According to statistics, so far this year, in less than 3 months, the US technology industry has laid off nearly 100,000 people. Some founders and investors in Silicon Valley believe that the technology layoffs are due to over-recruitment and redundant employees “doing nothing.”
Recently, Keith Rabois, co-founder of online payment company PayPal and current CEO of OpenStore, wrote that most laid-off workers in the technology industry are “pretending to work” when in fact these jobs don’t matter at all.
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Rabois said big tech companies hired too many people to pursue the “vanity” of their surging workforce. To appear stronger than their competitors, they bring in mediocre, spoiled employees and prevent those people from achieving anything useful over their competitors. “All of these people are irrelevant and have been for a long time,” LaBois said.
Rabois accused thousands of Google and Meta employees of essentially “eating and dying” and doing nothing. He said: “These people have nothing to do but pretend to work. Now the truth has been exposed, what these people are actually doing, they only know meetings every day.”
LaBois’ views have been backed by many wealthy investors and founders. Thomas Siebel, CEO of AI company C3.ai, said: “When working from home, some people really don’t do anything. If you want to work from home, like four days in pajamas, go to Facebook to work. Bar!”
In LaBois’s view, pretending to work means always having meetings. For his one-time founding partner Elon Musk, that meant employees weren’t in the office or working. For investor Marc Andreessen, the quintessential fake worker is the “laptop class.”
Investor David Sacks is a friend of Elon Musk’s and another member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” Last August, he posted a comment on one such video asking, “Is anyone still working?” Elon Musk responded with a dumbfounding emoji.
In terms of layoffs, Elon Musk has always been regarded as the most outspoken and ruthless CEO. He asked employees to promise to work harder at the beginning of his takeover of Twitter and prioritized engineers in areas such as policy, marketing and law. rather than ordinary employee interests.
One critic of Rabois said: “Probably some greedy VC trying to drive down wages. I’ve worked at a few companies that were supposed to be good at work-life balance, but in reality everyone had a lot of money. work to do.”
Pretending to work is out of the question in most startups, according to one investor. Says investor Eugene Malobrodsky: “It’s easy to get lost in a big company, but for a startup it’s impossible to get away with pretending to work. I think a lot of people are pretending.” Work is a misnomer, especially when companies have already deployed monitoring tools.”
But while not publicly agreeing with LaBois, Elon Musk, Andreessen, Siebel, and Sachs, it’s clear that other tech CEOs are following Elon Musk’s lead.
Last November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 people, with about 70% of the layoffs occurring in departments such as recruiting, product, marketing, operations, design and sales, according to the MetaMates Talent Directory. The MetaMates Talent Directory is a data table created by Meta employees to track job cuts. Only 22% of layoffs came from engineering teams.
