7 ms·

Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'

56 points by berkeleyjunk 4y ago

pictur 4y ago
We want to think that the people who run companies are very smart and would not do such things. but what we have to accept is that they are human too. So they're all essentially stupid.
- adrr 4y ago
  If you're drowning in money, people tend to spend it foolishly. I say this looking at my DJI drone sitting in the corner collecting dust.
  - pictur 4y ago
    that's exactly what i mean lol
- berkeleyjunk 4y ago
  I think avoiding smart people starting competitors by keeping them employed with high comps might be a good strategy for some of these cash rich and profitable companies. They might have been thinking of this as a good insurance.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    It's good strategy for the company, but bad for society*. I regard this as an example of market failure, where productive folk (who presumably want to do things that are cool and noteworthy) are diverted into sinecures to limit corporate competitors. The market for talent is being cornered here, just as a commodity trader might seek to corner the market to drive prices upward (or occasionally downward, to the detriment of a weak competitor). This seems like a prima facie case for regulatory intervention to require divestment or breakup. * I know, I know, 'how can we say it's bad, what if the resultant competition created environmental destruction or led to the invention of a basilisk.'
- CurtHagenlocher 4y ago
  Yes, as opposed to rich investors like Marc Andreessen who really are very smart and certainly don't "work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs."
__derek__ 4y ago
Actual title provides better context: > Google overhired talent to do ‘fake work’ and stop them working for rivals, claims former PayPal boss Keith Rabois The submitted title makes it look like a settled fact/conclusion, but there's no evidence provided AFAICT.
- wnevets 4y ago
  > stop them working for rivals, I thought this well known within the industry? Isn't this the point of the university to FAANG pipeline?
  - sidfthec 4y ago
    You can hire to outpace your competitors without having them do "fake work" once hired (whatever that means). It doesn't make much sense to not fully utilize people once hired.
    - wnevets 4y ago
      I'm not convinced most people at very large companies are doing "real" work most of the time anyway. Wouldn't need to do anything special at these large companies to create fake work just for these people, it would just be "regular" work.
      - sidfthec 4y ago
        I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech. I don't know anyone who does what I could consider "fake work". Unless you think anyone who doesn't measurably and immediately impact the bottom line is doing "fake work".
        wnevets 4y ago
        > I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech. I'm not limiting this sentiment to just big tech. For example very big companies tend to have a large number of people who do a lot of talking without saying actually saying anything. I would argue being trapped in those long meetings is "fake" work. The large number of employees working from home since COVID has shown most of those long meetings didn't need to happen. Now that the four day work week is gaining momentum with no lost of productivity[1] we have even more proof of the amount of "fake" work being done. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-week-uk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...
oh_sigh 4y ago
- According to some guy with no direct knowledge of the situation.
m3kw9 4y ago
Making fake work look like real work seem hard
buildbot 4y ago
This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.
- GVIrish 4y ago
  The fact that Twitter had to ask some of the people it laid off to come back shortly after having fired them says it all about how incompetent and self-defeating those layoffs were.
  - beebmam 4y ago
    The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate. You can certainly barely operate a web services company with a barebones crew: we all do it every year during the holidays! But long term growth? Yeah, good luck with that. Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
    - sidfthec 4y ago
      Twitter lost 200mil on 5b in revenue in 2021 and has had a handful of profitable quarters in recent history. Not sure why you think it's "not even remotely profitable and likely never will be". Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
    - spicybright 4y ago
      That's actually a good point. I bet it helps as a marking tool for his future investments too. "He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!" "He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
skarfloc 4y ago
let's see all the FAANG people rise up in HN and defend their bullshit jobs. I'm a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I've been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.
- manuelmoreale 4y ago
  Allow me this question: what % of the tech world do you think it truly is essential? I’m asking in the broader sense. Essential to modern society not essential within the scope of a company.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Essential to society? 1/4 to 1/3; maybe less.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Good lord. Almost none of it, if by "tech" you mean "software". Most of it's pushing consumerism via invasive advertising, spreading lies on purpose, or chasing marginal improvements in entertainment. I also suspect the majority of B2B activity is neutral or negative in actual delivered value over whatever it's replacing. [EDIT] I think this is true even for extremely generous values of "essential", in fact. I think the vast majority of software effort delivers marginal gains at best, with a net effect that is overall harmful in the median case, which harm is masked by the occasional huge improvement it delivers.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      Well, software is not just the web. Software that runs medical equipment is valuable and essential for example. And I think the same is true for all sorts of digital infrastructure. I’m thinking about software to run the power grid or running street lights or controlling a dam. There’s countless examples of useful to society pieces of software. But there are also countless other that are example of the opposite.
