Is he still a Google shareholder?
Eric Schmidt, Bilderberg Steering Committee member, makes up excuses for why Google's AI efforts are being surpassed by open source.
https://bilderbergmeetings.org/background/steering-committee...
Maybe this thread should be merged with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41241682 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41249946#41250600
From day one, the goal was clear: create networks that connect people regardless of their physical location, setting the stage for the flexible, remote work environments we have today. The evolution of these technologies wasn’t a happy accident; it was a deliberate move towards a world where work isn’t confined to an office.
If you disagree with this, you’re not just missing the point—you’re denying the very essence of what these innovations were designed to achieve. The idea that remote work wasn’t central to these developments is, frankly, shortsighted. The fact is, the potential for remote work was embedded in these systems from the beginning.
So, if you still don’t see that enabling remote work was the core outcome of these advancements, it’s time to wake up to the reality. To deny this is to fundamentally misunderstand the direction and purpose of network and server design from its inception. It’s not just about what these systems can do—it’s about what they were always meant to enable. And if you can’t grasp that, you’re not just behind the curve—you’re lost in the past.
I first worked from home for one project in 1992 but I had to lug a computer from the office -- several trips to the car to get it all loaded. And I had no network connectivity. A few years later in 2000 I began full time remote work but I still needed a rack of servers in my basement and eventually constructed my own ISP to get decent connectivity. Totally remote working where it's just me and a laptop and a fast network probably took another 10 years to arrive.
So if you got in your time machine and talked to Vint Cerf in 1990, sure he'd be interested in the vision that nobody would need a physical office at some time in the future, but that wasn't why he was building the network because nobody could practically do so for at least a decade and nobody at the time could predict how long it would take. Some predicted advances such as telemedicine and remote learning only took off due to a pandemic, for societal and regulatory reasons, not technical ones.
The networks and devices that get built evolve to meet public demand, if decisions are being made they'll inevitably follow the money instead of some 20-year plan. Priorities can change.
If the first instinct of everyone is to have an in person meeting them you're in a company which can't run remotely. If you're in a company where you get sent an instant message then you can't run it outside of the single time zone where the headquarters are.
You need to be comfortable with emails and high latency responses to have a company that can run globally.
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_ definition of political dysfunction. Absolutely amazing quagmires built by geniuses who were all more concerned with leaving their mark so they could get a promotion or being as milquetoast as possible in order to not rock the boat. Google practically invented the technology, but it's its applications looked funny AdSense revenue and it was quickly shelved.
Google falling behind on AI indicated a real leadership problem and you only need to look at Zuckerberg and Meta, which has similar policies, and has a far more cohesive vision and execution on AI; but it looks like Eric Schmidt doesn't have the balls to call out leadership.
I have no idea if similar things happen for many of their software products, but that would explain a lot behind things like GHC and how it's UX has gotten worse over time.
You’re describing Google 10 years ago.
My recent visits to its campuses have left me unimpressed. There are plenty of geniuses. But there are also many morons, and the mix is maybe a degree or two away from median corporate America.
The Google of 10, or 15 years ago did not build quagmires. Google's interview process is so rigorous that I do not doubt the caliber of talent that even currently works there. I think people don't have enough perspective when they criticize something like the Pixel Phone or Gemini. I don't think those are products that could be built by "morons".
There is a lack of risk or commitment to whenever Google launches anything new, and they refuse to be anything other than a fast follower. Stadia was an great product - afaik it worked with acceptable latency and the hardware was good. Morons could not have executed it that well. The quagmire came from the fact the messaging was confusing and there was no leadership that had any vision or conviction for the product. When I look at something like Stadia, as a microsm of new Google projects, the last lesson I take away is "Stadia was a shoddy product because people didn't spend enough time in the office." More engineers sleeping overnight at Google wouldn't have saved Stadia. Replace Stadia with any half baked release out of Google.
I worry the same for Waymo - an amazing product, damn near futuristic at this point, that will fall on the sword because no one at Google will be willing to risk their career on it.
Google's big problem is that they've always been dysfunctional. The AdSense money printer let them grow the company 100x over the last 15 years without the company actually figuring out how to scale up or solve any of their structural problems.
Nothing new here, just a new excuse by one of the guys that presided over it.
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.
That would mean extracting more value from your salary, and that might rock the boat of other employees in your salary bracket, so no.
The media are taking his relatively tame opinion on work ethics and blowing it up into click-bait.
His comment wasn't targeting remote work or WFH specifically - but general work ethic of companies. He praised TSMC and Musk - who are notorious for poor treatment of workers. That's all you need to know about this. If WFH or remote work to blame - why isn't Musks' AI company taken off and overtaken Google by now?
This guy will get rich off of his startup investments where he's mostly an advisor - and he wants you to work 12 hr days to make it happen for him.
