Tech employees say they were being paid to do nothing all day

[DragonSlayer101]

What just happened? Many former employees at big tech companies are admitting that they had very little to do at their jobs, despite earning high salaries. One such under-worked and overpaid former tech worker is 33-year-old Madelyn Machado, who left Microsoft to join Facebook's parent company Meta as a recruiter in the fall of 2021.

In a viral TikTok video, Machado claimed she was hired for a $190,000 yearly salary, but had basically nothing to do during her stint at the company. "I do think a lot of these companies wanted there to be work, but there wasn't enough," she said. Talking to The Wall Street Journal, Machado said that on most days, her work included attending virtual meetings from noon until 3:30 pm before logging off for the day.

Curiously, Machado says she was told by her recruiters at Meta that she wouldn't be hiring anybody during her first year at the company. She also claims that some of her colleagues told her that they had spent two years at the company without ever hiring anyone. Unfortunately for her, she only worked for six months at Meta before being fired last year for posting TikTok videos that the company said posed a conflict of interest.

Another former Meta worker who recounted a similar story is 35-year-old Britney Levy, who says she joined the company in April 2022 but received her first and only assignment shortly before being laid off in November. Since then, companies across the tech industry, including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, PayPal, Yahoo, Zoom, IBM, Spotify, and others, have announced massive layoffs, affecting tens of thousands of employees.

Talking to the WSJ, experts said they believe companies overhired during the pandemic-era boom not because they needed more workers, but to hoard talent from rival companies. According to Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, the hiring spree was initially fueled by a shortage of tech talent but eventually became a competition, which led to companies "hiring ahead of demand." He also pointed out that that the situation was very similar to what happened in the finance industry in the early 2000s, when companies overhired during periods of high growth, leaving many workers with not enough work.

Others, however, say they believe the tech companies have valid reasons to hire new talents, despite not having enough work for them from the get-go. According to Patrick Moloney, the head of global technology practice at the advisory firm Willis Towers Watson PLC, workers like AI engineers are expected to be in high demand in the near future, so it makes sense for companies to hire them aggressively even if they didn't have a lot to do in their initial months. However, it still doesn't explain why a company would need recruiters with nothing to do but attend meetings all day.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/98368-tech-employees-they-paid-do-nothing-all-day.html

 

[RenCruMia]

Good morning, you must have time traveled...next time take me with you! "assignment shortly before being laid off in November 2023."

 

[ScottSoapbox]

Makes the layoffs make even more sense.

 

[Jack77]

Consultants get to sit on their *ss at customers for days or weeks all the time. Because of bad planning, running contracts and out of fear that they will be on another assignment when they are needed again. Unless they can "work" from home during such periods, they need to pretend that they are busy during such periods. So that higher-ups in the company are not confronted with the situation.

 

[Trapped Nowhere]

I don't get throwing away nice money for social media fame

 

[Nobina]

Everyone suspected as much. Tech is infested with these pointless people. There are likely even more of them waiting for their day to come.

 

[p51d007]

And I think we can all assume the SAME THING happens with a bunch of "government" employees too!

 

[passwordistaco]

I don't get throwing away nice money for social media fame

She's accrued tens of Internet Dollars.

 

[nnguy2]

Not surprised HR recruiters are the first to get axed.

 

[waclark]

And I think we can all assume the SAME THING happens with a bunch of "government" employees too!

The problem is you can't get rid of government employees once you hire them. It's very hard and you need an ironclad case to do so.

 

[waclark]

I seriously doubt people sat around and thought about hiring people to keep them from other firms. Recruiters get requisitions for positions, and they go out and hire whomever they can find to fulfill the position. The impact may be that other firms cannot get that talent, but I doubt that is a driving reason to hire people.

I think in the Pandemic companies thought that once the lockdowns were over, life would return to normal and back to the growth and good economy we had prior. That did not materialize, and companies found themselves over-staffed, hence the layoffs.

 

[bviktor]

Not surprised HR recruiters are the first to get axed.

IKR. Which just happen to be women most of the time. In this article as well, both just happen to be females. Funnily enough, they don't complain about females being over-represented in HR, that's okay, but males being over-represented in STEM jobs is not okay. Because equality or something.

And when the sh*t hits the fan, obviously, they're gonna fire the slackers. If it's female slackers, so be it. But they OBVIOUSLY try to twist it as such that companies intentionally target women with the layoffs. You know, the bunch that the interwebs call "yoga chicks".

So my advice is plain and simple: find a job that's actually useful. Otherwise? Stop complaining.

 

[AndreV]

And I think we can all assume the SAME THING happens with a bunch of "government" employees too!

Why did you put "government" in comas? This is for implying that government is not government. It doesn't make sense.

 

[BuckarooBonzaii]

Getting paid to do nothing but some still complain about their working conditions.

 

[NicktheWVAHick]

Let’s face it…if you have time to play hacky-sack, ping pong, exercise and drink lattes at work, your really not working at all.

 

[LemmingO]

Tech is INFESTED with this culture. It's a cancer that should be excised. The number of people just hopping around 6-digit salaries is completely out of control, especially considering they aren't getting the work done.

As much as I'd like to sympathize with the tiktoker, I don't. They are the cause of it all because having a backbone in the tech industry is counter-intuitive to the zeitgeist. Now we'll all pay for it, because as these things begin to surface, companies will want to knee-jerk the **** out of it and fire more than they actually need to, just out of fear investors will get on their back because of company mismanagement.

