Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Silicon Valley companies, which have been over-recruited, are laying off staff. Former employees of Meta revealed that they not only didn't have to work, but also got a six-figure annual salary for nothing.

In Silicon Valley, batches of employees have been told to lay off workers and are continuing.

This year alone, 528 companies have laid off staff and 153598 people have lost their jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi.

Behind the "hand-to-hand knife attack" of large Silicon Valley companies is the result of excessive recruitment and counter-engulfment under the epidemic.

Some time ago, Meta launched a second round of layoffs. Amazon also announced another 9000 layoffs after cutting 18000 jobs in January. The 12000 job cuts announced by Google in January are still continuing.

Thomas Siebel, chief executive of a billionaire technology company, has said that "Meta and Google hire people so much that some people don't do anything at all".

People who are recruited to go to work are chatting and sleeping, and they can get a high salary without having to work.

Recently, Britney Levy, an employee who left Meta, revealed on TikTok that during his tenure, he not only did not have to work, but also received a six-figure annual salary.

The laid-off employee revealed that he had nothing to do after entering the job. Britney Levy said on Tik Tok that he was in Meta's "fake job" (fake work).

Levy revealed that he joined the job in April 2022. After joining Meta, she did a diversity survey and was assigned to a very strange position.

In that group, no one has to work. Levy said helplessly that she had to work very hard to find some work to do.

She says Meta collects them like Pokemon cards so that other companies don't hire them.

Some media have analyzed that Levy is part of Meta's one-year diversification plan. The program helps employees from underrepresented backgrounds to engage in technical recruitment. After working for the company for about seven months, Levy was fired.

Levy can talk about her work on TikTok because she didn't sign Meta's severance agreement.

She also said that many people feel that they have been recruited to facilitate future layoffs. For those who are capable and turn down other good company jobs, Meta seems to be deliberately wasting their professional lives.

Even though many people think it's a great thing to get paid for nothing. But it makes employees who can only waste their time feel like they can't accomplish anything, because there are no bright spots on their resumes after leaving.

Another TikTok user @ maddie_macho also said she was paid $190000 for doing nothing at Meta.

In 2016, HBO's Silicon Valley mocked the concept of "fake jobs".

A character in the show was promoted at a Google company called Hooli but was not assigned to the project. The role joins a group of other unassigned employees who sit around on the roof of the company all day, waiting for their contracts to expire.

At the time, an engineer in Silicon Valley said that the reality was so good: "when Google works to a certain extent, you will be paid a lot, and once you get to that point, there is no reason to work hard." Life is good. You can maximize your vacation and come as soon as you want. "

In addition, earlier this month, Keith Rabois, an investor who had worked for Paypal, LinkedIn and other companies, also put forward the idea of "fake jobs."

He pointed out at the time that Google and Meta employed thousands of people who were paid to do nothing.

He said that large technology companies pursue the number of employees for the sake of vanity, hiring some employees of mediocre abilities, which makes the company look prosperous. But in fact, these people are not important in the company, which also prevents these employees from joining their competitors.

Fake jobs have been around for a long time, and this practice is called "rest and vest", in which employees in Silicon Valley, especially programmers, get paid and share.

Their workload is easy and they spend most of their time reading stocks, taking part in the "pet project" and brushing their phones.

The "pet project" here refers to executives who are interested in the project, and after joining and sponsoring the project, the scope of the project will suddenly expand far beyond the original vision.

This used to apply only to a small number of people. Those who stay because of intellectual property rights, or because the cost of dismissal is too high. But now thousands of people have been recruited in this way.

According to Scott Latham, a professor of strategic management at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the technology industry during the dotcom boom, fake jobs have a "long history" in the technology industry.

"one of the reasons Silicon Valley has become more advantageous than the East Coast is that East Coast companies have become bloated, creating fake jobs, the previous pet programs. "

This concept breaks with the tradition of the technology world, where people thought that the work of a technology company required long hours and full commitment, such as spending the night in the office and spending every waking time in a well-designed technology park.

While some experts say "fake jobs" are a natural part of the boom and bust cycles of the technology industry, not everyone agrees.

Eric Nitzberg, the chief executive coach who has worked with hundreds of technology leaders, said the problem of fake jobs never came up in his conversations with executives.

"I don't think this is consistent with the reality, of course, there are some differences in the intensity of people's work. There are a few people who can work 40 hours a week and do it quite well, but that's a few. In most cases, these people work very hard. "

Mismanaged recently, massive layoffs mark the first major contraction in the technology industry after a decade of growth, which has soared the market capitalization of several big companies to more than $1 trillion and avoided the flow of these talents to smaller companies.

Last year, Microsoft CEO Nadella warned that telecommuting caused "productivity paranoia" among managers.

That is, when it comes to the productivity provided by working from home, bosses don't really make an impression, and workers don't think so.

The cognitive disconnect between these two groups is affected by productivity paranoia.

Harry Kraemer, a management professor at Northwestern University and former chief executive of Baxter, accused big technology companies of hoarding talent, saying the industry had a large number of workers and that the strategy "made no economic sense".

However, some experts say that with the ups and downs of corporate productivity, companies with more substitute employees may have some benefits. Latham of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell says temporary placement of an employee during the program break can help curb the high cost of hiring and training new employees.

Latham said, "the replacement is to get good employees involved and stay in the company." HR managers in the high-tech field have been fighting for this for more than a decade. How can I find the right person? How do I keep them in the organization? "

However, Latham says the practice can also be easily abused. In the case of Meta and Google, he says, this is a symptom of bloating: the company is growing so fast that in a market downturn, replacement employees will be eliminated first.

Latham added, "I think these fake jobs are just people who are not properly managed, and I blame the managers, not the employees. Most workers want to come to work. They want to show up and work a fair eight hours. "

In the end, executives pointed the finger at employees as an excuse for "poor management" and "poor planning".

Reference:

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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xin Zhiyuan (ID:AI_era)

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