Half of Google's white-collar staff 'does no real work,' Silicon Valley VC says

He isn't stating a fact, from what I can tell. The actual quote in the article is "I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work."

It's not controversial to think that there is likely waste at Google. This particular article, though, has no insight in it. It's an inflammatory statement with no conversation or intelligence about it. Maybe there's something more in the Substack they reference.

Then again, I don't think it's crazy to believe that 50% of Substack newsletter content is full of nonsense /joke

You'll hear this kind of thing from VCs, but VCs are used to investing in a number of bets that they expect to fail, but profit from the winners. The VC here seems to be criticizing Google for doing the same thing internally ("The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade"), complaining that most of the projects that are funded don't make money, as if management can magically know in advance which bets will work and which won't work.

I think the problem at Google is that they start too many things and don't follow through, and that they kill too many projects and products with happy users. But that's a management problem: they aren't using the workers as effectively as they could be doing.

The article literally has no substance. Who isn't doing any real work? What are they doing instead? How can companies improve? Literally nothing is said about anything.

I clicked through to the linked interview, and it elaborates in slightly more detail, saying that he wants the BS jobs eliminated so more capital can be returned to the shareholders. This is just "kill R&D so that I can have some cash now". (That sounds like the current state of the VC world. In a world with 7% interest rates, what do VCs do exactly? They aren't investing in startups, that's for sure. Maybe their job can be eliminate so a16z can return some capital to its shareholders, eh?)

There are definitely plenty of coasters at Google, but these kinds of investor statements are positively vapid.

"Google spends billions per year on projects that go nowhere" Isn't that exactly what VC firms do? Google would be unwise not to invest billions in many projects. Some of them will go somewhere and some of them won't. That's the nature of technology and R&D.

"all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts" Over the last decade, Google stock is up 534% while the S&P500 is up 177%; Over the last year, Google stock is up 59% while the S&P is up 26%. Your investment in Google has done pretty well. If you think it's being managed that terribly as an investor, sell your stock and invest it somewhere else.

VCs have a lot of vested interest in getting more engineers out of companies like Google for working on their own startups. It might well be true the productivity rate is low for Google employees, but they also need to look at how much money the company is making per engineer and that number is very high - much higher than any pre/post IPO startup.

Lol, project much Andreessen? He's been complaining about this for at least 1 years because I remember him complaining about this when I joined twitter in 2012. And what exactly has he done to earn his billions?

But what do VC's do?

The thing about automation is that if you're good at it, you don't need very many people. Managers do need people in order to build their empires and get promoted. It seems to be the nature of modern work that these cross pressures create the weather systems that roil large companies.

I think there are a number of advantages of having extra staff if a company can afford it. 1. Talent is pulled away from competition that can threaten Google's dominance. 2. Talent is prevented from creating their own startups that can threaten Google's dominance. 3. Engineers are available to handle extra work that suddenly shows up leaving the others to keep focusing on "real work". 4. Engineers are available to do work that is not "real". Meaning work that nobody wants to do but still has to be done. 5. Hiring more people shows that the company is growing causing the stock value to go up. 6. Firing people can also cause the stock price to go up because it shows company is doing something to cut costs.

Is this basically a restatement of the old cliche that only 50% of advertising works, but it's almost impossible to know which 50%.

He says "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade" - are these just the missed bets - the projects which if they had succeeded would have added billions and billions to the bottom line, but for any of a number of reasons, failed.

I guess this is QZ instead of Business Insider but it's same VC.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915

There's also the Fortune article of the same VC.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292924

Isn't this really the inexorable Pareto principal in action?

20% of folks do 80% of the productive work, Of that 20%, a 20% subset create 80% of the impact?

But an organization is an ecosystem, and it probably wouldn't function if you stripped it back to that 20% of 20%.

The big secret I learned to late in life:

The higher up you go in the corporate ladder, the easier your job is. Less stress, more respect, less hours. Decisions you make are hard to tie back to incompetence

The same holds true for companies with too much cash on hand

Anyone who works at FAANG could agree with this, not sure why this is flagged.