 

[amghwk]

These a-holes should be keeping their mouth shut and count their blessings. Instead, they have to rant like b!tches online in their favourite "social media" crap that they can't live without.
Serves them right if they are f-ked fired.

Anyway, these "extras" will be axed soon during the quality improvement overhaul by the management and during downsizing and maximizing profit exercises.

 

[BadThad]

The blame squarely lies on management. The quality of managers in most companies is weak. If your people are not working, then it's their managers fault for not keeping them busy. PATHETIC! Also, sadly, the young work force is also complicit. If you're being paid over $100k but do nothing, most people with ANY kind of ethics would tell their manager to give them work. BUT NOOOOO, these children are content with sitting on their arses all day which is also PATHETIC.

 

[hwertz]

Odd concept. I wonder if they really expected these people to do nothing, or if they expected them to (on their own initiative) decide to find projects to work on and like horn their way in and start working on them?

(Not that expecting that is necessarily a great idea for 2 reasons... 1) Depending on how the company is structured, some companies keep their project groups STRICTLY seperated and would not welcome someone inside the company trying to pry in any more than they would someone from outside the company doing so. And 2) Some people are excellent coders and problem solvers, but if someone doesn't say "Hey, would you take a look at this?" they are going to work on their own projects or just do whatever.)

 

[gamerk2]

The blame squarely lies on management. The quality of managers in most companies is weak. If your people are not working, then it's their managers fault for not keeping them busy. PATHETIC! Also, sadly, the young work force is also complicit. If you're being paid over $100k but do nothing, most people with ANY kind of ethics would tell their manager to give them work. BUT NOOOOO, these children are content with sitting on their arses all day which is also PATHETIC.

Middle Managers in most all corporations these days do not have any budgetary authority; that comes directly from corporate. And those funds are often tied up for various (read: Wall Street) reasons. The most middle-management can do is ask their bosses for more work, which then gets sent up the chain, but more often then not there isn't enough work to justify the current levels of employment.

By the same token, companies do not want to downside, for fear the workforce they need would not be available when those jobs come in. This is especially notable in companies with an older engineering staff that support long-lived programs; you don't want to lose the engineering experience, but also don't want to let the young talent who will eventually take over the support role in a few years time.

This has been going on for literally a decade now; the only thing that's changed is that these companies no longer have access to infinite credit, which is forcing them to make some decisions they otherwise wouldn't have had to.

*I've been working on a "Non-Productive Work" charge number since November.

 

[gamerk2]

Odd concept. I wonder if they really expected these people to do nothing, or if they expected them to (on their own initiative) decide to find projects to work on and like horn their way in and start working on them?

That would be a badly structured company that deserves bankruptcy. At that point, why even bother employing management?

(Not that expecting that is necessarily a great idea for 2 reasons... 1) Depending on how the company is structured, some companies keep their project groups STRICTLY seperated and would not welcome someone inside the company trying to pry in any more than they would someone from outside the company doing so. And 2) Some people are excellent coders and problem solvers, but if someone doesn't say "Hey, would you take a look at this?" they are going to work on their own projects or just do whatever.)

What I've seen over the years is that while top-level management wants the ability to move engineers around at will, most project leads are trying to protect control over "THEIR" projects and "THEIR" personnel, and keep outsiders away from their little fiefdoms. Because they want "THEIR GUYS" to get all the credit when the project obviously succeeds, so "THEIR GUYS" can get pushed up into management, continuing the cycle.

As for coding standards, I've found most companies are accumulating a lot of what I call "language experts". And the code they write is well structured and at times beautiful in concept. It's also overdesigned, runs like a slug, crashes the instant anything unexpected happens, fails to meet numerous project requirements, and generally isn't designed in a way that allows for easily adding/changing core functionality after the fact. Using OOP has it's place, but there are times (many in fact) where forcing it just for the sake of OOP not only is more trouble then it's worth, but actively sabotages the project.

 

[Jon Heil]

Sounds like a Lazy GenZ work ethic company then

 

[m3tavision]

These a-holes should be keeping their mouth shut and count their blessings. Instead, they have to rant like b!tches online in their favourite "social media" crap that they can't live without.
Serves them right if they are f-ked fired.

Anyway, these "extras" will be axed soon during the quality improvement overhaul by the management and during downsizing and maximizing profit exercises.

Elon was ahead of the curve at Twitter... Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc... all followed.

 

[godrilla]

The outlook on ai replacing as much as 20% of the near term workforce is making much more sense now. If you aren't contributing anything don't expect to keep your job especially when things turn red for the company. This is a pediatric immature mindset of doing the bare minimum and boasting it on social media. One thing the ai won't do when it's idle is boast about it on social media! The other day I read an article that some are able to work multiple full time jobs with the help of ai and remote work without the knowledge of the employers. The root cause of the problem and lack of efficiency obviously comes from the top and often not just management. If the management is not kept in check efficiency runs amok!

 

[yannus]

Why did you put "government" in comas? This is for implying that government is not government. It doesn't make sense.

In fact it does, governments are just the hands of those who decide, on a global scale.

Now talking about the why big tech hired people at that precise moment, it's possibly because they knew it was going to be big money for online corporations so they didn't want other companies to have an opportunity to take part in the feast.