Flexible working can harm learning and competitiveness, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said, after previously criticizing his old company’s approach to “work-life balance,” then walking back the comments.
“I am not in favor of, essentially, working at home,” Schmidt told the All-In Summit earlier this month. His comments were included in a Wednesday episode of the “All-In” podcast.
“Think about a 20-something who has to learn how the world works,” Schmidt said, adding that he learned a great deal from listening to older coworkers argue at Sun Microsystems in the early years of his career.
He asked, “How do you recreate that in this new thing?”
Schmidt said he’s “in favor of work-life balance, and that’s why people work for the government,” before saying “sorry” four times.
“If you’re going to be in tech, and you’re going to win, you’re going to have to make some tradeoffs,” he added.
The tech veteran, who was Google’s CEO for a decade and stayed on as executive chairman and then a technical advisor until 2020, said the US is “up against” China, whose work culture is often described as “996,” short for working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
“The Chinese have clarified that this is illegal,” Schmidt said. “However, they all do it. That’s who you’re competing against.”
Schmidt previously said Google’s flexible working culture was costing it the AI race. He later said he ‘misspoke.’
Schmidt was replying to a question about his comments last year that Google, now Alphabet, was falling behind in the AI race to startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic because of flexible working.
“Google decided that work-life balance, and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning,” he said during a talk at Stanford University last August, adding that “the reason startups work is because the people work like hell.”
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“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Schmidt continued in remarks later posted to Stanford’s YouTube channel. He added that startup 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.” The video was later made private after going viral.
Schmidt later withdrew his comments. A spokesperson wrote in an email to Business Insider at the time: “Eric misspoke about Google and their work hours and regrets his error.”
Schmidt didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider outside normal working hours.
Other high-profile tech figures have jabbed at flexible work in the government.
After President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that federal government employees return to the office in January, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said it was “about fairness.”
He added it wasn’t “fair that most people have to come to work to build products or provide services while Federal Government employees get to stay home.”
“Pretending to work while taking money from taxpayers is no longer acceptable,” he wrote in a follow-up post on X.
At the time, a union leader told Business Insider that Musk didn’t know “the first thing about” the federal government.
“Frankly, I don’t think he cares,” Randy Erwin, the national president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, added.