[deleted]
Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#52Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#53It's management's attempt at cargo-culting success. But success has more to do with good ideas combined with talent than anything else. It has nothing to do with where the talent rests their butts during the day.
I remember the office days - it was a room full of silent people, all chatting away on Slack. We can do that literally from anywhere.
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#54Prior to the pandemic, my roommate who works at Google would generally be at home playing FFXIV most of the day for like 2 weekdays per week. It sounded like a good gig. I don't think this outcome has much to do with whether remote work is allowed or not. In some other orgs it might not be possible to convince management that this is fine to do.
What makes you think management is being any more productive?
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#55Google is falling behind because at a certain point, employees will look at the tenuous connection between the company's overall success and their individual success, and make the rational choice to prioritize the latter even if it is not aligned with the former. That means finding any and all justifications for additional headcount, not collaborating across teams, making decisions based exclusively on short term considerations, etc. In short, doing whatever it takes to get promoted. Why would anyone take a risky bet on a low probability high upside project?
Eric was an EM -> VP at Sun back in the day, so he knows exactly how that shit works.
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#56Eric Schmidt says remote work is why Google’s lagging in AI, but was early success just about time clocked in the office and in person collaboration? I really doubt it. The real issue to me is the high number of “rest and vest” hires and how big companies manage talent when they grow past 10k employees.
Blaming remote work feels lazy and very clickbaity, productivity is way more complex. I personally gravitate towards being in person at the office as much as possible but I would never say my remote coworkers are less productive because they work from home.
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#57"It's not our managerial incompetence and lack of focus, it's those lazy devs working from home"
Google has been faltering on anything beyond old staples like Search and Gmail for over 15 years way before WFH was anything there.
And even search and gmail are more sustained by momentum, rather than innovation, and have been worsening continuously...
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#58Eric would probably not want to talk about how Google's leadership of which he hired at least a good half under his tenure is responsible for squandering an amazing technological and brand leadership that is now being threatened from every angle. His leadership led to the current situation, the leadership of Larry and then Sundar just continued the culture he put in place. He's simply trying to get people to focus on…
Google in comparison to say an Apple or Amazon just never had product focussed or customer-focussed leadership. Contrast Sergey/Larry/Eric vs Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos.
Sergey & Larry had a fun research project that could make a lot of money, then moved on to other things that were fun for them.
Eric was the hired adult supervision and probably most responsible for the org structure they ended up with.
The origin, leadership and structure of Google has far more to do with its products than where its devs sit.
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#59This is absolutely ridiculous statement. I have been invited to Google HQ several times. There is an entire culture there that is to blame, working from home is the smallest of the problems.
I would say risk aversion is the biggest problem by far. Google culture is also radically woke. Google is made by PhDs that always wanted to isolate from the world, they had always very weak customer support, everything was automated and had no contact with the customer so they ended isolated from the needs of your customers and lived in their own world.
On one side you see super brilliant people there. On the other you see total disconnection with the needs of the people because they were isolated on purpose.
Google was designed so people could almost live on campus, most of the time. So you could have 30, or 40 year old adults that are actually like children, not taking responsibility for their lives, isolated from the world most people live. How are you supposed to improve the world when you do not have incentives to improve it because you are not feeling the pain?
Your world is totally different from most people's.
This was obvious to me as an outsider. It is difficult to se culture from inside as you get used to it.
The old generation never understands. Science improves one funeral at a time.
I have worked remotely most of my life. We can work harder than anyone else precisely because we do not need to spend one/two hours a day commuting. We can focus without distraction for hours, control our working environment and do the deepest work.
But like anything else, you need to learn how to do it right and it will take decades before traditional companies learn how to do it.
Re: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI–and Remote Work Is Why
#60This seems extremely self-serving on behalf of Schmidt in order to avoid any serious self-reflection of what seems to be going on at Google. I've never looked a at a Google product and thought "this sloppy product is the result of people who were more concerned about going home". I don't really care about the remote work argument, but this fight is the rug that covers the real problem. Google products are _the_ defin…
> you only need to look at Zuckerberg and Meta,
As much as I don't like what meta is doing in certain areas of their business, I think Zuckerberg has a pretty good corporate structure. From talking to colleagues and interview series I've been to there, it's a very "engineer-led" culture. Managers, at least a few years ago, were allegedly not even supposed to call it "their" team, they were supposed to say "supporting this team," etc. Very small nuances like that can actually cause a big shift in culture. It's also very flat, from what I understand. The most dysfunctional corporate environments I ever see typically have 5+ management layers above the lowest person on the tech rung. To me, that's ridiculous. It's just managers managing managers managing managers managing managers all the way down to the poor guys at the bottom trying to figure out what the heck is going on - it's impossibly anti-productive and prone to corruption.