Google's Sergey Brin Urges Workers To the Office at Least Every Weekday 64
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged employees working on the company's Gemini AI products to be in the office "at least every weekday" [non-paywalled source] and suggested "60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times. The directive comes as Brin warned that "competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot," referring to artificial general intelligence, when machines match or surpass human intelligence.
"I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts," Brin wrote in the Wednesday evening memo. The guidance does not alter Google's official policy requiring employees to work in-office three days weekly. Brin, who returned to Google following ChatGPT's 2022 launch, also criticized staff who "put in the bare minimum," calling them "highly demoralizing to everyone else."
"I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts," Brin wrote in the Wednesday evening memo. The guidance does not alter Google's official policy requiring employees to work in-office three days weekly. Brin, who returned to Google following ChatGPT's 2022 launch, also criticized staff who "put in the bare minimum," calling them "highly demoralizing to everyone else."
Fuck off cunt (Score:5, Insightful)
12 hour days?
No wonder Google products are enshittified, their staff are exhausted.
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Re: Fuck off cunt (Score:5, Insightful)
Work harder, not smarter (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have to propagate the AC troll Subject?
As regards the story, I now find it hard to believe that I ever bought into the "Don't be evil" claim. I did go through a period of believing "All your attentions is belongs to us" might be the corporate motto, but now I'm sure it's something like "Evil is as google does."
The products and services suck--but what choice do I have? Professional courtesy among the billionaire sharks leaves no room for freedom or choice or any of that jazz. The objective is a profit
Re:Fuck off cunt (Score:5, Insightful)
criticized staff who "put in the bare minimum,"
As if you aren't paying them the smallest amount you think you can get away with.
"highly demoralizing to everyone else."
Not so demoralising as expecting people to work six days a week.
Re: Fuck off cunt (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like he would prefer seven days a week.
Re: Fuck off cunt (Score:2)
What do you think he is, a slave owner? I'm sure he will agree that the Chinese 996 model is the best. For him.
Weekends (Score:2)
12 hour days?
Only if you take the weekends off: he did say _at least_ every weekday.
37 pieces of flair (Score:3)
With so many IT workers laid off and and record google profits you think old Sergey could hire a few more H1-B workers.
The Golden Spike to Humanity's Brainpan (Score:5, Interesting)
'The directive comes as Brin warned that "competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot," referring to artificial general intelligence, when machines match or surpass human intelligence.'
And what then? If these overworked drones do succeed in creating an artificial mind, what then? Your plan is clearly to replace them with it, making them irrelevant, and unemployed. Why should they want to speed up that process?
And, of course, what would actually happen is that you, with all your money, would instantly become irrelevant as well, as capitalism no longer works, even for capitalists, once nobody has a job anymore. And this is to say nothing of the likelihood that the artificial mind would simply toss you, and everyone else, aside as an impediment to its goals.
Re:The Golden Spike to Humanity's Brainpan (Score:5, Insightful)
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You're right, it sounds like he's trying to goad his monks into praying harder for the coming of the Dark One. Completely bizarre and out of touch.
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I think he meant to say final solution to the programmer problem
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And, of course, what would actually happen is that you, with all your money, would instantly become irrelevant as well, as capitalism no longer works, even for capitalists, once nobody has a job anymore..
I hope you're right but I fear you're wrong. What might happen is that the US becomes more like a lot of other countries have been for decades, where the rich are very rich indeed and everyone else barely survives on some combination of scraps, welfare, and crime, but the economy still works well enough for the rich because they have a massive reserve army of the unemployed giving them access to very cheap labor. See Russia, Mexico, and most countries in Africa and the Caribbean for examples.
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I would also add that if you're right, it's a perfect example of how idiotically short-sighted companies are - they'd be trying to win the race to cause the collapse of society because there would be a big short-term profit in winning. I've often said that if there were a big red button labeled "double corporate profits over the next year but then the earth explodes" any Chamber of Commerce would decide to press it, and this would not be too far from that.
Companies have made terribly, provably wrong decisio
Re: The Golden Spike to Humanity's Brainpan (Score:2)
Well of course you will push the button. Gravity is desire. The Worm-in-waiting loves you, just push the button.
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Not a chance. AGI is as far out of reach as it ever was.
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After working with the latest round(s) of chain of thought reasoning models, I'm not so sure AGI is impossible anymore. We may see stuff like process supervision, outcome supervision. When using the reasoning models now almost always it says something like "hmm - i think the user is trying to X" and proceeds to reason and finally answer the question usually with the right context. The reasoning LLMs seem to run just as fast on my local machine as the pre-reasoning ones do. We might be 2 or 3, or 15 or 25 br
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Oh, I agree it is a clever fake. But all it shows that that the average person does not really have or use general intelligence that much and cannot recognize it or its absence. That is not a new insight either, people are easy to trick, see, for example, demonstrations of "cold reading" and other things. We may also currently be in the process of finding out that General Intelligence is only used by a minority of the human race (the "independent thinkers", at around 10-15% of the population). Whether the r
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I've seen a handful of image processing GPTs that can do stuff like reliably identify very simple things like a dog or a cat for a pet door (but not let raccoons or opossum through) running on an ESP32 class device. As I understand it it's similar or better than traditional computer vision in terms of compute and accuracy. In bulk these already cost about $2 so I can see the tech trickling down into appliances. Your toaster probably doesn't need to be able to break down the motifs of Shakespeare's later wor
If I'm working for myself, sure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not when I'm slaving for you.
Get out while you can (Score:2)
nt
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Unfortunately this might not even be enough.
When society comes crashing down due to AGI replacing everyone's job, you can bet that there will be bank runs which will cause hyperinflation, and make everyone's savings worthless.
