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Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for 'Fake Work', Argues Former PayPal Executive (yahoo.com) 121

Posted by EditorDavid from the office-spaces dept.
Fortune reports: The thousands of layoffs in Big Tech are thanks to an over-hiring spree to satisfy the "vanity" of bosses at the likes of Meta and Alphabet, according to a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia. Speaking remotely at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore, Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois said Meta and Google had hired thousands of people to do "fake work" to hit hiring metrics out of "vanity".

Rabois, who was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said the axing of droves of jobs is overdue. "All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways," Rabois said, according to Insider. "There's nothing for these people to do — it's all fake work. Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."

The DoorDash investor added Google had intentionally hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from being snapped up by competitors.
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Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for 'Fake Work', Argues Former PayPal Executive More

Tech Layoffs Caused by Vain Over-Hiring for 'Fake Work', Argues Former PayPal Executive

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  • Is this where... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GimpOnTheGo ( 6567570 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:39PM (#63362795)

    .. "Chief Experience Officers" and "Chief Inspiration Officers" come from ?

    • Re: Is this where... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GimpOnTheGo ( 6567570 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:40PM (#63362797)

      I've always wondered why these companies who produce nothing more than an app really, need 100,000 workers ?

      • Re: Is this where... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:42PM (#63362807)

        I think you'll find the answer with Twitter staff counts pre and post Musk.

        • Re: Is this where... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @11:30PM (#63362957) Homepage Journal

          I've been asking out loud for almost a decade what the fuck were 3000 engineers doing at twitter all day? They don't have a consumer hardware division, they're not building unique new products, they're not rolling out really unique new features. They're just baling out water on the existing product keeping it afloat. Number of active users has been steady at ~300 million since 2015, there has been no user growth so presumably whatever growing pains they were having in 2015 have mostly been unwound at this point. My twitter-defender buddy claims: now that they're down to only 500-650 engineers the site is slower but uh, everything seems fine so far to me (i'm not a heavy twitter user). I can't tell the difference. I would suspect there's quite a lot of people out there floating along doing 1-2 PRs a week to justify their job.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by hoofie ( 201045 )

            When you see TikTok videos of people's day at Twitter which seems to involves coffees/yoga/lunch etc but sweet fuck-all work it's pretty clear that there are lot of people who may not perhaps be contributing lots to the business.

            • A lot of cells in your body don't do much work, you wouldn't miss most of them when they go, but cutting a large fraction of them and making the rest work balls to the wall all the time seems like a stupid idea for some reason.

              • That's just because you can't just make your cells work balls to the wall and when they're wasted, throw them away and get new ones.

                You can do that with workers.

            • That's because people don't make tiktoks videos of sitting in front of a computer for 10 hours straight

            • I'm guessing those videos aren't 8 hours long. They only show the fun parts.

          • There's a whole side of Twitter we never see: the one facing advertisers. They have been leaving, and in some cases complaining. It's not all just for "woke" reasons.

            I imagine a lot of those engineers worked at services for advertisers, for the sales people of Twitter, and for various long shots that have a high-risk, high reward profile. For instance, Twitter was a main backer of a little Lua library known as "Torch".

            I don't disagree with the guy in the article who thinks there's a lot of vanity hiring and

          • everything seems fine so far to me (i'm not a heavy twitter user).

            We can tell. Twitter has had tons of serious problems starting from just a few days after Elno took over. Notably, for about a month it refused to assemble the front page feed for users. You could get notifications, and the site worked in general, except for that. Other times, other features have been broken.

            That doesn't speak to whether Twitter needed that many engineers, but it does prove that you don't know whether Twitter's been having problems. It's had so many they've been reported in the media.

            • A big problem is that Musk did not know which engineers were useful or not. He brought in his automobile engineers to look at code they had never seen before from a business they knew nothing about and took their quick off-the-cuff recommendations. That is sheer cluelessness in leadership on display there.

          • Well, if you don't understand it then surely it must have been a scam. /eyeroll.

          • 1-2 PRs a week is good. More than that then they're rushing and should slow down and make sure the code is good, design is done before coding, do the developer tests, etc. Musk made the mistake of assuming quantity is quality and measured lines of code like some clueless 90's manager.

            • He literally asked them to print out their code. [cnn.com]

              In the meantime, Musk has laid out ambitious goals for how he plans to change the platform and is pushing his staff to achieve them as he attempts to quickly bolster the companyâ(TM)s bottom line.
              Musk has also reportedly made confusing asks of employees, such as requesting that they print out dozens of pages of code theyâ(TM)d recently written and then reversing course and telling them to shred it.

              More like clueless '70s manager.

              • All for a silly company with a fluff product.

