These Tech Workers Say They Were Hired to Do Nothing
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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.
And also, based on posts on tik tok where people regularly make up or exaggerate stories for social clout.
Vest and rest is a real example and I've know a few people who fit that category.
https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...
amateur
The "miserable job" only works if the person plans on working. For many, you can just continue slacking off, coming up with delays/blockers, and dragging things out indefinitely.
And this is how she repays them.
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?
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.
There are things recruiters can do that aren't recruiting. Just like any other job, there's important stuff to do in downtime.
Too bad for megacorps that the layoffs are just gasoline for a million AI startups being launched in the last two months.
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.
I expect these layoffs to lead to the next big tech in a decade.
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.
I agree eventually, but top (for some definition) talent are still people. Pay someone a lot of money to work on yet another chat app, and most people can convince themselves it's worthwhile for a time. Most people are risk adverse and if someone is good enough to get a job at a FAANG, that's the least risky way to end up financially secure.
The potential is insane ...
Did you doubt Bitcoin as well?
Yes I started doubting Bitcoin about a decade ago and have been right about it ever since. (I've been more ambivalent about Ethereum and remain unsure whether my cynical phases or optimistic phases were closer to the mark.)
Bitcoin is the fastest growing asset ever.
What.
I don't know, do you?
Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for? Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments. But that didn't work for obvious reasons. There has never been another plausible explanation of what it's for since the failure of that first narrative.
Nope. Just a subscriber and see thousands of others using it on Discord. You pay to get access to their awesome models, it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling.
> Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for?
Go back to 2013 and read what they predicted, and try to fathom how something like this happened. Fastest growing asset ever and you don't understand it, and it's in your (presumably) computer science realm.
> Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments.
What's the first message in the first block of Bitcoin? "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." ................................................ some serious dunning kruger going on here.... "failure of that first narrative, that I just made up"
Yeah I find all the AI stuff really amazing and mind boggling. But that's not the point I made. My point is that I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable. I think it's currently being subsidized by investors, but I'm curious whether the marginal revenue will ever be able to exceed the marginal cost by enough to justify many businesses. Things can't just be cool, they also have to be cost effective.
(I wish we hadn't gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's boring while the midjourney discussion is interesting, but oh well.)
I don't have to go back in time, I remember what the idea of Bitcoin was, and it had nothing to do with speculation on its price. There were two ideas: 1. That it would be useful for digital payments; a secure and anonymous way to pay for things on the Internet, and 2. That it would be an inflation and banking crisis hedge (as your second paragraph alludes to). It's been a laughable failure at both of those things and now all anyone talks about is price speculation.
Hard to take this seriously, sorry man.
The whole reason chatgpt burst on the scene years after the techniques it is based on were developed is that the incumbents were unwilling to take the hit to their margins by releasing a fundamentally more expensive product category. OpenAI and Microsoft decided to take the gamble on that. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won't. That's how gambles work.
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.
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
??????
After layoffs probably those who didnt work started to. Or were let go.
If meta was hoarding recruiters, then truly the stock deserved to go down.
SMH
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?
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…”
So it looks dumb eventually but all the way up, possibly for many years, you’re staying ahead of growth perfectly.
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.
It's only efficient for the use-case of making sure there is always someone available to recruit.
> 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.