.
Moreover, being in the office does not make people smarter, and people can still be overworked remotely.
How do I know? Because I know people who work in AI startups - remotely - and they kick Goo
Maybe he means (Score:1)
Maybe he means the data centres are to far away from peoples desks.
Another idiot living in the past (Score:2)
What he says is not consistent with observable reality. Hence it is clear he either is bereft of insight, ior he is trying to shift blame.
Transformers (Score:2)
he has been informed (Score:2)
Schmidt has since been informed that he misspoke, and is now grovelling for forgiveness.
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This is certainly a factor, yes. Another one is that Google got boring, bureaucratic and risk-averse. I know people that simply quit their very well-paid job there because they were financially set for a decade or longer and wanted to do something interesting again. Google is fossilized these days and it is a result of them cancelling everything interesting they ever did if it did not bring in massive profits. Greed like that destroys the ability to innovate.