But now there is a big uptick in employees not working much, and I think the cause is just that companies are so disconnected from people. For example, Sundar wants people to be more "customer-focused" but everywhere at Google, all anyone talks about is this metric and that metric. Customers are just treated as a number to be aggregated into a metric. They're really not talking about specific customer problems. And they're not empowering employees to have vision for how to solve specific customer problems overall imo.
Also, speaking of their own employees as people, they're similarly disconnected. They just treat employees as part of a metric too to a large extent. And what does that lead to? Employees that also care mostly about that metrics ($) and not building cool, assistive/helpful products.
I mean it all comes back to incentives of companies trying to grow their stock value. So it's really that and not out-of-touch CEOs. But although a recession is heartbreaking, we do need to regain some sense of reality imo. Perhaps return to technology that's actually trying to assist people or fix things in the world. One can hope.