[gorgoiler]

> 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.

[tialaramex]

> 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]

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.

[jh00ker]

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]

That reminds me of https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1156804295/shopify-delete-mee...

[ryandrake]

One thing I noticed after switching to WFH is that I am no longer dealing with that 15-30 minute "mental haze" that happens right after I finish my 2 hour car commute: That decompression period where my brain is fatigued from being on high alert, white knuckling it down I-580, then I-680, then I-880, watching for hazards, accidents, or just slogging through bumper-to-bumper traffic. I'd walk into the office but my brain was just too fatigued to work without a little time spent just walking around like a normal person.

[spacemadness]

2 hours?! That is insane. I don’t understand why people put up with that.

[inferiorhuman]

  If I'm sat in a car

There are other ways to commute. Commuting via train gave me a chance to go for a walk through parts of the city I'd otherwise not spend a lot of time in. Being stuck in suburban hell currently, working 100% from home is a nightmare scenario for me. Asshole neighbors. Constant noise (far worse than e.g. Oakland). Shit infrastructure (electric, telecom, whatever).

And, in my experience, collaboration almost always suffers. One coworker used to work 100% from his man cave but also refused to invest in getting decent WiFi coverage down there.

  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.

So? Even though HN has a hard on for eliminating human interaction, socialization is important.

That said, Schmidt is wrong to pin Google's failures on remote work. Pichai is a fucking moron and Google's toxic culture is destroying both their ability to put out competitive products and to keep anything around long enough to get meaningful market share.

[goshx]

> There are other ways to commute.

There are better places to live.

See what I did there? Not everyone has better options to commute.

[esalman]

Better places might be more expensive.

[dsq]

True, but doesn't WFH solve that? There must be somewhere that's both good and cheap once you go far enough.

[inferiorhuman]

  There are better places to live.

So? Going into the office makes a clear delineation between my personal and professional life. Working from home means I never get around to doing the things I need to do at home. Working from an office means I leave all (well, most) of that shit at the office. IOW, don't shit where you eat.

[lnxg33k1]

I commuted every day in London, for 6 months, going to work in Croydon, from Blackfriars. It was the worst six months of my life, you make it sound like you're the only one commuting via train, every morning I would get covered in armpits, train delay, train canceled, people standing on top of each other.

[inferiorhuman]

  Croydon

Well there's your problem.

[lnxg33k1]

Imagine going to Croydon while covered in Napalm

[musicale]

Commutes can be great when they aren't crowded. But overcrowded trains and subways, highway traffic jams, and risk-your-life city cycling are commuting nightmares.

[NBJack]

Or cities that have seen a uptick in crime but refuse to either fund security measures or empower the existing workers to do anything about it on mass transit.

Seattle used to have a great transit setup between the busses and the light rail. But post Covid, the security and enforcement was scaled back dramatically, making it a real crap shoot on how safe a ride could be. This is slowly being recognized and changing [1], but I don't need the stress of being stabbed or shot each morning on the way to work.

[1] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/sound-transit-beefing-up-se...

[andreiursan]

On other ways to commute: You assume that people who commute by car do so because they want to, instead of going by train. I don't think that is the case.

On people who refused to get a good WFH setup (e.g., WiFi): I bet those are terrible people to work with in the office, too.

& I agree with your last point.

[electronbeam]

Often there are not other ways to commute

[Rinzler89]

>On people who refused to get a good WFH setup (e.g., WiFi): I bet those are terrible people to work with in the office, too.

Huh? That's some crazy generalization Batman. Many people who rent have little control over their home office setups,. especially in a bad housing market.

[genocidicbunny]

> There are other ways to commute

Really? Pray tell what other methods I would have to commute? The closest bus, train or subway service is about the same distance as driving to work with a car. Parking at work is also free, but I have to pay for parking at the bus stop, or the train stop, or the subway stop. Oh and there's no way to walk there because I would have to walk along the shoulder of a 4-lane highway where the speed limit is 65mph.

So, how do I commute without a car?

[wordofx]

There’s no point in arguing with people on HN. The same people downvoting you are the same people who refuse to use AI because it’s “not perfect”. They would rather work from home and be made redundant and unemployable than be productive and valuable.

[genocidicbunny]

No, the people arguing with the parent are the ones who have actual life experience of living in places where there's no reasonable access to public transit (read: most of the USA) and who aren't naive to think that everywhere is a perfect little urban world where you have usable choices in your method of transport.

I live inside a major metro area. My closest public transit is a 10 minute drive by car, or a several hour walk by foot, and that's a 3x a day bus. If I wanted to actually access useful public transit, I would need to hike 3+ miles over about 1500' of elevation change, on roads with no sidewalks. And I'm in one of the most public transit friendly metro areas in the US.

[wordofx]

No. You make a choice to live far or unconvinced from your place of work. And that is totally fine. But it doesn’t change the fact you are less productive working from home than in the office. Can argue all you want but it doesn’t change the facts.

[surgical_fire]

You presented no facts. You presented some poorly worded opinions on questionable rationale and inferior vocabulary.

In fact, there was this whole WFH experience some 4 years ago, and companies saw no loss in productivity. That is fact.

[genocidicbunny]

You haven't produced an iota of evidence to support your claims as being facts.

