Tech Worker Confessions: Many admit they did little to nothing for years (WSJ)

Glad WSJ finally did an article on this. I’ve noticed it for several years now, and this article sums up the work ethic and culture in silicone valley.

quote:

---

These Tech Workers Say They Were Hired to Do Nothing

Amid layoffs, former workers in tech are venting about jobs with little to do; ‘hoarding us like Pokémon cards’

WSJ

Un­til last year, Made­lyn Machado, 33 years old, worked for Meta. Ex­cept she says she didn’t re­ally work at all. 

Ms. Machado, who held a po­si­tion as a re­cruiter, says that af­ter join­ing the com­pany in Sep­tember 2021, she spent much of her time in meet­ings that didn’t ac­com­plish any­thing, and that the par­ent of Face­book and In­sta­gram had too many re­cruiters and not enough work for them to do.  

“We just don’t hire any­body and, like, we still get paid,” she said she was told by other re­cruiters in a vi­ral Tik­Tok video doc­u­ment­ing her ex­pe­ri­ence. She added that she was paid $190,000 a year and was told she wasn’t ex­pected to hire any­one in her first year, given that she was still learn­ing the ropes. Meta de­clined to com­ment. 

In re­cent weeks, other for­mer tech work­ers have posted sim­i­lar videos, rack­ing up mil­lions of views. They say they col­lected pay­checks from large tech com­pa­nies with­out do­ing much. 

---

quote:

---

Such con­fes­sions—which have drawn plenty of crit­i­cism on­line—aren’t sur­pris­ing, ex­ec­u­tives and in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­als say. Tech com­pa­nies that boomed dur­ing the pan­demic were flush with cash, they say, and snapped up work­ers to build a deep bench and hoard tal­ent from com­peti­tors, even if those work­ers weren’t be­ing fully uti­lized.

---

quote:

---

Oth­ers blame what they view as a per­mis­sive cor­po­rate cul­ture in Sil­i­con Val­ley that cre­ates en­vi­ron­ments where it’s pos­si­ble to stay em­ployed with­out work­ing hard. Thomas Siebel, head of the soft­ware com­pany C3.ai Inc., says tech em­ploy­ers’ em­brace of re­mote work has made mat­ters worse.

“Peo­ple were job-hop­ping from jobs where they were do­ing noth­ing, work­ing from home, to an­other where they were do­ing noth­ing, work­ing from home, and got paid 15% more,” he says. Em­ploy­ees at Mr. Siebel’s com­pany are ex­pected to work full time from the of­fice, which he says is es­sen­tial to high per­for­mance and col­lab­o­ra­tion. 

 

---

There is still a loose structure to most of these tech companies. So under performers can go a long time before they are identified as useless and RIF’ed. Many leave voluntarily and move to the next startup when structure is applied, accountability becomes traceable, and their job becomes “uncool”. That’s their whole career: bouncing from start up to start up…doing nothing, then leaving when expected to actually do something.

This should surprise nobody that works with Silicon Valley companies.