Half of Google office employees ‘don’t really work’

Other venture capitalists have also joined the debate around this issue and overstaffing in Big Tech in recent years.

In 2022, Marc Andreessen once tweeted: “Big, good companies are overstaffed 2 times over. Big, bad companies are overstaffed 4 times or more.”

Tech investor Keith Rabois last year attributed mass layoffs at Meta and Google to this. “There’s nothing for these people to do… It’s all pretend work,” he continued. “Now after being exposed, in the end all these people do is just go to meetings.”

Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.ai, agrees. He said that Google and Meta were hiring too many employees and not having enough work for them to do. “They literally do nothing while working from home,” he said.

Although some tech workers say they have to “basically fight to find work”, others blame bad governance, with bosses over-recruiting and assigning workers jobs busy to make yourself look more important and secure a promotion.

Tech companies like Meta and Google have laid off thousands of employees in recent years, often under the pretext of becoming more efficient.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that 2023 will be “the year of efficiency” and expressed his distaste for the cumbersome organizational structure of management levels.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told 2022 employees that “There are real concerns that overall performance is not commensurate with the number of people we have.”

From the beginning of 2023, Google enters cost-cutting mode when parent company Alphabet announces plans to lay off about 12,000 workers. The cuts continue this year. In a recent memo, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said Alphabet is restructuring its financial organization, meaning the scale may shrink further.

(Theo Insider, CNBC)