                • He bought himself a $44-billion admin account so he can't be banned.

                  I.e. He put a price on his ego. 44 billion dollars and about 100 million followers.
                  Makes Bezos' orbital penis pod really puny in comparison. Though it probably means his has thicker skin. Fore and aft.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

          Well it's difficult to pay people when you are hemorrhaging cash. Like trying to sell the office plants. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]

          Or your inability to pay rent. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]

          Even better is this guy. https://i.redd.it/11l4dg5p5nma... [i.redd.it] Nobody knows why he was hired (including himself) but he's still receiving a paycheck. Office Space has become a reality.

          You're telling me all successful companies don't operate this way?

        • Post Musk, where he laid off essential employees so that the company is sputtering? The downtime last week was precisely because the wrong people were laid off. Musk has the same problems as the other CEOS - having no idea how many or few to hire, not knowing who is important or not, and mistakenly thinking that he's a genius.

    • No, those are high class hookers.

    • .. "Chief Experience Officers" and "Chief Inspiration Officers" come from ?

      That and "DEI" jobs ...

    • It is well known that you can do with 30 people at a small company, that which is impossible with 300 people at a large company.

  • There was a guy on reddit I think ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GimpOnTheGo ( 6567570 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:45PM (#63362817)

    ...saying how he was hired at Twitter right when Musk took over, and in the confusion he fell trough the cracks and has been banking a 6 figure pay cheque while doing nothing and not even knowing what his job is supposed to be.

    He even reached out to Musk asking him.

    That guy is a moron. I'd STFU and keep the money flowing while I did something else.

  • CEOs that have no idea what products actual human beings want because they're completely disconnected from regular human interactions and who are so completely above criticism due to a combination of fear and cult personality but nobody can tell them when they have a boneheaded idea.

    Real problem is we've been looking to individuals for leadership instead of working together the way human beings are meant to. We've bought into great man theory despite a quick Google search proving that it's essentially b

    • No, it's what the article says (Score:4, Funny)

      by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @09:59PM (#63362829)

      People have been posting here for a long time about how companies like Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, etc. will hire up talent (perceived or real) just to keep the competition from having access to good people.

      Shockingly, hiring people mainly to wage a war of attrition on your rivals is not an effective use of corporate capital.

      If the CEOs were doing it mainly out of desperation to find growth opportunities, it would be merely incompetence and a humane one at that.

    • Real problem is we've been looking to individuals for leadership instead of working together the way human beings are meant to.

      I see the problem, but having a board of directors isn't going to fix anything.

      • Then why do we keep the useless spongers around? I mean, they're insanely expensive and don't produce jack.

        • Then why do we keep the useless spongers around? I mean, they're insanely expensive and don't produce jack.

          The CEO of my company started the business with an Excel spreadsheet and an idea. What he does all day, I don't know, but if he didn't I wouldn't have my job.

          • I have had a similar experience.

            While my humanity tends to recoil from the âoegreat manâ theory of human development, thereâ(TM)s actually a lot to it. It is real, and is the explanation/ reason for some great stuff. Itâ(TM)s also the reason for a lot of bad stuff, too. But, I have never been a fan of the âoeletâ(TM)s all sing kumbayae and build a great product. âoe Iâ(TM)ve never seen it in 30 years in the business.

            This does not mean the âoegreat man

          • You have one of the few CEOs who would actually be missed. Because he is actually the one who started the company. This is fortunate, but far from the standard in today's business world.

            Most CEOs wouldn't survive a year if they had to actually start a business. They'd run that into the ground before the ink on the charter is dry.

    • And when you do have the balls to tell the CEO that his idea isn't going to work, he reacts like you're "challenging his absolute authority" or worse, offending his mother. It's hard to deal with people who have been corrupted by power.

      • By the time you get a word in about a hundred yes-men have already convinced the CEO that it's a genius idea and he is a god-king for suggesting it.

      • But I'm speaking truth to power! Or did they already stop doing that because they noticed they don't like it when they notice their underlings are smarter than they and it hurts their egos?

        Might have been the reason for the end of that open door policy, too.

  • And now the monkeys won't even come to the zoo... (Score:4, Funny)

    by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @10:01PM (#63362831)
    ... for the c-levels to show off for each other. Worthless monkeys.

  • where those cuts are coming from?

    That I've seen, frontline workers have been reduced by around 30% while management ranks have swelled to over 600% (not kidding).

    And then management wonders about the death spiral of people quitting and an inability to attract new workers (because no one wants to work anymore... that short-staffed).

    Their solution?

    Hire more managers for job fairs and the like!

    I am continually surprised most corporations don't collapse under the weight of their own gravity.

