If you’re a bad at management, don’t blame remote work

There aren’t many things that make me angry, but when remote work gets the blame for the lack of success of a project, it boils my blood. Especially if the project in question is Google’s “AI” undertakings, and the message between the lines is that workers slack off when they’re unsupervised. I’m referring to an interview with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Stanford’s School of Engineering. Asked about the reasons Google is lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic, this was his response:

“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning. And the startups, the reason startups work is the people work like hell.”

He continued:

“I’m sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”

Hoo boy, there’s a lot to unpack. Firstly, “one day a week” is a number Schmidt made up himself. Google’s policy is that employees have to spend at least three days a week at the office. Schmidt later provided a correction to the Wall Street Journal, saying, “I misspoke about Google and their work hours. I regret my error.” He also asked Stanford to take down the video; it’s no longer on the school’s YouTube channel.

I mean, come on

Schmidt’s argument that Google allowing their staff to work from home is the reason its LLM applications are losing the race with the competition never held water. It’s easy to see how flimsy this argument was, given that said competition actually has pretty similar WFH policies to Google’s.

We also have to talk about how, according to the billionaire ex-Google-CEO, “winning” has to be more important than “work-life balance”. After all, “the reason startups work is the people work like hell”. I mean, he’s not totally wrong. I worked like hell every time I started a new business. It took years of hard work for my current company to reach calmer waters. The catch is that this company has been remote-first from its start in 2010.

Good management breeds good results

Remote work isn’t antithetical to hard work. The only prerequisite is that your management isn’t shit. The downsides of working from home can easily be mitigated by managing based on outcomes. This modus operandi, known as a “results-only work environment”, requires more smarts than counting butts in chairs. But that’s why managers are getting paid the big bucks, right?

Well, that doesn’t seem what Schmidt had in mind, seeing how he demanded that “people work like hell”. What I think he meant was that it takes so much less effort to put pressure on people when you as their boss are standing in front of them. That it’s easier to tell them that they’ll have to work long hours and weekends in person than on a video call.

Winning is key, even if it means we lose

Maybe it even sounds less ridiculous when you remind them to their face that the important thing isn’t work-life balance, it’s winning! Well, perhaps not.

“Winning” is of course shorthand for people like Schmidt getting even richer. On the other hand, many of the people who actually go through hell at work will be laid off eventually. The reason being either that they’re burnt out from too much winning, or, you know, “because AI”.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, but if the first thing that comes to mind when you’re asked why your dumpster fire of Artificial Enshittification is even less successful than the rest of the companies desperately trying to make LLM fetch happen is “It’s because of remote work!”, then you’re either a moron or a fucking grifter.

The reason startups work is not because they push their employees to their limits. It’s because they develop a functioning business model, work out product-market fit, and execute on delivering value to customers. Instead of implicating innocent remote workers, Google might want to divert some attention to these aspects rather sooner than later.