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These Tech Workers Say They Were Hired to Do Nothing
- juunpp 4y ago> 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. How can you work at one of the most desirable (by others) companies and not be expected to hire anyone in the first year? Sounds like a very low bar for a recruiter? > In an interview, Ms. Machado, who is based in Tampa, Fla., and has reinvented herself as a career coach, says that during a typical day at Meta, she might log on at 11 a.m., when her West Coast colleagues began their day, sit in meetings from noon until 3:30 p.m., and then check recruiting efforts on LinkedIn for an hour before logging off. Clearly living the hi-life, and for $190k. Jesus. "Checking recruiting efforts on LinkedIn" -- aka, letting the surveillance show recommendations for you?
- Forge36 4y agoI was contacted via linked in. I suspect they were using the "nuke from orbit" hiring approach. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd hired so many recruiters that recruit to developer hire was <10
- bink 4y agoI have to wonder if she was simply told that their expectations for junior recruiters were lower than more senior recruiters and maybe that they even had people who, despite their best efforts, were unable to get anyone signed for up to a year. That's quite different from saying that she wasn't expected to hire anyone for a year. edit: or as others have pointed out they were hired at the beginning of a hiring freeze and heard that hiring may not pick back up again for a year. In that situation I'd expect them to have been laid off rather soon, but certainly not informed ahead of time.
- Beaver117 4y agoWow they make that much? I wonder if an engineer can switch to being a recruiter easily, sounds like a pretty sweet deal
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoIf they literally couldn't hire anyone because of a freeze, I'd expect a person being paid $190k to be networking and identifying groups in other organizations that might be good to poach from based on the estimated needs of your company. There are things recruiters can do that aren't recruiting. Just like any other job, there's important stuff to do in downtime.
- CPLX 4y agoThis is the legacy of our antitrust policy. It shouldn’t take too much mental imagination to understand why something like this is a classic symptom of a lack of effective competition in a market segment.
- juunpp 4y agoIt's not just a symptom, also allegedly a cause: > Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive and venture capitalist, has accused large tech companies of seeing hiring as a “vanity metric,” deliberately hiring talent to keep them from working for other companies.
- birdyrooster 4y agoThis is what happens when you centralize all of your recruiting. Central planning doesn’t work for certain types of activities because the realities at the edge cannot be sensed or controlled for.
- UncleEntity 4y agoThey seemed to have no problems hiring people. The main problem is they hired too many people just before the bubble burst so had people doing nothing until they figured out which way the economy was heading.
- birdyrooster 4y agoThey clearly did have problems because if they were closer to the actual business they would have not hired so many people because the way that Facebook and Google work is they hire people externally to find work internally. There is a lag time between being hired by Google and joining your team for example. At Facebook they do bootcamp and whatever. The point is that since team isn't doing their own hiring you will ALWAYS have this cohort of unusable people. In the best case its the same as if teams were hiring their own people, but in the worst case you will have teams who don't need anyone but still have all of these unused people in the cohorts you are recruiting. It's only efficient for the use-case of making sure there is always someone available to recruit.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymeta01 4y agoPlease note that tech worker here is someone in tech. Specifically, in this case, a recruiter. If meta was hoarding recruiters, then truly the stock deserved to go down.
- Panini_Jones 4y agoThe recruiter was hired at the beginning of the hiring freeze in 2022 when the storm was setting in. What did she expect to work on before they cut her contract?
- throwawaymeta01 4y agoIMO it's less about calling out how Meta was honoring contracts and more about trying to exploit this to raise her profile to get more leads for her career counseling gig.
- philll 4y agoProduct of zirp in the process of being corrected.
- nr2x 4y agoThe real issue is FAANG has paid top talent to sit around all day in meetings solely to blunt competitive risk of those people getting any real work done. Too bad for megacorps that the layoffs are just gasoline for a million AI startups being launched in the last two months.
- rco8786 4y agoThis is speculative at best.
- anonuser123456 4y agoI’ve never met a top talent person that would just sit around all day waiting to get tasked. Maybe this is just a standard filter. Hire people that fit the top talent criteria. Then just wait and see what the accomplish. If the answer is nothing interesting, you counsel them out.
- matwood 4y agoIt’s hyperbole of course, but more like work on inconsequential things. Big tech has sucked up talent to both prevent competitors from finding it and to stop them from starting their own companies. I expect these layoffs to lead to the next big tech in a decade.
- nr2x 4y agoNext week at this rate!
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> more like work on inconsequential things I’m going to disagree with you on a definition basis. Top talent doesn’t stay still. Even if it once was top, it degrades. But more fundamentally, bullshitting isn’t a common attribute among people with and utilising a talent. (Apart from a talent for bullshitting. Go away.) FAANG wanted to do this. But they wound up with legions of nonperformers while the top talent found other places.
- anigbrowl 4y agoStarting to think I should just fake my resume and collect one of those sweet subsidies. If we're going to have market failures I might as well cash in. Edit: in fact, if you're an exec at a large tech company staring down the barrel of some previous bad decision, consider paying me to just not talk about you for a year. * Owners of Twitter need not apply
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoI work at Google. This checks out. We're not there to work so much as we are there to make our management chain look good.
