Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
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.