dougb5 4y ago
“There’s nothing for these people to do—it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.” Wait, what do VCs like him do with their time? Or are those meetings somehow more legitimate?
dcreater 4y ago
There is absolutely a trend of empire growing. Managers vying to get head count just to grow their power
subjectsigma 4y ago
Pfft, these guys are amateurs, I work in government contracting and we’ve been doing this for years! Note that I think my job is at least somewhat important, I write code so at least I produce something. But there’s dozens of not hundreds of people whose jobs consist entirely of meetings, signing paperwork, and taking multi-hour lunch breaks…
agilob 4y ago
>Sundar Pichai previously said he takes "full responsibility" for the decisions which lead to mass layoffs, and has now been accused of hiring sprees for "vanity". How does one take "full responsibility" for such decisions? Give yourself pat on a back? Pay raise to compensate for moral losses?
- playingalong 4y ago
  In theory it means he doesn't blame anyone or anything else. In practice it's just a rhetoric figure
- bitL 4y ago
  Thoughts and prayers.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  He should step down and donate his riches to charity to prove he means it.
tqi 4y ago
"Fake work" is a pretty funny accusation from guy whose company (Opendoor) is 97% down from all time high and dangerously close to getting delisted from NASDAQ.
karmasimida 4y ago
So what is fake work then? Maybe he is implying smaller impact but that is case for all mega crop It seems a useless accusation tbh
dhosek 4y ago
John Gruber was saying this months ago, pointing out that Apple hasn’t had big cuts because they didn’t do this sort of vanity hiring.
unxdfa 4y ago
This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She'd been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn't done anything useful for a year and was just there to put it on her CV and was suicidally bored. I bet she got laid off recently. Anyway it's not like it doesn't happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn't show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We're talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.
mellosouls 4y ago
I think "fake work" seems a reasonable phrase to describe what a lot of the mouse-moving class do, or at least it's difficult to connect it to real world value - and I wouldn't necessarily exclude the digital workers looking in here at a remove from the redundancies. When you consider the mental and physical energy and time it takes to produce the life of relevant comfort and safety of the average Western digital worker against the raw materials and environment that life is extracted and fashioned from (compared, say, to the prospect of surviving against nature on your wits and bodily power alone or the plight of a penniless war refugee), can you honestly say with a straight face: "yes, I deserve that"? We - most of us - live off the value provided us from the great good fortune of having been born in to a society fashioned and built over hundreds of years; it seems to me that provides the bulk of what we "earn" as individuals, and particularly so in the digital economies.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Lol @ the defensive downvotes
YeahNO 4y ago
I can't think of anything more demoralizing than being hired simply to warehouse my talent to keep me out of competitors' shops while feeding me bullshit go-nowhere projects or leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.
protastus 4y ago
This article is a word salad. The headline is not supported by evidence and looks like a causal fallacy. The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator's dilemma.
CountSessine 4y ago
This is consistent with my bias that FAANG salaries are where they are to discourage developers from accepting equity stakes at start-ups that could eventually disrupt the FAANG companies - that these salaries exist to starve the start-up ecosystem. I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.
candybar 4y ago
I mean this is true in that large organizations are internally wasteful - a lot of people are just there to shuffle resources around and a lot of the decisions are bad, entire teams are working on worthless projects, etc. But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it's just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste. Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.
sgammon 4y ago
rabois telling on himself again
rektide 4y ago
Ok so, apologies, didn't read, but it's a juicy idea unto itself. Personally I really want companies to build like ~4 teams with the same mission, same goal. Not fake work, but duplicative work. (Whether we tell folks this is happening or not: either way.) Over time, try to figure out what are the best potentials/possibilities, what are the most promising components/people. Organizationally iterate. Developers are iterative as fuck, imo. Organizations just kind of have people & stay there, doing whatever. Trying to explore the space of dynamical organizations is a huge huge huge interest that I think society is no where near, but could greatly better the world & what happens. Imo, we have a very: your org goes to battle with the team they have mentality. Personally I think orgs would, long term, do much better with a more deliberate effort to explore broader takes. I have a hard time connecting it explicitly, but I really dug the thinkpiece MIT paper "Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing 'Virtual Countries'?"[1], which to me suggested more dynamical orgs that had more than the single-poker-in-each-fire view that predominates the corporate world. [1] http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html

