Former Google CEO Explains Why He is ‘Not in Favor of’ Working From Home
Eric Schmidt said people have to make tradeoffs to succeed in tech.
Flexible work, with days spent working from home, needs to be eliminated, says Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt spoke on an episode of the “All-In” podcast, which aired on Wednesday. In the episode, Schmidt said that he was “not in favor of, essentially, working at home,” because it inhibits learning in junior employees.
He mentioned that he learned from “elder people” while he was working at Sun Microsystems, a computer manufacturer purchased by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion, by being in the office and listening to conversations. Schmidt worked at Sun from 1983 to 1997, rising from a software manager role to become vice president of the Sun General Systems Group.
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“Think about a 20-something who has to learn how the world works,” Schmidt said on the podcast. “When I think about how much I learned when I was at Sun, just listening to these elder people who were five or 10 years older than I was, argue with each other, in person, how do you recreate that in this new thing?”
Though Schmidt said he was “in favor of work-life balance,” he mentioned that tech workers have to make “some tradeoffs” between the two in order to succeed.
“If you’re going to be in tech, and you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some tradeoffs,” Schmidt said.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Photo by Shahar Azran/Getty Images
Schmidt was CEO of Google for a decade, from 2001 to 2011. Last year, he said at a Stanford University talk that Google fell behind in the AI race due to remote work policies for its staff. Google allows employees to work from home two days a week.
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“Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” Schmidt said at the time. “The reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”
Schmidt later walked back his remarks, saying he “misspoke.”
Companies like Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T have enforced strict return-to-office mandates this year, requiring staff to work from the office five days a week. The initiatives have met with pushback, as employees protested the impact on work-life balance, but have since been implemented.
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Flexible work, with days spent working from home, needs to be eliminated, says Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt spoke on an episode of the “All-In” podcast, which aired on Wednesday. In the episode, Schmidt said that he was “not in favor of, essentially, working at home,” because it inhibits learning in junior employees.
He mentioned that he learned from “elder people” while he was working at Sun Microsystems, a computer manufacturer purchased by Oracle in 2010 for $7.4 billion, by being in the office and listening to conversations. Schmidt worked at Sun from 1983 to 1997, rising from a software manager role to become vice president of the Sun General Systems Group.
