[TAG0][TAG1]
- Silicon Valley investors and founders are arguing about what is real work in tech.
- This is the largest job loss in the industry's recent history.
- Keith Rabois, investor, said this week that many firms have over-hired engineers who do "fake" work.
What are you actually doing if you're not building, coding, or designing?
This is the question that certain Silicon Valley elite members are asking. They believe layoffs can be attributed to boom-time phenomena like over-hiring and fake work.
Keith Rabois (a PayPal Mafia member, and technology investor) launched a tirade about fake work this week.
Rabois, speaking from Miami to Evercore's event, said that big tech companies had too many employees in pursuit of "vanity metrics" such as headcount. To look larger than their competitors and stop them from being useful, they hired spoiled workers to fill the gap.
Rabois stated, "All these people are extraneous." This has been true for many years. This false god was the vanity metric of hiring employees.
He claimed that thousands of employees at Google, Meta and other companies were basically kept around for nothing.
He said, "There's nothing these people can do — they really — it all fake work." "Now that this is being exposed, what do these people do? They go to meetings."
This view is popular among founders and wealthy investors.
They see mass layoffs, which they consider a chance for tech exceptionalism to be reset and to return to the grind.
A specific view of 'work.'
This notion of fake work has its roots, at most, in political disagreement.
Many of these tech leaders are Republican in their views, which is quite different from the left-leaning tech workers that they criticize.
They seem to be proud of the blue-collar worker ethic, which is sometimes portrayed as the only real kind of work. They celebrate the "weirdos" who do things well, but have limited science, math, and coding skills. They are hostile to tech unions, claiming that they are a product of too many activist employees who have too much time.
They see marketing, design and HR as a waste of space.
These things are not always stated explicitly.
Rabois believes meetings are fake work. It's not sitting in an office, or not making things. Marc Andreessen, investor, believes it is what the "laptop class" does, including holding socially conformist views. Statements like Musk's 1:30 a.m. code review on engineers after Musk took ownership of Twitter or Andreessen Horowitz’s mocked "it’s time to build” manifesto are a good indicator of their views about worker value.
They have ammunition. In the past, tech firms were so determined to keep staff from moving to rivals that the perks became legendary.
Cue TikTok video "Day in the Life of" videos. Here, 20-somethings working in high-paying tech jobs talk about how they get face masks at work and what it feels like to have a "self-care moment".
David Sacks, a friend of Musk and another member of the PayPal Mafia, commented incredulously last August on a video that showed him asking: "Does anyone still have a job?" Musk responded with a cry-laugh emoticon.
–David Sacks (@DavidSacks), August 20, 2022
The rest-and-vest phenomenon is another example of rich employees who are absorbed into larger organizations and do nothing while they wait for their shares vest so that they can leave.
Musk is the most vocal and determined CEO when it comes cutting workers he considers surplus. He demanded early in his Twitter takeover workers be "extremely core" and prioritize engineers over workers in areas such as policy and marketing.
Blind observed that he and others who promote a grind culture are motivated.
One Rabois user, whose tag indicated that they work at Square, stated that it was likely that a greedy VC is trying to suppress wages. "I have worked for several companies that claimed to offer a good work-life balance and all of them had tons of work."
One investor said that fake work is not possible at most startups.
Eugene Malobrodsky is a partner at One Way Ventures (an early-stage investor that backed fintech Brex), and said, "It's easy for people to get lost in large companies, but it's hard for startups to get away from fake work." "I believe it's false to claim that many people do fake jobs, especially since companies already have workplace monitoring tools."
However, they don't necessarily agree with Musk, Andreessen and Rabois. But it is clear that other tech CEOs follow Musk's lead.
Meta, which had more than 11,000 employees laid off in November, saw 70% of its layoffs come from departments like recruiting, product marketing, sales, and design, according to MetaMates Talent Directory. This list was created by Meta employees to track the number of jobs that were cut. The engineering team accounted for only 22% of all layoffs.
Tech workers are no longer in a good place.
—————————————————————————————————————————————
By: hchowdhury@insider.com (Hasan Chowdhury,Shona Ghosh,Emilia David)
Title: Silicon Valley elites are warring over who does ‘fake work’ in tech
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-debates-tech-employees-doing-fake-work-2023-3
Published Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2023 10:01:00 +0000
Related posts:
Ted Cruz launches Big Tech Investigation into Big Tech Censorship. Elon Musk says he has ‘changed Silicon Valley’
Elon Musk said he was open to the idea that Silicon Valley Bank could be bought, but a Tesla investor told him “no thanks”.
According to reports, the Twitter manager Elon Musk admired for embodying his ‘hardcore” work culture was laid off. She stated that she had no regrets about going all-in on Twitter 2.0.
Elon Musk accuses Twitter employees who are laid off of using their disability to do no actual work’
Leave a Reply