During Eric Schmidt’s talk on stage here at Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle asked the Google CEO about the origin of the 10% raise leak that eventually led to the firing of a Google employee last week.
Schmidt explained that the decision to give a raise was made in the spring, and that the company is still carrying residue of the recession, “We wanted to share our success and knew even upper-level workers are struggling with real estate costs.” Along with the increase in employee salary, Google made the commitment to focus on further acquisitions that lead to core products like Android and Maps.
While Schmidt chalked rumors of Google’s brain drain to “poor story writing” by the media, he did say that “It is a war for talent” and that the company is now hiring hundreds of people a week. Said Schmidt, “Any company of scale is subject to the following narrative, ‘Big fat dumb and happy,'” implying that this is not the case with Google.
When asked about Google’s M&A failures, Schmidt granted that Google’s had both successes and failures in terms of acquisitions. “People are ecstatic to work for Google, and people are dying to work for Google,” he insisted.