Billionaire Eric Schmidt had shared choice words for Google’s policies on work-life balance
By Stephen Council,Tech Reporter Updated Aug 14, 2024 (SFGate.com)
FILE: Eric Schmidt speaks onstage during the TIME100 Summit on April 24, 2024 in New York City. Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME
LATEST Aug. 14, 4:10 p.m. After former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made headlines this week for criticizing the tech giant’s work policies, he offered a mea culpa.
“I misspoke about Google and their work hours,” Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal in an email, per a story the outlet published Wednesday. “I regret my error.”
The wave of news coverage was sparked by a classroom video posted on Tuesday by Stanford’s School of Engineering. In the video, Schmidt answered a question about Google’s lag in artificial intelligence development by complaining, “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning.” (His full comments are below.)
According to the Wall Street Journal’s story, Schmidt asked Stanford to take down the video. As of Wednesday afternoon, it was no longer available on the school’s YouTube page.
Aug. 13, 5:30 p.m. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a complaint about his old company, and it’s one that employees across America are increasingly hearing from executives: Workers aren’t coming into the office enough.
The former billionaire investor, who led Google from 2001 to 2011 and remained on as its executive chairman until 2015, made his feelings on remote work clear before a class at Stanford, a video posted Tuesday by the university’s School of Engineering shows. In the video, professor Erik Brynjolfsson asked Schmidt questions, then students got a turn.
It was one of Brynjolfsson’s queries that got Schmidt going about remote work. The professor brought up Google’s breakthrough artificial intelligence discovery from 2017, the creation of the “transformer.” (The technology helps power much of the AI research behind today’s products; it’s the “T” in ChatGPT.) Then, Brynjolfsson parroted a common refrain: the idea that despite that early lead, the Mountain View tech giant has fallen behind in AI development.
“They’ve kind of lost the initiative to OpenAI, and even the last leaderboard I saw, Anthropic’s Claude was at the top of the list,” Brynjolfsson said. “I asked [Google CEO] Sundar [Pichai] this, he didn’t really give me a very sharp answer. Maybe you have a sharper or a more objective explanation for what’s going on there.”
Schmidt, after noting that he’s no longer an employee of the company, got on his soapbox.
“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning,” he said, prompting titters from the crowd. “And the startups, the reason startups work is the people work like hell.”
“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Schmidt continued. “But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”
It’s worth noting that one day a week is an exaggeration on Schmidt’s part; Google required workers to come into offices three days a week back in 2022, SFGATE reported.
Schmidt then said that there’s a history in tech of dominant companies missing out on the next wave of the industry, and he played up the importance of “crazy ideas” and hard-charging founders like Elon Musk. He also praised Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, and said that the massive chipmaker has a rule that new PhD hires have to work “in the factory, on the basement floor.”
“Now, can you imagine getting American physicists to do that?” Schmidt asked. “The PhDs? Highly unlikely. Different work ethic.”
Hear of anything happening at Google or another Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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TECH REPORTER
Stephen Council is the tech reporter at SFGATE. He has covered technology and business for The Information, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and CalMatters, where his reporting won a San Francisco Press Club award.Signal: 628-204-5452
Email: stephen.council@sfgate.com