56 points by berkeleyjunk 4y ago

We want to think that the people who run companies are very smart and would not do such things. but what we have to accept is that they are human too. So they're all essentially stupid.

adrr 4y ago
If you're drowning in money, people tend to spend it foolishly. I say this looking at my DJI drone sitting in the corner collecting dust.
- pictur 4y ago
  that's exactly what i mean lol
berkeleyjunk 4y ago
I think avoiding smart people starting competitors by keeping them employed with high comps might be a good strategy for some of these cash rich and profitable companies. They might have been thinking of this as a good insurance.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It's good strategy for the company, but bad for society*. I regard this as an example of market failure, where productive folk (who presumably want to do things that are cool and noteworthy) are diverted into sinecures to limit corporate competitors. The market for talent is being cornered here, just as a commodity trader might seek to corner the market to drive prices upward (or occasionally downward, to the detriment of a weak competitor). This seems like a prima facie case for regulatory intervention to require divestment or breakup. * I know, I know, 'how can we say it's bad, what if the resultant competition created environmental destruction or led to the invention of a basilisk.'
CurtHagenlocher 4y ago
Yes, as opposed to rich investors like Marc Andreessen who really are very smart and certainly don't "work through a screen and are totally abstracted from tangible physical reality and the real-world consequences of their opinions and beliefs."

__derek__ 4y ago

Actual title provides better context: > Google overhired talent to do ‘fake work’ and stop them working for rivals, claims former PayPal boss Keith Rabois The submitted title makes it look like a settled fact/conclusion, but there's no evidence provided AFAICT.

wnevets 4y ago
> stop them working for rivals, I thought this well known within the industry? Isn't this the point of the university to FAANG pipeline?
- sidfthec 4y ago
  You can hire to outpace your competitors without having them do "fake work" once hired (whatever that means). It doesn't make much sense to not fully utilize people once hired.
  - wnevets 4y ago
    I'm not convinced most people at very large companies are doing "real" work most of the time anyway. Wouldn't need to do anything special at these large companies to create fake work just for these people, it would just be "regular" work.
    - sidfthec 4y ago
      I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech. I don't know anyone who does what I could consider "fake work". Unless you think anyone who doesn't measurably and immediately impact the bottom line is doing "fake work".
      - wnevets 4y ago
        > I don't understand why this sentiment is so prevalent. It's like people watch Silicon Valley the TV show and think it's actually representative of big tech. I'm not limiting this sentiment to just big tech. For example very big companies tend to have a large number of people who do a lot of talking without saying actually saying anything. I would argue being trapped in those long meetings is "fake" work. The large number of employees working from home since COVID has shown most of those long meetings didn't need to happen. Now that the four day work week is gaining momentum with no lost of productivity[1] we have even more proof of the amount of "fake" work being done. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-week-uk.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/business/four-day-work-we...

oh_sigh 4y ago

- According to some guy with no direct knowledge of the situation.

m3kw9 4y ago

Making fake work look like real work seem hard

buildbot 4y ago

This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.

GVIrish 4y ago
The fact that Twitter had to ask some of the people it laid off to come back shortly after having fired them says it all about how incompetent and self-defeating those layoffs were.
- beebmam 4y ago
  The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate. You can certainly barely operate a web services company with a barebones crew: we all do it every year during the holidays! But long term growth? Yeah, good luck with that. Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.
  - sidfthec 4y ago
    Twitter lost 200mil on 5b in revenue in 2021 and has had a handful of profitable quarters in recent history. Not sure why you think it's "not even remotely profitable and likely never will be". Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.
  - spicybright 4y ago
    That's actually a good point. I bet it helps as a marking tool for his future investments too. "He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!" "He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"
  - 908B64B197 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

skarfloc 4y ago

let's see all the FAANG people rise up in HN and defend their bullshit jobs. I'm a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I've been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.

manuelmoreale 4y ago
Allow me this question: what % of the tech world do you think it truly is essential? I’m asking in the broader sense. Essential to modern society not essential within the scope of a company.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Essential to society? 1/4 to 1/3; maybe less.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Good lord. Almost none of it, if by "tech" you mean "software". Most of it's pushing consumerism via invasive advertising, spreading lies on purpose, or chasing marginal improvements in entertainment. I also suspect the majority of B2B activity is neutral or negative in actual delivered value over whatever it's replacing. [EDIT] I think this is true even for extremely generous values of "essential", in fact. I think the vast majority of software effort delivers marginal gains at best, with a net effect that is overall harmful in the median case, which harm is masked by the occasional huge improvement it delivers.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    Well, software is not just the web. Software that runs medical equipment is valuable and essential for example. And I think the same is true for all sorts of digital infrastructure. I’m thinking about software to run the power grid or running street lights or controlling a dam. There’s countless examples of useful to society pieces of software. But there are also countless other that are example of the opposite.

