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Journalism of Courage
The former CEO of Google has a warning for American tech workers, and some may not like it. Eric Schmidt, who previously led the search engine giant, said during a conference interview published by the All-In podcast that remote work isn’t helping US tech companies compete with China’s cutthroat work culture.
“If you are going to be in tech and you are going to win, you are going to have to make some tradeoffs,” Schmidt said. “Remember, we are up against the Chinese; the Chinese work-life balance consists of 996, which is 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.”
Schmidt said he was “in favor of work-life balance, and that’s why people work for the government,” before saying “sorry” four times.
Schmidt has previously criticised his former company, Google, for its easy policies on remote work and productivity. In a talk at Stanford University last year, he said, “Google decided that work-life balance, and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning.” Stanford later deleted the video, and Schmidt took his comments back.
When asked about how he saw the tech race between the two nations, 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.
