Keith Rabois, the Silicon Valley VC of the so-called PayPal mafia, told a banking event earlier this month that big tech companies like Meta and Google Was hired thousands of people to do “fake work” From “Vanity” to Hiring Metrics – and to prevent them from working for rivals.
Google owner speaking after layoffs at Alphabet (12,000) and meta (11,000 in November and further 10,000 this month, insider Rabois said, “These people have nothing to do – it’s all fake work. Now that it’s being exposed, what these people really do is they go to meetings.”
According to a former member of Meta’s staff, Rabois’ theory is absolutely correct.
Former Meta employee Britt Levy has taken to TikTok to share her “awkward” experience at Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant. In a video that has now been viewed more than 1 million times, Levy explained: “I was hired in April 2022; three days after I was hired we were asked to do a diversity survey.
“Everyone else I worked with had to work on stuff, but I didn’t. So I’m one of those employees who was put in a really awkward position where they immediately put me in a group of individuals who Diyas, which were not working.
“I mean, like, we just sat there. We basically had to fight to find work. It was a very strange environment and it seemed like Meta was hiring people so other companies weren’t us. And they’re just hoarding like Pokémon cards.”
meta didn’t respond immediately fate’s Request for comment.
‘Year of Efficiency’
Levi’s TikTok comes after Mark Zuckerberg launched a “year of efficiency” at Meta, saying the company is going to be “more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or aren’t as important anymore.” Could be.”
Beyond a troubled economic outlook, inflation and Fed rate hikes, META has had to deal with slow advertising revenue in the company. Whereas, investors and meta shareholders have became serious Zuckerberg’s decision to steer the company into uncharted waters with his Metaverse push was first announced in late 2021.
Responding to a comment from a viewer who said getting paid to do nothing sounded “horrible”, in another video Levy said the practice was actually “really screwing up” people’s careers. .
The mother of two explained: “It’s really not getting paid for doing nothing, you’re getting paid to put your career on hold. You’re being paid a temporary salary that will cover your lifetime earning potential.” is going to reduce.
“A lot of people turned down other really good opportunities or they left really good jobs to go meta and go into these jobs. Then when they’re doing nothing it’s like, ‘Well, what? going to happen? I’m not learning new skills, I’m not working on projects.'”
“It puts you in a position where it’s really difficult to get another job. It’s a compromise and it sounds great, but it will really screw up people’s careers.”
Killing Time in the Metaverse
levy told earlier insider he was hired on meta source development program, a 12-month program that helps workers from underrepresented groups enter the corporate technology recruiting industry. she was starting the program in april discontinued after just six months and claims she refused to sign the severance package.
She said that people in the program were assigned to different teams, in which she was one of the people with a low workload. As a result, she said, she spent her time getting to know the company’s employees.
“Participants of the program are placed in different teams throughout the meta,” she explained. “The people on those teams were full-time employees who had been with META for years—and those people weren’t doing anything.
“I had all the time in the world to just message random people: engineers, program managers, project managers. I messaged them and had 15- to 20-minute conversations about what they did all day and they’d tell me what they What were you doing? Nothing is working.
“We also had groups of people doing this thing called dog-fooding, where you just volunteer for metaquests, go out into the metaverse and see if you can run into any bugs or glitches.” and then report on it. A lot of people were doing it because we had nothing to do.”
This story was originally featured fortune.com
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