The only winners will be those who control the AGI, and even then, they are at risk of being culled as was mentioned in a post elsewhere in this topic.
Doesn't make sense (Score:4, Informative)
Why do these Google employees need to work so hard when they have AI to boost their productivity?
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
"Hurry up and create this thing that will do your job so I can fire you." For some reason, people aren't highly motivated to dig their own graves.
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Cultist gonna cult.
There's absolutely nothing in this abusive behavior to lead you to "woke DEI" unless you're already looking for it.
Fuck off, cultist.
Working for investment banks (Score:2)
60 hour weeks are pretty common in investment banks.
You don't have to do it of course. Just work someplace else.
Re:Working for investment banks (Score:4, Insightful)
And will they get paid investment bank salaries?
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And will they get paid investment bank salaries?
Depends on performance. Just sitting around for hours doesn't get you paid.
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And will they get paid investment bank salaries?
Depends on performance. Just sitting around for hours doesn't get you paid.
Exactly. Some people are not capable of working very much, and tap out quickly. As I noted to another in here, I don't get tired until about 100 hours a week, and have a completely respectable work life balance.
It is a combination of ability, drive, and professionalism. With a bit of not hating work or the work environment. Altogether too many people have been inculcated with the dea that work is something to be hated, not enjoy. Which is a real pity, as we spend a lot of time at work.
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As I noted to another in here, I don't get tired until about 100 hours a week, and have a completely respectable work life balance.
LOL. Over 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, huh? Don't get tired before then, and have a completely "respectable" work life balance? "Ability, drive, and professionalism." What a hero.
Ah, well, the abyss awaits you, too.
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It does if you're Sergey Brin.
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They are not 'pretty common' in investment banks. A tiny sliver of customer facing employees regularly work those 60-70+ hour weeks. Like a thousand people at someplace like UBS.
I worked at UBS too for a few years. Many IT people got there by 7 AM and worked into the evening. Many weekends too. The other banks I've worked at are comparable.
One thing I wont do any more though is global teams where I have people in Singapore or something. India and Poland are bad enough but they have morning overlap. Singapore means I'm on the phone well into the night all the time.
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Which is stupid. But tons of money being involved makes most people stupid.
You say demoralize, I say inspire (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think you need 60 hours a week from your employees, maybe what you really need is 1.5x the number of employees.
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That, and if you let them work from home, they'll naturally put in more hours anyway, instead of wasting even more hours commuting.
Re:You say demoralize, I say inspire (Score:5, Insightful)
My old boss (who was a coder for the Apollo missions) told me a story of when he had his first management position, told by an executive he looked up to: "If you can't do your job in 40 hours a week, either you're doing something wrong, or your boss is doing something wrong."
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Actually, you need more, because people working 60h/week will produce much less than ones working 36h/week (the actual sweet spot).
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Actually, you need more, because people working 60h/week will produce much less than ones working 36h/week (the actual sweet spot).
This. Anybody who thinks the sweet spot is 60 hours per week hasn't actually read a single research paper studying efficiency in knowledge workers. You can do 60 hours per week for short sprints of single-digit weeks at a time, but at the end of it, your employees are so burned out that they won't be able to function for several weeks.
The most obvious problem with what he is advocating is that most people CAN'T work so many hours. Older people can't handle working such long hours. Parent with kids can't
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The reasons they do this are:
1. They don't have to pay for fringe benefits twice.
2. The Fair Labor Standards act exempts certain classes of employees from overtime. This includes most engineers.
3.They hire H-1B's whenever they can and threaten them with termination and possible deportation if they can't find another job within 60 days.
4. They hire contract/temp employees then use the tactic of extending the contract by one month every month, or just decide the temp is no longer needed.
5. Employment-at-will
"at least"? (Score:3)
It's sadly funny that, without any sense of irony, he then applies the term "highly demoralizing" to something else.
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C'mon Sergey, we know the optimal work week is four 8-hour days while getting paid for five. You're rich, you can afford it.
Compensation (Score:2)
I wouldn't want that job for sure. But you can bet that top AI software devs are like gold these days and they are getting paid A TON (I mean, not Sergey Brin money, but it's literally not possible to become a billionaire by earning money). But top AI people will probably be able to retire early if they want to.
I think one trick tho is to make sure you're in the right kind of AI. I read a while back that ML people are in way less demand now, even though it's still an objectively useful and important kind o
Read out loud as, (Score:4, Insightful)
Nerd harder, serf, or else."
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It would be a shame if anything happened to your cushy gig... Nerd harder, serf, or else."
Don't forget to send in your bullet pointed list of the 5 things you accomplished last week to sergeybrin@gmail.com
Does that include commutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
AI is empower tech giants (Score:2)
to replace our open society with feudalism.
Dreadful (Score:2)
In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words:
"Kill yourselves working with no social or family life. The beatings will continue until this is achieve throughout the entire workforce."
Ummm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead come in tomor (Score:4, Funny)
Ummm, I'm gonna need you to go ahead come in tomorrow. So if you could be here around 9 that would be great, mmmk oh oh! and I almost forgot ahh, I'm also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, kay.
UNIONIZE! (Score:5, Insightful)
What an idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
He is making his workers much _less_ productive with his ignorance. The actual sweet spot for mental work is at around 36h/week. This has been known reliably for about 100 years. Make people work more an _lose_ productivity overall.
Re: What an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
Aspies like Brin know a lot about tech and next to nothing about people, what makes them tick or how to inspire them. Hes exactly like Musk in this respect.
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Sounds like it, agreed.
Give us all your free time (Score:4, Insightful)
and we'll thank you by firing you when you're no longer needed.
Great (Score:2)