Sergey Says: Work Like It Was 1975 at McKinsey or Booz, Allen
March 6, 2025
Yep, another dinobaby original.
Sergey Brin, invigorated with his work at the Google on smart software, has provided some management and work life tips to today’s job hunters and aspiring Alphabet employees. “In Leaked Memo to Google’s AI Workers, Sergey Brin Says 60 hours a Week Is the Sweet Spot and Doing the Bare Minimum Can Demoralize Peers”, Mr. Brin offers his view of sage management and career advice. (I do want to point out that the write up does not reference the work ethic and other related interactions of the Google Glass marketing team. My view of this facet of Mr. Brin’s contributions suggest that it is tough to put in 60 hours a week while an employee is ensconced in the Stanford Medical psychiatric ward. But that’s water under the bridge, so let’s move on to the current wisdom.)
The write up reports:
Sergey Brin believes Google can win the race to artificial general intelligence and outlined his ideas for how to do that—including a workweek that’s 50% longer than the standard 40 hours.
Presumably working harder will allow Google to avoid cheese mishaps related to pizza and Super Bowl advertising. Harder working Googlers will allow the company to avoid the missteps which have allowed unenlightened regulators in the European Union and the US to find the company exercising behavior which is not in the best interest of the service’s “users.”
The write up says:
“A number of folks work less than 60 hours and a small number put in the bare minimum to get by,” Brin wrote on Wednesday. “This last group is not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else.”
I wonder if a consistent, document method for reviewing the work of employees would allow management to offer training, counseling, or incentives to get the mavericks back in the herd.
The protests, the allegations of erratic punitive actions like firing people who use words like “stochastic”, and the fact that the 60-hour information comes from a leaked memo — each of these incidents suggests that the management of the Google may have some work to do. You know, that old nosce teipsum stuff.
The Fortune write up winds down with this statement:
Last year, he acknowledged that he “kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.” That also coincided with some high-profile gaffes in Gemini’s AI, including an image generator that produced racially diverse Na#is. [Editor note: Member of a German affiliation group in the 1930s and 1940s. I have to avoid the Google stop words list.]
And the cheese, the Google Glass marketing tours, and so much more.
Stephen E Arnold, March 6, 2025
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