    • Re:Have to wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @06:53AM (#63363361)

      This joke was already old when I heard it, but it seems it only got worse:

      In a rowing competition between Ford and Toyota, the Toyota team won by miles. So Ford hired two consultant companies to figure out the reason. After half a year of analysis and filling spreadsheets, both consultants came to the same conclusion: The reason is likely that Toyota's boat has 8 rowers and a coxswain, the Ford team consisted of a rower and 8 cox.

      Their recommendation was that the rower should use more oars.

      A year later, in the next competition, the gap between Ford and Toyota incrased.

      So logically the rower was fired.

      • This joke actually appeared some time between 1975 and 1980 as one of those cartoons circulated by photocopy and fax. Our organization used "matrix management", where one worked for two managers: a longer-term line manager, and a specific project manager. One boat was as you describe for Toyota, captioned "conventional management", and the other as you describe for Ford: "matrix management".

      • Great joke, hits very close to home. Thanks.

  • Wasting engineering dollars (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Moof123 ( 1292134 ) on Saturday March 11, 2023 @10:12PM (#63362849)

    There is an old expression for advertising: “I know I’m wasting half my advertising dollars, I just don’t know which half”.

    I am pretty sure this is also more than true in the startup and tech world. Lots of chucking bucket loads of spaghetti at the walls in hopes you’ll be on the ground floor of the next Google, Uber, or what have you. A decade ago VR, self-driving taxis, or a bunch of other wild eyed ideas were going to take over the world by now. Sure bets fizzle, but occasional wild ideas take over against all odds.

    Today’s hair brained moonshot is most likely going to be utter cat crap on a stick, but you just need that one needle in a haystack, and that is what is easy to point at and mock.

    • Re:Wasting engineering dollars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @12:50AM (#63363031)

      It's because if you're lucky as a venture-capitalist and you manage to land on one company that produces and becomes wildly successful, then the money that you spent on the other 29 companies that fizzled is earned back several orders of magnitude.

      And a lot of it really is luck. If Gary Kildall hadn't been as awkward as he was when IBM came calling looking for an operating system for their new computer, Microsoft never would have managed to become the runaway success that it ultimately became. If Amazon's solicitation to Sears Roebuck Corporation for a buyout to become Sears' online catalog to replace their dying paper catalog business had been accepted, then Amazon wouldn't be the giant that it is today.

      So venture capitalists are constantly looking for things to throw money at to see what sticks. Only now, compared to 25 years ago, they're taking the time to actually confirm that there's really a business there, not just some guys looking to fund their urban apartments and to fill offices with Aeron chairs.

      • Right now it's easier to see if there was a business. The whole DotCom thing is absurd for sure. Amazon was a company that got rejected by Sears so they decided to sell books ( a losing proposition )... on the Internet. And look where we are today. Technology was shifting rapidly back then. ChatGPT might be over-hyped but if AI really takes off, there are going to be companies coming along that want to sell books... with AI. And one of them might be the next Amazon. After all think about how nice it w

    • Re:Wasting engineering dollars (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @06:58AM (#63363371)

      If Google, Uber, Facebook and the like tell a story, then that you do NOT want to be on the ground floor. Because on the ground floor are Webcrawler, Celluride and Friendster. Ever heard of them? They were there first. And none of them is relevant today anymore.

      Because they had to use their money to do all the expensive mistakes that Google, Uber and Facebook could then avoid and instead use their money to do it "right" (for varying definitions of right...).

      You don't want in on the ground floor. You want someone else to lay the foundation, then slap your prefab house on top that you have been prepping while they were busy building and rebuilding the concrete.

      • You can make money being a leader and you can make money being a fast follower. Execution is a huge factor.
    • I think this is less likely in the startup tech world where everybody knows what everyone else is doing. In large companies, it can be very hard to figure out who is redundant and who is adding value. Large companies know that maybe 30% of their workers are redundant so they tell managers to trip the ranks by 30%. But the probability of the right 30% getting cut is about zero. Because, after all, if that were possible, the 30% wouldn't have been hired to begin with.

  • Engineer think they understand everything. It's fucking embarrassing.

  • It is always a smart play by a manager to grow his team. If the team is at 25 and you grow it to 50 then you can turn around and ask for a raise because you are supervising twice as many people. When layoffs hit a few years later then you can get rid of the 25 unneeded workers and ask for another raise since your team is doing the same work with half as many people. You've doubled productivity.
  • I've worked at a few of those companies, I hate how these dudes make it seem like the folks they hired are somehow responsible for the bloated dysfunctional organizations they oversaw and created and that the real problem isn't themselves

    • If you really want to go down that rabbit hole: :-)
      "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black (1985)
      https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
      "I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way [by making it into play]. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent o

  • the PayPal mafia? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cpurdy ( 4838085 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @12:22AM (#63363017)
    Not sure I'd take any advice from "the PayPal mafia". The early PayPal, when those bozos worked there, was an atrocious pile of dung, which didn't work and was infuriating to even try to use. If eBay hadn't bought it, it likely would have died a miserable dotcom death.

