Google is a giant legacy company that has been around for decades now. All its executives have set their lives up around the idea of commanding a fiefdom of underlings, in person, in the Bay Area. Google execs have the ability to totally ignore the rational pull of a much cheaper distributed talent market, because Google is a Monopoly minting Monopoly-level profits.
"Monopoly does what it wants" is not interesting, nor is it big news to me.
What's more interesting is all the companies that are never going back, and all the companies started in the last 2 years that will be remote-native going forward. Given the tight market for talent right now, and falling stock prices for growth companies, I'm already pulling out the popcorn now.
Google executives have never had to think seriously about silly things like "cost-structure" before. In this next market cycle where Growth takes a back seat, it will be very fun to watch decisions like these pile up to eventually bite them in the rear 5-10 years from now.
I can see it now, investors tanking their stock price in 2026, wondering why an old company that hasn't innovated in 10 years is paying 50,000 engineers half a $million a year to sit inside the most expensive real estate on earth and do nothing.
"Monopoly does what it wants" is not interesting, nor is it big news to me.
What's more interesting is all the companies that are never going back, and all the companies started in the last 2 years that will be remote-native going forward. Given the tight market for talent right now, and falling stock prices for growth companies, I'm already pulling out the popcorn now.
Google executives have never had to think seriously about silly things like "cost-structure" before. In this next market cycle where Growth takes a back seat, it will be very fun to watch decisions like these pile up to eventually bite them in the rear 5-10 years from now.
I can see it now, investors tanking their stock price in 2026, wondering why an old company that hasn't innovated in 10 years is paying 50,000 engineers half a $million a year to sit inside the most expensive real estate on earth and do nothing.