- juunpp 4y agoAre you an engineer?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoYes
- coding123 4y ago190k...? in FL? recruiter? why am I still writing code?
- juunpp 4y ago> 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. I mean we aren't farmers working the sun-baked land, but where is this notion that the job is easy coming from? Am I alone?
- icedchai 4y agoIt depends. I know plenty of "professional meeting attenders" in tech. Most of them are not engineers, but occasionally we get roped into it. One day I had 7 meetings. All of them were useless.
- Panini_Jones 4y agoThere's a narrative being pushed (I don't know if anyone is intentionally pushing it, but you can see it recently). These recruiters have been in many news articles and the circumstances make you understand why they weren't doing much work (one was a Meta recruiter hired at the beginning of the hiring freeze).
- nemo44x 4y agoThe data probably just says people love reading stories about people making a huge salary by doing nothing in the decadent tech industry.
- floren 4y agoSome people are pretty invested in a return to in-person work (possibly invested in a literal sense, like they own office buildings) which is why a lot of articles like this sorta pivot to vague complaints about WFH part way through. Starts off as "some tech workers say their employers didn't give them any work" and then switches to "some CEOs have a hunch WFH people are slackers"
- equalsione 4y agoLooks like it’s my turn to wear the tinfoil hat… There’s a concerted PR campaign to push the “tech workers do nothing” meme for two reasons: - justify layoffs that are pushed by activist investors - union busting (as in “why would these lazy so-and-so’s need a union?”) On the latter, the fallout from things like the firing of Timnit Gebru and other incidents alarmed a lot of board members. This is part of that fallout. “He takes off his tinfoil hat…”
- DoreenMichele 4y agoEh, slow news day, I guess. I was hired by a Fortune 500 company. In a class of twenty people being trained for three months for an entry-level job, only six were new hires and one of those six could not hack it and washed out of training. The rest were people who previously worked at the company and were returning (one was a military wife, back in the area again) or internal transfers or internal promotions from an even lower level entry-level job. They also went from pages and pages of job listings to only a handful of job listings overnight during a recession. This was followed by a period of little to no hiring and few promotions. My department got shiny new offices and we were moved there because we didn't have enough space for everyone and desk sharing for different shifts was the norm. Then the hiring freeze happened, the department shrank and we couldn't fill all the desks even after eliminating the night shift and the practice of desk sharing. They began repurposing some sections. Hiring takes time. Training and onboarding take time. Best guesses about future needs can be wrong. So far, no one has perfected the art of predicting the future. Business planning at this scale is hard and often looks stupid to outsiders.
- jopolous 4y agoI’m a SWE at Meta and this does not match my experience. Basically everyone I work with is perpetually overcommitted.
- kenjackson 4y agoI suspect these are very small pockets in the company for some really odd, but specific purposes. This isn't an epidemic problem at any company.
- __pache__ 4y agoI've seen hundreds of posts from engineers saying they work maybe 2 hours a day ??????
- whatyesaid 4y agoIf you said Meta research, I'd believe you. Between Cambridge Analytica and the Metaverse that billions of dollars was wasted on for releases that don't even compete with VRChat, I really don't know what to conclude apart from a lot of busywork going on there from the past few years.
- loeg 4y agoCambridge Analytica was 2014. If your worldview is based on that, it’s very dated.
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- sublinear 4y agoRecruiters are not tech workers. What even is this article?
- protastus 4y agoJournalists have been milking this story for weeks now. All stories are about the same two junior recruiters who were hired just before hiring slowdown/pause. Meta was graceful enough to leave them in the payroll, and the new hires decided to shitpost on TikTok instead. Recruiters in big tech have basically zero visibility about work happening in engineering orgs. Which in my experience is generally intense, even when the ideas are too bad to ship. I'm waiting for journalists to report on actual engineers who were paid to sit on their ass. But I am skeptical these people (if they exist) will be dumb enough to post videos on TikTok about it.
- rco8786 4y agoThey don’t exist. At least not outside of some extreme anecdotes.
- paulgb 4y ago> All stories are about the same two junior recruiters who were hired just before hiring slowdown/pause. And also, based on posts on tik tok where people regularly make up or exaggerate stories for social clout.
- juunpp 4y ago"Journalists"
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- nemo44x 4y agoIt’s better to over hire based on a reasonable chance of growth projections becoming a reality and missing rather than to under hire and hit your targets for growth. With the former you can layoff people and eat the hit. With the later you are falling behind and giving up ground to competitors. So it looks dumb eventually but all the way up, possibly for many years, you’re staying ahead of growth perfectly.
- imwillofficial 4y agoGets paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Craps on the company who gave her the good deal. SMH
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- juunpp 4y agoOk, so this is fake news from The Wall Street Journal to amplify the idea that remote workers are slackers. That and union-busting is what is going on here, and it's clearer now from everyone's responses on the thread. Also sounds like somebody has bought too many REITs.
- xvilka 4y agoFamous problem of the bullshit jobs. Even if some people appear busy it's way too often they do nothing of the actual value to the company. All these giants probably need only 1/3 of all staff to operate at the same efficiency.
- sys_64738 4y agoWhen I interviewed at Facebook I was told they hire people without active positions to fill. They beach them until the roles need to be filled. Nope I ain’t ever doing that.