It's more of a "not even wrong" statement. It's the kind of useless and reductive analysis poor leaders trot out from a position of personal frustration after failing to surmount the challenges involved in steering a complex, messy, human institution towards success.
It's incredible how consistently this maladaptive "everyone just work harder!!" mentality crops up among failed leadership in institutions of all kinds and sizes. In this respect, Schmidt is no different to the average frustrated restaurant owner, blaming his business failures on his staff's work ethic, "no one wants to work hard these days" and other copes.
Let's say we go ahead and assume that long grinds and 100% in-office attendance is the only way a successful and highly engaged team can look. Getting to that point would still require leadership to perform the actual hard work of creating the right conditions and incentives for that successful, engaged work to emerge. Shaking your fists at the air and saying "work harder people! we need to win!" doesn't cut it.
If Schmidt allowed himself to look more closely and reflect more deeply, he would realize that Google is and was full of extremely hard workers. But their "hard work" more likely took the form of navigating Google's political structures and chasing up internal promotions and prestige.
This is all very true for a small startup and some kinds of skunk works projects.. Many companies Google's size don't allow you to work that way in general, and in some sense don't benefit from it because gaps caused by no need to write things down are too hard to fix later and more critical to them than not shipping at all.
If I had to guess, Google's problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.
You are assuming the business is entirely located in one city or at least region which is rarely the case beyond a certain size. It would also be an argument against function specific offices or locations (eg a NYC sales office) which has been a characteristic of companies for a very long time.
Function specific offices typically only exist for roles that can be done alone. Sales is a great example; it benefits from the competitive atmosphere, but sales people aren’t generally sharing leads or collaborating on deals. That, like engineering, is actually a role that could work just fine WFH.
Fairness is not important to businesses - it's important to people (employees of the company). The other people aren't blind. They see devs being able to WFH but they can't. They're not going to like that.
"They" don't like bonus for sales reps either, see it as unfair, and yet it exists. Good working conditions is the developer's incentive in many places.
Whew... unfair? Having trouble with that one. What is fairness? Why do developers owe everyone else suffering; to preserve some perceived social order? Does not compute.
>There's nothing like a team sitting together working towards a common goal. WFH can't duplicate it.
They're gonna need to put up more money to get people back in the office then. Maybe even get rid of the open office bullshit. Remember when everyone actually had offices with actual doors?
Not only are people choosing the WFH job over the in office job given the same salary and benefits, but they'll likely choose a less-paying WFH job. Your in-office job pay needs to overcome both the convenience and getting-people-to-change-jobs taxes now. Otherwise you are getting people desperate for a job or that aren't skilled enough to land a WFH job.
So it's simple: you ask for more, you pay more. We know Schmidt's comment "Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning." is just trying to get more out of workers for no additional pay. Convincing people to work harder with words only costs time.
But companies aren't doing that. They're going the opposite direction and making return to office a threatening and oppressive response. Then they are also turning around and doing layoffs on top of it. Those who are good can go find a WFH job.
None of what the CEOs are doing coincide with what they are saying, and no one trusts them. Why would you actually want to do good work for a company/CEO like that? You'd just be saving them from themselves for no additional pay and a lot more driving to work!
Google doesn't use more WFH than the competition so that's obviously a loser's excuse. The failure is in the leadership which they won't admit ever. Google will be split into 5 companies because of WFH, sure.
This feels like a generalization which isn't true across the age spectrum. I manage two products teams which are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One which has been working for more time than I have (10-20 years) and another which got their first jobs right before the pandemic so most of them have never worked outside hybrid settings. Both teams work on the same complexity and produce similar products (model optimizations mostly). These are not skunk works teams either, they are coming up with new models for lithography machines. These products run on most semiconductor fabs in the world.
I observe the younger team is way better than anyone else at remote work. Even the other more senior teams in my department. They are in fact the more social team, sometimes even I can't keep up with their in jokes. I'm not surprised, most of these people grew up with the internet (I had some teenage years without it). Many of their personal relationships are also online.
To put it crudely, if you find WFH disconnecting its a skill issue.