dougb5 4y ago

“There’s nothing for these people to do—it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.” Wait, what do VCs like him do with their time? Or are those meetings somehow more legitimate?

dcreater 4y ago

There is absolutely a trend of empire growing. Managers vying to get head count just to grow their power

subjectsigma 4y ago

Pfft, these guys are amateurs, I work in government contracting and we’ve been doing this for years! Note that I think my job is at least somewhat important, I write code so at least I produce something. But there’s dozens of not hundreds of people whose jobs consist entirely of meetings, signing paperwork, and taking multi-hour lunch breaks…

agilob 4y ago

>Sundar Pichai previously said he takes "full responsibility" for the decisions which lead to mass layoffs, and has now been accused of hiring sprees for "vanity". How does one take "full responsibility" for such decisions? Give yourself pat on a back? Pay raise to compensate for moral losses?

playingalong 4y ago
In theory it means he doesn't blame anyone or anything else. In practice it's just a rhetoric figure
bitL 4y ago
Thoughts and prayers.
Gigachad 4y ago
He should step down and donate his riches to charity to prove he means it.

tqi 4y ago

"Fake work" is a pretty funny accusation from guy whose company (Opendoor) is 97% down from all time high and dangerously close to getting delisted from NASDAQ.

karmasimida 4y ago

So what is fake work then? Maybe he is implying smaller impact but that is case for all mega crop It seems a useless accusation tbh

dhosek 4y ago

John Gruber was saying this months ago, pointing out that Apple hasn’t had big cuts because they didn’t do this sort of vanity hiring.

unxdfa 4y ago

This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She'd been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn't done anything useful for a year and was just there to put it on her CV and was suicidally bored. I bet she got laid off recently. Anyway it's not like it doesn't happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn't show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We're talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.

mellosouls 4y ago

I think "fake work" seems a reasonable phrase to describe what a lot of the mouse-moving class do, or at least it's difficult to connect it to real world value - and I wouldn't necessarily exclude the digital workers looking in here at a remove from the redundancies. When you consider the mental and physical energy and time it takes to produce the life of relevant comfort and safety of the average Western digital worker against the raw materials and environment that life is extracted and fashioned from (compared, say, to the prospect of surviving against nature on your wits and bodily power alone or the plight of a penniless war refugee), can you honestly say with a straight face: "yes, I deserve that"? We - most of us - live off the value provided us from the great good fortune of having been born in to a society fashioned and built over hundreds of years; it seems to me that provides the bulk of what we "earn" as individuals, and particularly so in the digital economies.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Lol @ the defensive downvotes

YeahNO 4y ago

I can't think of anything more demoralizing than being hired simply to warehouse my talent to keep me out of competitors' shops while feeding me bullshit go-nowhere projects or leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.

protastus 4y ago

This article is a word salad. The headline is not supported by evidence and looks like a causal fallacy. The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator's dilemma.

CountSessine 4y ago

This is consistent with my bias that FAANG salaries are where they are to discourage developers from accepting equity stakes at start-ups that could eventually disrupt the FAANG companies - that these salaries exist to starve the start-up ecosystem. I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.

candybar 4y ago

I mean this is true in that large organizations are internally wasteful - a lot of people are just there to shuffle resources around and a lot of the decisions are bad, entire teams are working on worthless projects, etc. But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it's just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste. Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.

sgammon 4y ago

rabois telling on himself again

rektide 4y ago

Ok so, apologies, didn't read, but it's a juicy idea unto itself. Personally I really want companies to build like ~4 teams with the same mission, same goal. Not fake work, but duplicative work. (Whether we tell folks this is happening or not: either way.) Over time, try to figure out what are the best potentials/possibilities, what are the most promising components/people. Organizationally iterate. Developers are iterative as fuck, imo. Organizations just kind of have people & stay there, doing whatever. Trying to explore the space of dynamical organizations is a huge huge huge interest that I think society is no where near, but could greatly better the world & what happens. Imo, we have a very: your org goes to battle with the team they have mentality. Personally I think orgs would, long term, do much better with a more deliberate effort to explore broader takes. I have a hard time connecting it explicitly, but I really dug the thinkpiece MIT paper "Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing 'Virtual Countries'?"[1], which to me suggested more dynamical orgs that had more than the single-poker-in-each-fire view that predominates the corporate world. [1] http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html http://ccs.mit.edu/21c/21CWP001.html