Why is Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Against Flexible Work?

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, said in a conference interview published by the All-In podcast that he does not believe in working from home as it prevents young US employees from learning and growing, and it does not help the US tech sector compete with China’s.

Expanding on why he wouldn’t allow his employees to work remotely, he said that people in their twenties need to learn how the world works, even those who are highly educated.

Eric added: “When I think about what I learnt at Sun (Sun Microsystems) just listening to the older people –  just 5 or 10 years older than I was – argue with each other in person. How do you recreate that in this new thing?”

The former exec, who was Google’s CEO for a decade in the early 2000s, emphasised that he’s “in favour of work-life balance, and that’s why people work for the government” – before apologising for the jest.

However, the tech veteran’s reasons against working from home go beyond the employee, with Eric claiming that the US needs to remember they’re “up against the Chinese” – whose work-life balance is 9-9-6, he argues.

This means working from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week, which “the Chinese have clarified is illegal, however, they all do it”, Eric added, “and that’s who you’re competing against”.

Tech race between US and China

When asked in the conference how he conceptualised the race between the two tech giants, he responded that he thought China and the US were competing at a peer level in AI – saying the “good work” of the White House in restricting their chips was slowing them down.

“But they’re really doing something different than I thought”, Eric admitted.

He said that because China is not pursuing ambitious AGI strategies, partly because of hardware limitations and because “the depth of their capital markets don’t exist”, its tech sector is instead focusing on day-to-day AI such as consumer apps and robots.

“So the concern I have is that while we (the US) are pursuing AGI, which is incredibly interesting, we better be competing with the Chinese in day-to-day stuff”, Eric told the interviewers.

Google’s work-life balance in its early years

The former Google CEO has been criticised in the past for what he shared about the work-life balance of the tech company in its start-up days over 25 years ago.

According to Business Insider, in a talk at Stanford University in August 2024, he said: “Google decided that work-life balance, and going home early, was more important than winning. 

“The reason startups work is because people work like hell.”

He added that start-up founders aren’t going to “let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups”.

Following these comments, a spokesperson wrote an email to Business Insider at the time saying: “Eric misspoke about Google and their work hours and regrets his error.”

But Eric still believes in the power of non-remote working in building a tech empire, saying: “If you’re going to work in tech and you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some tradeoffs."