Former Google CEO blames remote work for company's struggles

Why not?

And the reason for this is...?

Both Anthropic and OpenAI extensively used (and continue to use) remote workers for fullstack and frontend development. But their core AI researchers and engineers are in the office.

> (Nvidia) has a rule that new PhD hires have to work “in the factory, on the basement floor.”

Him picking the most educated means it isn't an age/generational problem.

He could have picked the c suite. But no.

He’s still on the board and is instrumental for the companies failures.

Google’s track record of killing stuff quickly has got to be demotivating for employees.

I don't care what Schmidt's opinions are but at least stand by your comments. Stanford you're just as bad.

As someone who has been working remotely for a worldwide organization even before the pandemic, I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement.

> It hinders creativity and practically limits exchange between workers.

Exactly! Those things are essential to delivering the most value to the company and ultimately to its shareholders, and there's nothing in the world more important than that. Those pompous, selfish, self-important WFH workers need to understand that.

I personally hated working for a remote-first company. I was paralyzed because my coworkers were never online and then they would only pop in to reply briefly to my questions or requests and then disappear again. It was extremely isolating as well never leaving my house, and I was glad to go to a company with actual offices. Separating work life from home life was something I didn't think I needed, but over the long term it really does affect you.

The only times I’ve ever felt hindered in my communication with teammates online has been when they refused to communicate in anything but ad-hoc rambling video calls.

Absolutely! Where else the backbone of every company would get ideas for their presentations.

it’s very obvious to me that parent comment is sarcasm, but it’s not obvious to me that your comment isn’t sarcasm. Hmmmmmm

How quickly you forget the unpleasant realities of shared spaces—like the distinctly unpleasant aroma of communal restrooms. It's amazing how some things are easy to overlook, but after a long break, those less-than-pleasant details hit you like a ton of bricks. Definitely one of the 'perks' of office life I didn't miss!"

>That also assumes that your 17 second hallway traversal results in all five employees being in the same ares and not off doing other projects or in meetings.

Or at the coffee machine at the other side of the building, or in the bathroom, or wandering around the building looking for an open bathroom because the one near their desk is overcrowded...

As you seem to agree, the final product seems rather questionable, with incredibly poor reliability and build quality for a $100+K car. The innovation and risk taking mainly seems to consist of cutting corners at the expense of the customer experience. Meanwhile, the other models are fairly stagnant. At least the "D" part of their R&D seems to be wanting.

And for all the hyperbole from the leadership, the "R" is not all that great either. The supposedly "self driving" car cannot even reliably get its windshield wipers to work automatically, it's not particularly good at parking itself, and it seems to be not much closer to autonomous driving (which was supposed to have been achieved in 2017) than 8 years ago. Meanwhile, competitors have released products with actual, if severely geofenced, autonomy. And the robot seems to be pure demoware.

> Is this a big company thing?

Yes, kind of.

There seems to be one universal quality that defines both developer productivity and quality of output: ownership. When developers have no ownership, no liabilities, and no penalties they are free to largely turn their brains off. Yes, they have to do some work but there is no pressure to do more than just survive and no motivation. Large employers prefer this for reasons of candidate identification, zero cost retention, and employee predictability.

From a psychological perspective the target is low openness but moderately high intelligence. The output is people who are really fucking boring and cowardly. Yes, the openness metric of OCEAN accounts for about 80% of cowardice and bravery which is the flip side of creativity.

In my experience startups aren’t much different. Management moves faster and pivots more frequently which results in churn that keeps developers more busy, which is not the same thing as high productivity.

So, I was thinking about my previous comment. Busy is not productive. So, how do you define productive and increase productivity?

This is going to sound really counter-intuitive, but productive people are the ones not doing work. In theory if you spend 10% of the time actually doing work compared to the next guy then you have 90% availability to do additional work. That part is obvious, but its not about work. Its about what you deliver. If the output is superior quality it will require less effort to maintain and feature dramatically less risk of regression, and these factors mean less work.

So, if person A performs 10% of the work compared to person B then person A is 10x more productive than person B if they deliver the same quantity/quality of output. If person B delivers lower quality output then person A is even more productive. That is how you get 10x developers, and you don't even have to be a good programmer to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x, or much greater, developer multiple times and I am almost never the smartest programmer in the room.

That is why creative people are important, but they are more important mathematically than it sounds. Creative people tend to get bored quickly and tend to not want to do work just for the sack of qualifying their existence, but creative people tend to really loathe being bored. That means they aren't going to waste time on repetitive tasks and will instead look for something else to fill that time. If they know more repetitive tasks are coming then they will work harder up front to prevent the occurrence of repetitive tasks in the future. In the world of software that can mean writing a new tool or creating a new process.

But, its more than that, because creativity is marginally contagious. Non-creative people are scared shitless of new things, those fucking cowards. However, they really enjoy having more time available for enjoyable things like everyone else. That means non-creative people will not become more productive of their own initiative and will actually sacrifice productivity in proximity to creative people until those creative people demonstrate a superior solution. In the presence of a superior solution the non-creative people will increase their productivity as a result of using that new solution. This is actually a repetitive cycle.

To add to that non-creative people are repulsed and emotionally aggressive when confronted with original things. That is more reason why creative people will work less hard in the office and instead keep their solutions to themselves until it means not losing their jobs or directly eliminating more effort.

Even more counter-intuitive is that to some degree higher intelligence, on its own, is actually harmful to productivity. Organization and industriousness are products of conscientiousness, which is negatively correlated to intelligence at about -0.27. You can't even survive in upper management if you are in the bottom of the population with regards to conscientiousness, much less do anything original. Openness and creativity are highly correlated to intelligence at about +0.4, but you also need persistence and diligence, which is where conscientiousness comes in.