    It's not even that they're necessarily wrong about "over hiring" and "fake work"; it's just that they were the masters of "fake work" and "crap work".

  • I always run lean teams despite hiring pressure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @12:24AM (#63363021)

    I always run lean teams despite hiring pressure. Management wants to build a bigger organization and they think more people equals more productivity but the reality is small solid teams can crank out work like crazy. More people has diminishing returns and more management aggravation. Now that my firm is doing layoffs my core team has been untouched. It would be insane to cut any of them, they know everything and they are really hard to replace.

    • Re:I always run lean teams despite hiring pressure (Score:4, Insightful)

      by khchung ( 462899 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @02:30AM (#63363115) Journal

      Now that my firm is doing layoffs my core team has been untouched. It would be insane to cut any of them, they know everything and they are really hard to replace.

      You have been lucky. I have seen my share of teams that stayed lean during a hiring spree, and then come layoff time the "lean" teams got the same quota percentage-wise for cutting. The C-suites don't care if any staff is "hard to replace" or if it was insane to cut them. Insanity happens all the time when rounds of layoff comes. By the time those hard to replace roles need to be refill the CxO who gotten a fat bonus from doing layoffs was already gone, it is now someone else's problem.

      The smart managers hire redundant staffs during the hiring spree so they have the extra fat to be cut during lean times, keeping the core team stable.

      • Working around the problem is better than ignoring it, but worse than fixing it.

      • I've seen some insane cuts at those moments, especially of people my company scooped up. Competent generalists who could turn to any task, who completed automating one task and moved to the next are very vulnerable compared to people who became gatekeepers for their particular extremely manual and inconsistent cupboard of hand-written tools. My company's services sometimes displace those information misers, but they're often considered absolutely vital to ongoing operations and impossible to lay off. Their

    • You are lucky, naive, and conceited all in one post. A tri fecta!

  • PMs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Huitzil ( 7782388 ) on Sunday March 12, 2023 @01:40AM (#63363065)
    At my company, there has been an explosion of project manager hiring. PMs hire more PMs to do more PM work. Some are business PMs and some are dev PMs and both are mostly people that create a lot of work for everyone. Like requirement documents with 100 contributors for projects that will never get funded. Pre mortem and post mortem for stuff that no one cares about. Their power comes from creating information asymmetry and basically being middle people somehow speaking for everyone in a project without having a clue about how to do any of the work. All projects led by PMs fail. All projects hacked together by engineers succeed.

    • In my experience it depends on bringing a PM in when it makes sense to do so. Not everything needs Six Sigma or endless Miro sessions. I'll bring in a PM if there's a lot of cat herding that's otherwise take me away from doing what I would prefer to be doing.

  • Most businesses operate in a cyclical climate - sometimes there is a lot of money sloshing around and sometimes there isn't. Sometimes they are growing and sometimes they're stagnating. This is such a time for tech companies, especially ad based tech companies and that's why they're laying off staff. Of course, if they were paying closer attention they would have probably gotten by allowing staff to leave through natural attrition.

  • Small, independent teams to figure out new stuff, a few highly interconnected teams to tie these together, and large numbers of small teams working in parallel to scale up production. The squad unit is the optimal size for human interaction.

  • A VC talking about "fake work" must be peak irony.

  • Offices are elaborate vanity projects built to impress visitors and stroke the egos of leadership teams who want to gaze up rows of "their" workers. Having a nice CEO desk in a home office with your kitchen coffee pot is less impressive than a CEO desk in some ornate, glass skyscraper, with a concierge that fetches your coffee.

  • I guess lots of Chief Woke/SJW Officer far out extremists out there looking for a new job, eh?

  • Sacking large numbers of employees drives the share price higher.

  • If you are doing fake work, and you do not see a viable business path yourself, then it is time to move on. Unless it is your ship, there is no glory in going down with the ship.

  • How awful and cringy the sitcom was to watch, it just exactly showed how the real Silicon Valley behaved.
    1. 1. Hire way more employees than you need in order to deprive your rivals of talent.
    2. 2. Collude with your rivals so you don't have to pay your employees as much as they deserve so that you don't bankrupt yourself paying for all these useless workers. [wikipedia.org]
    3. 3. ...?
    4. 4. Profit!

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