When Microsoft "lost the mobile war" everybody was in the office still, no? Is it conceivable that google is behind on AI for reasons other than wfh?
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.
Eric was an EM -> VP at Sun back in the day, so he knows exactly how that shit works.
Problems in AI is leadership problems.
I think a more likely explanation is that Google’s own internal policies, procedures, and culture (unrelated to remote work) are the reasons for falling behind.
From the article "I misspoke about Google and their work hours,” Schmidt said Wednesday in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “I regret my error."
Looks like that comment brought more heat than he preferred.
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.
We all got a taste of the flexibility the C-suite has always exercised, and they don't like that. Now that the job market has turned enough they are trying to take it away as hard & fast as possible.
It would take a serious downturn to kill it completely and even then I doubt it. While you don't see a lot of arcade games in offices anymore, they didn't get people back to wearing suits...
As soon as you get into competition for talent, in-office 2~3-day vs 4-day, or hybrid vs full in-office will quickly become a selling point again.
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.
I was tired of driving 3 hours a day (which equals a full month per year) in traffic. I told my boss "I'm not coming in to the office anymore in two weeks" without really having a plan for what comes next - either I'd quit or ???. He suggested I could work from home (they didn't want to lose me), and I jumped at the chance. It worked great for 6 months until that company went out of business. I was the only one working from home, so the company going out of business definitely wasn't because of WFH.
Let's face it, at this point creating an LLM is not that difficult, relatively speaking. I can download dozens with Ollama, and many of them are brilliant. But look at ChatGPT or Claude and then look at Google - which is the better product?
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.
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...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/technology/eric-schmidt-a...
> He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.
> I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.
> So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on."
If Elon Musk, the richest man on earth, wants to work all the time, that’s his prerogative and right. He shouldn’t be allowed to force that on his workers though.
If you want to work under those conditions, it should be your own prerogative. There are plenty of places to work.
I think it's not one specific reason - primarily though, I think, it gives employees more power over their employment situation and lives. Employers love power over their employees and I expect them to react harshly when they perceive this power is threatened.
Secondly, CEO's are typically lifelong corporate cretins with zero imagination, and they mostly just copy whatever CEO they think is reputable. The result is they all end up copying whatever everyone else is doing. I promise you, Meta's "year of efficiency" was not unique to meta, nor was that naming. So, once one declares remote work is dead, all of them will fall behind.
Thirdly, I think it is investments already made into real estate and sunk-cost fallacy type of thing. Probably not even a little part of it is the ego boost that comes with getting your preferred parking space, corner office where you can gaze smugly at your less fortunate underlings, etc.
They don't actually care about productivity, because I think the studies are pretty conclusive about remote work so far. It's far, far easier to waste time doing nothing in an office than at home, at least for me. I can easily kill a half hour doing a lap around the bullpens and appear to be working but in reality I'm doing nothing. In most corporate remote work environments, they'll notice really quickly if you're gone for a half hour because of all the productivity software.
You will be surprised how many people that became rich with startups have invested in real state. A lot of those investments are tanking now because of WFH, so they have something personal against it.
>When Microsoft "lost the mobile war" everybody was in the office still, no?
Microsoft lost both "the Internet" and "mobile" because they just could not understand it, like IBM could not understand a world with a computer in every desktop. It is a normal thing when your culture gives you success, the world changes, your culture remains the same.
Other companies appear that understand it and they win. If Google does not adpat, others will.
I'm not a manager by title, but when I'm managing something, my objective is to get as many hassles out of the way as possible and reduce as much cognitive load off people as I can. The rest usually takes care of itself.
If WFH magically solved all problems or prevented failure everyone would do it but lets be real...it doesn't. No one is going to be convinced by an argument like this.
Stadia was early in the game, cloud gaming will maybe take off in the next 10 years....it's still too early.
Google has brilliant programmers but I think product managers and business managers are the problem.
I do! The process is rigorous. But in my opinion, rigorously wrong. It tests for problem-solving skills. But not something else. (I openly admit I don’t know.) It’s the freshman dorm commons at an Ivy League with a lot of money.
This nonsense clears out above the 8th tier of whatever ranking system they employ (principal?), for the most part. But it’s a lot of making increasingly-elaborate artisan firing mechanisms for guns that shoot a Petri dish of cancer, in the name of curing cancer. It’s technologically marvellous. But it’s so stupidly useless. (Bloom! Self-piloting boat that could mostly keep pace with the winds. Why? The balloon tore itself apart if inflating with even a bit of wind on launch.)
Those are the managers that hate work from home. Not managers actually doing productive management.
Sure, if the managers have any experience at all doing the actual work. These days that is rare, middle management are all just MBAs who don’t have a clue how to do the work.
I have actually been a manager at a big tech and a small start up, and yes there is politics at all sizes, but its extremely rare for an engineering manager to not have been an engineer previously. I was that manager, being the mentor.