While Brin comes back to Google to advocate for 60h workweeks as it lays off thousands of employees.
I wouldn't want 60-hour weeks of dealing with a lot of promotion-seekers, though.
I wonder how different Google would be if they'd just paid people enough money they didn't have to think about money, but it was the same amount of money to everyone. You do the work, not for promotions, but because you like doing the work. You can train up for and transfer to different kinds of roles, but they pay the same.
* You like the craft.
* You want to be there for your team.
* You like that your financial needs are taken care of, so that you don't have to think about that.
* You like that everyone else's financial needs are taken care of, because you want everyone to be happy.
* You like that there's alignment by everyone on this. (Even though there will be disagreements on, say, how best to accomplish the mission.)
If someone gets in and doesn't actually have or find motivations like that, or doesn't rise to the occasion despite help, I guess they'd be managed out. That cultural mismatch wouldn't be good for anyone involved.
You answered your question by yourself: the company has to prevent these morons from getting in.
That solves half of the problem of typical work dynamics already; the second half, preventing unqualified morons from getting in and setting themselves up for life by being paid good money for doing nothing, would need to be solved in some other way.
There are so many things worth doing in so many areas that pinning your whole weekly life on a single one is just an immense waste.
Cap the time that a company gets to have from you, and achieve so much more.
Alphabet has effectively monetized the world economy and gained outsized influence on policy, and Brin has about 25% of voting shares on the company
His money is on advocating that people widely forfeit a right acquired by labor movements in the early 20th century, and through his ex, on public-sector scientific research becoming unviable
This amounts nakedly (if fortuitously) a further consolidation of power and capital in the hands of a powerful few
(In my head at 2am, I was (wrongly) taking that as a given, understood by everyone, and then remarking on a tangent from there. About the implications of 60hr/wk at Google specifically. And then going from there, about how maybe it didn't have to be like that. Moot for Google in reality, but it makes a good example for what-if thinking or daydreaming about how we'd like the next good tech employer to be.)