CIO Insights: Efficiency or economising?

The end of 'Move fast and break things'?

"Multitasking Makes You Stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong."

So writes Jeff Sutherland, who coined the term 'scrum', in Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time.

It's a book that Google's Sundar Pichai could stand to read - preferably before having announced this week that Google Cloud employees will have to share desks in a drive for "real estate efficiency."

By itself, the move is uncontroversial; plenty of firms hotdesk these days, and plenty (mostly American) use euphemisms like "efficiency" when what they mean is "cost savings."

It's the second half of the announcement that's caused anger. Workers have to come back to the office, but on alternate days: either Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday (forcing staff in on a Friday still appears to be a step too far), which immediately undermines the stated goals of efficiency and collaboration.

"Our data show Cloud Googlers value guaranteed in-person collaboration when they are in the office," wrote one spokesperson, apparently forgetting that only having half the employee base in at once is something of an impediment to that aim.

Other tech firms, who championed and enabled remote work in the pandemic, are also bringing people back into the fold now that stocks are falling and the boom times are over. It's a clear signal that the time for experimentation and moonshot ideas - the era of "Move fast and break things" - is taking a backseat at Big Tech as we enter Zuckerberg's Year of Efficiency.

Coming up next...

This week also signals the anniversary of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, which was partly responsible for the massive cost rises now forcing companies to consolidate spending. Tech was very much on the frontline in the early days of the war, and next week we'll feature a case study with a Kharkiv-based IT firm, on how a robust business continuity plan enabled it to keep operating in the middle of an evacuation.

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