Google Has a Productivity Problem, Can Sundar Pichai Solve It?

No, Sundar can't solve it. He was brought on to bring rapid growth to google at a critical time. That meant rapid revenue growth but also rapid headcount. Unfortunately, as you add more people at Google, it does not scale productivity- productivity decreases with each additional employee above about 50K or so.

I expect Ruth to be brought on as CEO eventually and she will aggressively cut headcount until the remaining folks are motivated to work more.

This article can be forgiven for misunderstanding Pichai's comments and the problem he is trying to solve.

The problem isn't the kind of low productivity caused by too many minutes between mouse-clicks. It's not too many hours where nothing much gets done -- it's too many quarters in which nothing ultimately useful gets done.

Google does have a cohort of "rest and vest"ers, which it should identify and discourage.

It also has a fairly large (possibly bigger than the rest-and-vest-ers) "political warrior class" of folks that have job titles like "engineer" but who spend the majority of their time on political strife instead. Google somewhat intentionally cultivated the political warrior cohort (or, if they didn't, they sure acted like they were doing it intentionally).

Then, after you deal with these two groups of folks who produce nearly no (engineering) work output, you have the productivity loss from otherwise-productive folks who get poisoned by these two groups.

And then finally you have the usual large-company internal political fights that lead people to waste huge amounts of productivity building the wrong things to route around the dysfunction.

None of this is amenable to "focus scoring" or mouse-movement tracking, or the like -- and I don't think that Pichai is dumb enough to try to actually do that.