the Job/Work/Employment Thread

[avatar! | 1,827]

Got a new job? Looking for a new job? Want to bitch about your current job? Want to talk about jobs? This is the thread for you!

I'll start off with this interesting article I read --

Google and Meta over-hired thousands of employees who do 'fake work,' says PayPal Mafia's Keith Rabois

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-meta-staff-do-fake-work-says-vc-keith-rabois-2023-3

Speaking remotely from Miami at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore, Rabois said that major tech firms were responsible for over-hiring and that the sector's current mass shedding of jobs to rein in costs was overdue.

"All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways," he said.

Later on the call, he estimated that Alphabet's Google and Facebook owner Meta had thousands of employees who don't do anything.

"There's nothing for these people to do — they're really — it's all fake work," he said. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."

Google, he continued, had intentionally over-hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from moving to other companies, a strategy he described as "pretty coherent." But, he added, that meant engineers had been happy to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing."

Can't say I'm really surprised. Same thing happens and is happening in academia. Many "administrators" do absolutely nothing. In fact, after covid numerous institutes of higher ed have cut back on administrators, but honestly, there are still way too many doing nothing.

Edited March 8, 2023 by avatar!

[RH | 4,965]

This might be worse.  I know for a fact as one in IT.  I considered going for my doctorate back in the mid-2000s.  I had a buddy that did as well, and it was well understood back then that once you got a CompSci docorate, you could pick between Apple/Microsoft/Google and get hired.  It was also known that Google was hiring doctorates and "they were answering Orkut tickets".

These IT corps could offer amazing salaries and perks but at the end of the day, these people had largely no work to do.  The sad fact is that Google at least articulated that if someone in the pool of really smart people was to make the "next big thing", they wanted to have them on staff plus provide them the resources to have their product as part of the Google line-up.

Well, it turns out that even if you offer doctoral candidates $250k/year (again, this was even back in the 2000s), they will leave if they really are talented and have  ambition beyond landing a gig with bragging rights.  Many of the top-talented, truly smart people end up leaving those organizations and, usually, make their own thing.  What's left are the people (mostly, but not entirely) who've worked their way through school but are now happy to sit back and rake in the pay  check.

I'm surprised it's taken this long for this to happen, but the bottom line is that if there is talent out there, these companies will always  want to be sure they have it versus their competition.  It makes sense that layoffs will happen and will continue as we move towards recession.  But if things get better consistently, I don't see this behavior stopping.

Edited March 9, 2023 by RH

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

That’s been known for about two years in Silicon Valley. The ongoing joke is asking “engineers” what they actually do. Like please describe to me your job description, its nonsense. 
 

I don’t mind because it’s causing Google to restructure their facilities. They are abandoning the properties that they have leased, and focusing on remodeling their property they actually own. More work for us!