Shin Ji Won reports
Editor: Peach Britta
【New Zhiyuan Guide】Silicon Valley big factories that have been over-recruited have seen a surge of layoffs. Meta former employees not only do not have to work after joining the company, but also get a 6-figure annual salary for nothing.
In Silicon Valley, batches of employees have been told to lay off jobs and are ongoing.
Layoffs.fyi data shows that this year alone, 528 companies have made layoffs and 153,598 people have lost their jobs.
Behind the "hands on the knife" of Silicon Valley big factories is the result of excessive recruitment under the epidemic and being eaten back.
Some time ago, Meta opened the second round of big layoffs. Amazon also announced the layoff of 9,000 people again after cutting 18,000 jobs in January. Google's 12,000 layoffs announced in January continues...
Thomas Siebel, CEO of billionaire tech companies, has said that "Meta and Google overhire employees to the point that someone doesn't do anything at all."
People who are recruited come to work are nagging, sleeping, and they can get a high salary without working!
Recently, Britney Levy, an employee who left Meta, broke the news on TikTok that during his employment, he not only did not have to work, but also received a 6-figure annual salary.
The laid-off employee revealed that he had nothing to do after joining the company
Britney Levy called himself a "fake work" at Meta on Tik Tok.
Levy revealed that he joined in April 2022. After entering Meta, she did a diversity survey and was placed in a very strange position.
In that group, no one had to work. Levy said she had to work very hard to find some work to do.
She said Meta collected them like Pokémon cards so that other companies wouldn't hire them.
There is media analysis Levy is part of Meta's one-year diversity program. The program helps employees from underrepresented backgrounds in technical recruitment. After about 7 months with the company, Levy was fired.
Levy can talk about her work on TikTok because she didn't sign Meta's severance deal.
She also said that many people feel that they are recruited to facilitate future layoffs. For those who are very capable and turn down other good company positions, Meta is like a deliberate waste of their professional life.
Even if many people think that getting paid for nothing is a great thing. But this can make employees who can only waste time feel like they have achieved nothing, because there are no highlights to put on their resumes after leaving.
Another TikTok user, @maddie_macho, also said she was paid $190,000 for doing nothing at Meta.
In 2016, HBO's drama "Silicon Valley" mocked the concept of "fake jobs."
At the time, a character in the play was promoted at a Google company called Hooli, but was not assigned to the project. This role joins a group of other unassigned employees who spend all day on the roof of the company, doing nothing, waiting for their contracts to expire.
At the time, an engineer in Silicon Valley said the reality was that "after working at Google to a certain point, you get paid a lot, and once you get to that point, there's no reason to work hard." Life is beautiful, you can maximize your holidays and come whenever you want."
In addition, earlier this month, Keith Rabois, an investor who used to work for companies such as PayPal and LinkedIn, also raised the idea of "fake jobs".
He pointed out at the time that Google and Meta hired thousands of employees who were not paid for anything.
He said big tech companies are chasing headcount for vanity, hiring mediocre employees to make the company look thriving. But these people are irrelevant in the company, and this practice also prevents these employees from joining their competitors.
Fake work has a long history
It turned out that this practice was called "rest and vest", which means that Silicon Valley employees, especially programmers, are paid and their shares are shared.
Their workload is easy, and most of their time is spent looking at stocks, participating in "pet projects" by the way, and swiping their phones.
The "pet project" here refers to executives interested in the project, and when they join the sponsorship of the project, the entire scope of the project will suddenly expand far beyond the original vision.
This previously only applied to a small group of people. Those who stay because of intellectual property, or those who stay because the cost of firing is too high. However, thousands of people are now recruited in this way.
According to Scott Latham, a professor of strategic management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the tech industry during the internet boom, fake jobs have a "long history" in the tech industry.
"One of the reasons Silicon Valley has become more advantageous than the East Coast is that East Coast companies have become bloated, and they have created fake jobs, which is the previous pet project."
This concept breaks with the tradition in the tech world, where people thought tech companies needed long, complete engagement, like spending the night in the office and every waking hour in a well-designed tech park.
While some experts say "fake jobs" are a natural part of the tech industry's boom and bust cycle, not everyone agrees.
CEO coach Eric Nitzberg, who has worked with hundreds of tech leaders, said the problem of fake jobs never arose in his conversations with executives.
"I don't think it's consistent with reality, of course, there is a certain difference in the intensity of people's work. There are a few people who can work 40 hours a week and do it fairly well, but that's a minority. In most cases, these people work very hard."
Mismanaged
The recent layoffs mark the first major contraction in the tech industry after a decade of growth that has sent several large companies worth more than $1 trillion and avoided a drain to smaller companies.
Last year, Microsoft CEO Nadella warned that remote work caused "productivity paranoia" among managers.
That is, when it comes to the employee productivity that working from home provides, bosses aren't really impressed, and workers dismiss it.
The cognitive disconnect between these two groups is influenced by productivity paranoia.
Harry Kraemer, a management professor at Northwestern University and former CEO of Baxter, accused big tech companies of hoarding talent, a strategy he said was "not economically viable" for the industry's sheer number of workers.
Still, some experts say companies with more replacement staff may have some benefits as company productivity fluctuates. Latham of the University of Massachusetts Lowell said temporary placement of an employee between project breaks could help curb the high cost of hiring and training new employees.
Latham said, "Substitution is about getting good people involved and staying with the company. HR managers in the high-tech sector have been fighting for more than a decade, how can I find the right people? How do I keep them in the organization?"
However, Latham says the practice is also vulnerable to abuse. In the case of Meta and Google, he said, that's the symptom of bloat: The company is growing too fast, and in a downturn, substitutes will be eliminated first.
Latham went on to say, "I think these fake jobs are just people who aren't properly managed, and I would put the blame entirely on the managers, not the employees." Most workers want to come to work. They want to show up and give their fair eight hours of work."
Eventually, executives took aim at employees as excuses for "mismanagement" and "poor planning."
Resources:
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/britney-levy-meta-job?lang=en
https://www.businessinsider.com/coasting-fake-work-tech-workers-excuse-bad-management-2023-3