As a worker from home guy (I am fully remote), I feel offended by this over-simplifying statement:
I'm one of the top contributor in the company I work for (it was officially acknowledged).
Also, as a solo parent, work life balance is uppermost important to me.
What he miss out is that by restricting the bucket of employees/human you consider, you get ride of top talents that aren't to your norms.
I am similar, having built and run many high-performance, remote-friendly teams, several of which have built hundreds of millions+ in value, maybe a few billion because it continues to compound over time.
Schmidt is entitled to his opinion, though it's been a long time since he's been personally involved in personally getting things done. He's also been hanging out with his friend Elon and absorbing that narrative into his brain.
Also, it's difficult to comment what WFH looks like "on average". In my career I've learned the brutal reality of what "average" really means and looks like. Spoiler alert: Average human behavior is often surprisingly lr even shockingly lower than I anticipated.
Yet, Google, and the Bay Area and other tech hubs are full of at least slightly to moderately above average people, due to the natural competition to even survive and be successful in these areas.
TL;DR: Don't take it personally, there are exceptions to every rule.
I didn't read the mention of work from home as all that important of an example in making his point, and ironically I interpreted it in an entirely neutral light.
He could have instead said that Google decided it was more important to let people have lives outside of work instead of winning, and I'd interpret it the same way, because only an idiot sacrifices too much for their employer. He's not saying it's a bad thing in general, he's saying that if the company's goal is to win, it needs to crack the whip on people who are highly intelligent, but too stupid, too arrogant, and have no other concept of life outside their screens and bank accounts that they'll do literally whatever is demanded of them.
You should be proud to be able to raise a kid _at_all_, but even prouder of the fact that you're only willing to give your company marginally more than you need to in order to make it work. If you needed to work harder I'm sure you would, but you shouldn't be volunteering to do double extra overtime so sociopaths from the valley can flex on other sociopaths from South Africa.
I don't have friends who do this for their companies because those hypothetical people traded friends and sanity for promised clout and stock options. Who fucking cares it's just tech shit.
Also, as a solo parent, work life balance is uppermost important to me.
What he miss out is that by restricting the bucket of employees/human you consider, you get ride of top talents that aren't to your norms.