- Eric Schmidt said Google was losing the AI race due to home working, but later walked back his comments.
- Jordan Thibodeau, who worked at Google for nearly a decade, said BI Schmidt's comments were out of touch.
- The former HR manager, who left Google in 2020, said bureaucracy was to blame for Google's problems.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jordan Thibodeau, a former Google and Slack employee who co-hosts the SVIC podcast.
I worked at Google for 10 years, and it was the greatest opportunity in my life.
I got a job at Google as a temporary contractor in 2011, before converting to a full-time role in 2012. I then started working in HR, specifically in mergers and acquisitions, and did that until I left in 2020.
I was really proud of my time at Google, and the company will always have a special place in my heart. Google helped me become financially stable, and it's a great company with great people.
When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said this month that Google was losing the AI race because staff were working from home, I thought they were completely out of touch.
When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made his comments about working from home, I thought they were completely out of touch.
With all due respect to Schmidt, the data does not support his interpretation of what's going on at Google.
Google pioneered the technology ChatGPT is built on. In 2017, its researchers wrote the paper which laid out the technology behind large language models.
Bureaucracy
It was not a work-from-home issue. Google had the technology, but decided not to act on it.
The real issue with Google is that there's too much bureaucracy. When I started, Google had about 30,000 employees. It was still a big company, but people were still getting stuff done.
By the time I left for Slack, there were about 135,000 employees. I felt like even in HR, we went from a fast-moving tech company to a fast-moving government department.
There was just an oppressive bureaucratic burden. A lot of my manager friends who are still at Google say that they have lost the ability to be true product managers because there's so much red tape.
Groupthink
Executives like Schmidt are just using work-from-home as a scapegoat. Look at Nvidia — Jensen Huang says he's perfectly happy for employees to work from home all they want, as long as they're producing. And they are producing: Nvidia's now one of the most valuable companies in Silicon Valley.
What annoys me about Schmidt's comments, even after he said he misspoke, is that we have groupthink here in Silicon Valley. So when a well-respected executive says things like this, other executives will listen and run with it.
It's like when Elon Musk got rid of 80% of Twitter's workforce. I think that made a lot of other executives say, hey, we can get rid of a lot of people too.
When Eric Schmidt makes those comments, he's hurting a lot of people who don't have a voice inside Google, who have been forced to relocate or are considering leaving the company because of the return-to-the-office push. (Editor's note: Google employees were told in 2022 that they must be in the office at least three days a week. The company also offers "work from anywhere weeks.")
RTO woes
When Larry Page was Google CEO, there was a policy of trying to get employees to move to central hubs. Under Sundar Pichai, the decision was left to vice presidents, who eventually started relaxing and telling employees they could work at satellite offices and be flexible.
When Covid hit, everyone was mandated to work from home. I knew quite a few Google employees who started moving to cheaper areas, and it was assumed that working from home would continue.
A lot of employees were very angry, because some of them, during Covid, were under the understanding that as long as a manager's okay with what I'm producing, I can go relocate. They felt like it was a betrayal of trust.
Return to Office crackdowns fill everyone with tremendous fear and anxiety. I've had friends who were at risk of losing their work-from-home job and have had to go get therapy.
When I eventually left to join Slack's M&A HR team, they offered me a full-time work-from-home job, which was awesome because I care for my dad. Saving 10 hours a week not commuting so I could be at home more was a huge opportunity.
A lot of former and current Googlers I've spoken to think Schmidt's comments were tone-deaf and unproductive, and they are nervous because they feel that people at the executive level might take them seriously.
Do you work for Google or have information to share? Get in touch with this reporter from a non-work device at [email protected]