Technology

a) you're right. Everyone who says this is right

b) If the senior leaders have designed their own ivory towers to force obsequious behaviour from their own people, they sure as shit won't listen to totally reasonable analysis from people who don't work for them. As such, they have engineered their own demise. I wish them well with it.

Yeah and they make ad revenue hand over fist. So anything else is just “experimental” to them aka a cost center. Since they don’t commit to these side products they don’t become profitable and inevitably get cancelled.

Odd coming from someone who is fucking retired.

I'd suspect he sacrificed work-life balance his whole career (yes, CEOs are known for golfing and vacations, but I bet they still think of work 24/7). So just like people complaining about student loan forgiveness, some people get so angry if they perceive someone might have an easier experience than they did.

The suits have taken over and are cannibalizing the current portfolio. Search is being transformed into a large AI powered advertisement billboard to pump up the profit. Now they're all surprised search is less used and realize that search is the gateway to their other services. And the management blame storm begins.

He's complaining that googlers aren't killing products faster anymore because of the remote work. It was easier to just say "hey how about we kill gtalk" over on campus coffee shop discussions, but now they've to do that on Google meet and it limits the imagination of what all they could kill next week.

Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.

He retired from his role at Google a few years ago so yeah…

But he is still a typical C-Suite asshole. Blame workers for strategic corporate failures (Googles competition all offer WFH) and take personal credit (and bonuses) for any and all successes.

H&R Block has prioritized these worker-focused things since 2020, and in the past year its stock price has frequently broken its record high since going public in 1962. Its CEO has been interviewed by Fortune magazine about his commitment to keeping a “work from anywhere” policy at the company. The business is “winning” by the most public metric used to determine that, and I think their commitment to these exact things is a big part of why.

It’s amazing: when you treat employees like human beings, you tend to have better employees, and better employees make you more successful. /shocked pikachu face

It saved him like several hundred per month.

If you live within biking distance of Google, you are spending a ton of money on rent. Work from home is way cheaper, especially since you can just live somewhere with sub-million houses.

It's pretty easy to be in the office and not working. Especially with all those different places to get lost. I really doubt that works out the way they want it to

and nobody in the Stanford audience had the balls to yell out "IT FUCKING IS" at him after he said it. Cowards and sycophants, all.

I think it's been proven time and time again that return to office mandates are a way to avoid severance packages. People end up leaving voluntarily. In the age of tens of thousands of layoffs at all the big tech companies this has to have saved them thousands of salaries worth of compensation packages.

They don't care about the "quality" of workers because if someone is truly important they get exceptions, everyone else is imminently replaceable.

In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.

There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it's WFH the company managers and owners don't have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that's the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.

Of course not. They were taking notes as they expect to be next in line to grind the peasants.