Stupid, especially coming from a VC that is very knowledgeable of the amortization of returns on a portfolio: 9 companies fail for every single success. Google acts like a big VC fund, obviously many initiatives fail. Why would he judge Google for failed initiatives while he himself is a poster child of waste?

No doubt there are useless jobs but the main example he gives is failed initiatives by Google.

What about failed initiatives (“startups”) at a16z?

It's vexing to me why a company like Google has so many employees. Does running an ad server and search engine really need tens of thousands of people? Perhaps many of these engineers are on-call if something goes wrong to fix the problem ASAP. Investors ought to care how much money is being wasted on superfluous hiring.

I think it would be crazy to believe that 50% of people at Google do "no real work." Or if not crazy, definitely stupid.

Why? First because it's a proposition that doesn't have any fixed meaning. What counts as real work? Many work initiatives in tech are inherently speculative. If the speculation pans out, then the airhead VCs will call it "real-work" in retrospect. If it doesn't, then they condemn it as fake work. Even Theranos, which was a scam, spent a lot of money TRYING to be more than a scam. They failed, but it was real work to try to make her dumb idea a reality. VCs loved Theranos, didn't they?

The other thing that bothers me about this is the idea that investors should be given their money back instead of Google, you know, trying to use that money to make their company more successful. Besides all that, there is a value to employing lots of tech people even if you aren't having them do very much.

Why, you ask?

Because if you don't employ tech people, then the upper working class collapses even more than it already has. This is not good for society.

Somehow rich people must be made to understand what rich people in the late Roman Empire never understood until the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, wiped them out: that naked self interest without any civic responsibility leads to the collapse of the very systems that protect you.

What’s the point of 12 rounds interviews to have staff that does no real work ?

Most jobs are bullshit jobs [1].

How automation could work: we have to work less because automation decreass the amount of work done. Everybody has a greater quality of life.

How automation actually works: we fire half the staff and use that to suppress wages of those remaining ("you might be next", "you can be replaced"), increase the amount of work each person has to do and move the costs of the unemployed onto the state. For slightly higher profits.

So "bullshit jobs" are both a way of a company protecting itself (like in Google's case, by having people avilable) and society protecting itself where people create BS jobs because they may have a bS job themselves or may have one someday.

This is going to reach a breaking point in the future and it's long been predicted that at some point we'll only need 20% of people to do the work.

It's really shortsighted too because companies will have no one to sell to if no one earns enough to afford what they sell. But this system has no long-term planning. It's all a series of short-term local decisioning-making where we cut labor costs 20% to increase profits by 1%.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

How many people work at Google?

About 50%.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915

Random VC says some random inflammatory thing with no evidence to support it. 15% growth, a dividend, and a buyback but those poor disenfranchised capitalists still want more.

> "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."

... So a lot of those projects ultimately helped result in the current AI bubble, into which the VCs are so enthusiastically pumping money. LLMs didn't suddenly appear one day, as if by magic, a gift from god; they're the result of decades of companies spending money on projects which go nowhere for a long time.

I guess this is a good thing?

If a lot of people in a company do no real work, that means there is potential to trim down the workforce, decrease costs and still get the same amount of stuff done?

On the other hand, people said the same thing about Twitter. Elon Musk bought it and fired most employees. Indeed, Twitter works kinda similar to before. But revenue is said to be down 50%.

VCs who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Also, go read the letter to future shareholders published at the time of the IPO. They told you they were going to run the company this way.

100% of Silicon Valley VCs do no real work.

This certainly appears to have been the case at Twitter. Many employees, if appearances are to be believed, seemed to socialize and eat (free) for a living while proudly declaring themselves and their organization to be 'not really capitalist, more like socialist,' or whatever that one hidden camera quote was.

The well-meaning technocracy cannot sustain indefinitely, it seems, which is a relief.