The reality of Big Tech's 'fake work' problem https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-industry-fake-work-problem-bad-managers-bosses-layoffs-jobs-2023-7?_gl=1*j2hb2g*_ga*MTU0MTI4MjQ0Ny4xNjcxNDgzMTg0*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTY4OTA1MzQwMy41NTAuMS4xNjg5MDUzNDU1LjguMC4w What is your reaction? Here are some choice selections from the article: Another ex-Meta employee said that there were so many workers in his department when he joined in 2022 that on multiple occasions, he'd complete a project to learn that as many as four other people had been given the same assignment separately. The former employee described the work he did at Meta as "intern-level' — putting together graphs based on preexisting data, polishing presentations, or practicing how to "work a problem backward" — despite having nearly a decade of experience in tech. He said he found the environment "stifling" and was often deterred from trying to increase the scope of his work. Some people were assigned plenty of tasks, but they ended up serving no mission-critical purpose. The former Google program manager said that people were working hard but what qualified as work had seemingly changed. "They gave us a lot of work that was just a waste of time," she said. One former contract worker hired by Meta during the pandemic became so frustrated with feeling idle that she took on a second contract job at Microsoft at the same time (neither company knew she was working for the other). She decided if "they're not going to give me anything to do then I guess I'm just getting paid." "It's a little bit of a symbiotic relationship where the people that you report to aren't saying that you're not doing anything and you're not saying that you're not doing anything," she told us. At almost all tech companies, current and former employees said, bosses were rewarded for overhiring since it made them look important. Bloated org charts resulted in too many people fighting for work, a poor understanding of what each segment of the company was doing, and a rise in projects spun up merely to help managers get themselves promoted. "People are often measured not in contribution but in head count." Moran said. "The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company," Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. "It's what we call empire building. You're not focused on building a product; you're focused on building an empire. That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating." The former Meta employee who joined the company in 2022 felt that stuffing teams was a byproduct of middle managers looking for a promotion, leading to employees having less to do. One of his managers hired so many people that within three months, there became four levels between him and the person who was supposed to be managing him. "A lot of the time, my managers had no idea what I was doing," he said. Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" that without financial hurdles, managers had every reason to keep hiring. "The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization," he said. To secure their fiefdoms, managers often pitch projects they created that are sometimes referred to as "vanity projects" or "promo projects." These may ultimately contribute zero to a company's top line, but the flashy presentations and demos associated with the projects often lead to a promotion and nice pay bump for the person leading the work. One Google manager who recently left the company said the head-count process at Google "rewards bad behavior" by promoting people based on "having a bigger team and creating decks." Google had "dozens" of teams, he said, that did "think tank-like strategy work with no real practical way of impacting the business or a customer or user." "I do think that process favored the people who were better at bullshitting and storytelling," he told us. At Meta, one current employee said it was common to see employees all the way up to vice presidents invent workshops or "sprints" to set "strategic visions" for projects, while only a small fraction made it onto a road map, an actual timeline for a product to launch to the public, the employee said. "I've rarely seen a large-scale vision be referenced after it's presented, despite the fact that upwards of 20 people are called to participate, usually by making and remaking decks for leadership," they added. "You can always tell when performance reviews are about to happen because there's almost always one or two workshops on the calendar a month before." He (salesforce) said the meeting culture at the company had also gotten out of hand and "work" was defined as "making slide decks and giving speeches and having a really full calendar that shows you're in a lot of meetings." #amazon #google #meta #microsoft #uber #netflix #tech #engineering #engineer #productmanagement #productmanager #programmanager
Defaming tech workers at all levels and pushing companies to layoff. News organizations need to grow up. This does not represent 99.9%.
It perfectly matches my experience at MS in the past 3 years. Had seen my group grow from 2 superstars to 30 meh-ngineers, changed 7 managers and got 3 layers of extra managers above me, sooo lacking the skills, just making up pointless projects, constantly scratching plans, crushing great engineers morale who see the way it works and just cant believe. Exodus has started.
I've gone through 5 manager changes and 2 re-orgs in the past year, not kidding. How the hell am I supposed to get anything done in that environment? I also had managers that would give me a project, then two weeks later decide that project wasn't important. It would happen so often that I began to bullshit more myself. Why would I commit to a project my boss isn't committed to? Like I'm not just some machine: how I feel about a project matters.
This is spot on with what I have observed at MS.. too many empire building and bull shitting Partners
big companies are like this in general. there are pockets of cruft
The article actually talks about "lazy management". So many articles were in the news about how SWE don't do real work... But reality is the management chain is just gathering status updates and summarizing for the chain up.
I expected this from Google and Microsoft. Meta and Salesforce and Amazon too??? I thought at those places they had actual work to do.
Anyone who uses FANGMULA has certainly mastered the art of bullshit. "Data is not the plural of anecdote"
When management and tech employees want to build something they can for example: Another person familiar with the company said that Threads wasn't making money but that the app also cost Meta "almost nothing." The team of engineers that built the app is just 15 people, while the entire Threads team is just 50 people, with Threads operated through Instagram's existing infrastructure. https://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-threads-app-growth-meta-twitter-2023-7?_gl=1*k9qyhd*_ga*MTU0MTI4MjQ0Ny4xNjcxNDgzMTg0*_ga_E21CV80ZCZ*MTY4OTA5NzM1MS41NTQuMC4xNjg5MDk3MzUxLjYwLjAuMA.. It seems like there is a chicken and egg problem here. Managers were once ICs at these companies. How can the problem be fixed.
What is this anti worker crap stop posting this shit