It's almost like such decisions aren't made based on a single binary argument, but on a lot of different factors. Sure, I could live closer to work. I'd be paying more for a smaller house, worse schools, more local traffic, more noise, neighbors that are a little closer than comfortable. But yes, then I'd be able to get on the bus and ride it to work instead of using my car. I doubt I'd be more productive though because my sleep quality will suffer, I'll have more stress dealing with things like getting the kids to school, or worrying if my car is going to get broken into or hit-and-run while it's parked on the street. Instead of being able to take a short 10 minute break to read to the kids, or to help cook lunch or dinner, I'll just wander down to the cafeteria and make myself some cheap tea and grab a granola bar. Sure, I don't get to see the kids as much, and my partner can't work full-time hours anymore because I'm not there to help, but at least the bus stop's right there eh?

And perhaps I don't really care to be as productive as possible for your definition of productive. I don't live to work, I work so I can live how I want. Somehow, I've managed to still have a job; In my time I have seen plenty of 'productivity maximalists' come and go.

[nextos]

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]

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]

And that doesn't clean it up, it just moves the mess off of your plate to someone else's.

[kamaal]

>>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]

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]

can you name successful remote-only startups? Yes, I know gitlab, others?

[spyke112]

Automattic: The company behind Wordpress. https://automattic.com/

37signals: The company behind Basecamp and Hey. With a founder being the Ruby on Rails creator. https://37signals.com/

[SkyPuncher]

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.

[MobiusHorizons]

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.

[jemmyw]

Aha! https://www.aha.io

[PostOnce]

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]

Then somebody younger will happily do it until they too have the same realization. Then another batch.

[PostOnce]

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.

[ChuckMcM]

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]

Wasn't that Scott McNealy? (Though, if I recall your bio from previous HN posts, you'd know far better than me.)

[valleyer]

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-schmid...

[benzible]

Sure was. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

[ChuckMcM]

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.

[1024core]

> 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]

Thank you, I’ve updated my quotes.

[rodgerd]

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]

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-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.

[toomuchtodo]

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

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

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]

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]

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.

[benzible]

> Or maybe mad that he wasted his life having no work-life balance

He's been trying to make up for it... https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/eric-schmidt-google-sc...

[ackbar03]

What are these companies you speak of? I would like to take them over in a leveraged buyout, chain the employees to their desks, and make an immediate 9% return

[dangus]

You might be surprised that chaining employees to their desks doesn’t make them more productive.

It’s easy to figure out that a lot of companies collect the same checks from their customers regardless of how much their employees burn themselves out. Google doesn’t magically get to charge more money for cloud storage because they decide to work their engineers harder. Labor is only a small component of the cost of that product.

https://hbr.org/2023/07/how-taking-a-vacation-improves-your-...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-four-day-workwe...

[Rinzler89]

Sorry, but that smells like bullshit. No European company I worked at or know of entirely shuts down in August. That's just a meme. There's still people at work keeping things going that month. Vacation approvals need to be requested in advance and staggered because of that to keep things going while people are on vacation.

And if you're still giving them money despite being absent for a month because like you say you need their product, that's more like survivorship bias where that company probably has a monopoly and no competition so you're forced to only buy from them but that's no your average European company, not by a long shot.

The company I work in now, the managers check in on things even on vacations.

[dangus]

You’re calling bullshit on the thing that the manufacturer told me verbatim? They literally said the factory was closed in August for holiday.

Here’s the direct link where Colossal Order (Finland) talks about going on a month-long break: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/42441613...

> The company I work in now, the managers check in on things even on vacations.

Bruh, my manager would never do that to me. It’s against our team norms. If your manager makes you do a significant amount of work when they “check in” or requires you to answer their messages, that policy is illegal and you’re owed your time off back. You need a new job or a new manager.

> Vacation approvals need to be requested in advance and staggered because of that to keep things going while people are on vacation.

You’re just saying what I said: that the companies in Europe make extended time off possible by staggering leaves. Some companies stagger leave, others decide to shut down or slow down operations. I never said that every company in Europe shuts down to make holidays work, but I can guarantee you that every company in countries like Denmark, Finland, and France are allowing their employees to take 25 days of leave (plus national holidays) because that’s the law.

The important part is that the individual gets to take time off. Whether the entire company shuts down or not is up to the specific business. The two companies I mentioned decided that it’s easier for them to shut down for a month because their work is essentially in a queue. For the factory making physical goods, they can receive orders while they are closed and catch up on them when they are opened again. For the software company, they can continue selling their software digitally while the company is on leave and their users just wait an extra month for software updates.

This never-ending work culture in the USA isn’t even helping overall production and productivity all that much.

[golergka]

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?

[jozzas]

> How could I get the same feeling of fulfilment from the most amazing vacation?

If you can't answer this, you are going to have a very bad time when you retire.

[golergka]

All good things come to an end at some point. That's not a reason not to enjoy them.

[dangus]

And what happens to this paradigm if you don’t really love your job more than your family and friends and just work out of necessity to survive?

Only half of all Americans are “very satisfied” with their jobs.

Lower income people are less satisfied with their jobs than higher income people.

What about people who work jobs that are physically demanding where time off is literal physical rest?

This idea of work as fulfillment is highly classist IMO.

And anyway, you wouldn’t like to have a month every year to spend on your own personal coding projects that don’t become owned property of your employer? Nobody said you have to spend your time off sipping margaritas on the beach.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/30/how-ame...