Silicon Valley's return-to-office battle is still a hot mess
- The debate over remote work in Silicon Valley is far from over.
- Eric Schmidt triggered fresh debate following critical comments of Google's flexible work policy.
Flexible working still appears to be a very touchy subject in Silicon Valley.
Former Google boss Eric Schmidt became the latest tech leader to weigh in on the merits of in-office versus flexible working this week after a video surfaced of him lamenting his former company's embrace of the latter in the face of fierce competition on AI.
In his view, Google had spent too long emphasizing "work-life balance and going home early and working from home" over "winning," leading it to fall behind younger startups such as OpenAI.
It's worth noting the video in which Schmidt addressed Stanford University students has now been taken down, with the ex-Google CEO claiming he "misspoke about Google and their work hours" in comments to The Wall Street Journal. Google has also shifted its working policy in recent times, with office attendance becoming a growing priority since last year.
Still, it's clear that tensions around the conversation remain high in the tech sector, as Schmidt's comments have triggered a fresh debate in Silicon Valley over a topic that has left company leaders in favor of return-to-office mandates in a tough stand-off with some employees.
Bojan Tunguz, a senior systems software engineer at Nvidia for more than four years until leaving his role in April, had this to say to Schmidt's take on X: "Cope. I know one large tech company that is bigger than Google and keeps on winning while not sacrificing any work-life balance."
The tech company Tunguz is referring to here, of course, is his former employer.
Nvidia may offer the single strongest rebuttal to the notion that remote work saps productivity having seen an explosion of growth since the start of the AI boom — growth that led it to briefly become the world's most valuable company this year — without following in the footsteps of rivals like Meta and Amazon, which have implemented stringent office mandates on their employees.
Those strongly in favor of in-person work include OpenAI's Sam Altman, who labeled remote work "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes", and Elon Musk — the Tesla and X boss who once brandished remote workers as being "detached from reality." However, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang as resisted imposing RTO mandates.
Schmidt's comments in the Stanford lecture has also drawn criticism from those closer to home.
Incentives and ownership
François Chollet, a software engineer working on deep learning at Google, took to X on Wednesday to offer his take on what the obsession over in-person work misses: hard work isn't necessarily the byproduct of a sweeping mandate.
"Getting employees to work hard," he wrote, is "a matter of incentives and ownership. People do their best when they work on interesting problems, in a self-directed manner, and get rewarded for success. "This is true regardless of location and schedules."
Where the tech industry will eventually land on this debate is unclear. Many tech chiefs remain adamant that the best work is work that's done in person, in the office. Getting their workforce to think along similar lines may prove somewhat more challenging.