Hired To Do Nothing!

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Until last year, Madelyn Machado, 33 years old, worked for Meta. Except she says she didn’t really work at all. 

Ms. Machado, who held a position as a recruiter, says that after joining the company in September 2021, she spent much of her time in meetings that didn’t accomplish anything, and that the parent of Facebook and Instagram had too many recruiters and not enough work for them to do.  

“We just don’t hire anybody and, like, we still get paid,” she said she was told by other recruiters in a viral TikTok video documenting her experience. She added that she was paid $190,000 a year and was told she wasn’t expected to hire anyone in her first year, given that she was still learning the ropes.

In recent weeks, other former tech workers have posted similar videos, racking up millions of views. They say they collected paychecks from large tech companies without doing much. 

Such confessions—which have drawn plenty of criticism online—aren’t surprising, executives and industry professionals say. Tech companies that boomed during the pandemic were flush with cash, they say, and snapped up workers to build a deep bench and hoard talent from competitors, even if those workers weren’t being fully utilized.

“They were hiring ahead of demand,” says Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. A shortage of tech talent at the time, he says, contributed to a sense of urgency that fueled recent hiring sprees. When there’s a war for talent, “you want to hire ahead of others,” he says. Other sectors such as the finance industry in the early 2000s, he says, similarly overhired during periods of fast growth, leaving some workers without enough to do. 

In an interview, Ms. Machado, who is based in Tampa, Fla., and has reinvented herself as a career coach, says that during a typical day at Meta, she might log on at 11 a.m., when her West Coast colleagues began their day, sit in meetings from noon until 3:30 p.m., and then check recruiting efforts on LinkedIn for an hour before logging off.

“I do think a lot of these companies wanted there to be work, but there wasn’t enough,” she says of her six months at Meta. The company terminated her, she says, after reprimanding her for posting on TikTok, where she offers career advice, saying her videos posed a conflict of interest. 

Ms. Machado says she now has seven employees working for her coaching business, assisting clients with interview prep and salary negotiations. She says she landed her Meta role after three short interviews and was offered a $70,000 raise to leave her previous role at Microsoft.

Since the start of the year, tech companies have laid off more than 168,000 people, according to Layoffs.fyi, a website that tracks job cuts. Many tech executives, including Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, have issued mea culpas for overhiring, and their mistaken belief that pandemic shifts to online spending would be more permanent.

Keith Rabois, an early PayPal executive and venture capitalist, has accused large tech companies of seeing hiring as a “vanity metric,” deliberately hiring talent to keep them from working for other companies. Mr. Rabois made the remarks at a recent event held by the investment banking advisory firm Evercore.

Some laid-off workers agree. “They were just kind of, like, hoarding us like Pokémon cards,” a former Meta worker hired in April 2022 says in a recent TikTok video about her experience at the company. In an interview, Britney Levy, 35, says she was hired as part of a yearlong training program dedicated to recruiting diverse talent, and she was frustrated to receive only one assignment shortly before being laid off in November.

“I was like, am I being set up for failure?” she says.

Patrick Moloney, who co-leads the global technology practice at the advisory firm Willis Towers Watson PLC, says that forecasting hiring needs was difficult during the pandemic. For tech companies, it can be prudent to make long-term bets on roles that are especially hard to hire for, such as software engineers, or in in-demand fields such as artificial intelligence, he says. The companies expect that strategy will eventually pay off, even if there’s lag time between hiring an employee and giving them enough work to fully occupy their time. 

“If you’re looking from the outside, you’d wonder, why did you hire that person?” he says of new hires with little to do. A year later, he says, that same person might be slammed, and the company really needs them. It can take time, he adds, for workers to be fully onboarded and contribute in a meaningful way. 

Others blame what they view as a permissive corporate culture in Silicon Valley that creates environments where it’s possible to stay employed without working hard. Thomas Siebel, head of the software company C3.ai Inc., says tech employers’ embrace of remote work has made matters worse. 

“People were job-hopping from jobs where they were doing nothing, working from home, to another where they were doing nothing, working from home, and got paid 15% more,” he says. Employees at Mr. Siebel’s company are expected to work full time from the office, which he says is essential to high performance and collaboration.
 
Mr. Siebel recently rehired an engineer who had left for more money at another tech company, only to return, frustrated, complaining that there wasn’t enough to do there. 

Another tech worker, Derrick McMillen, 32, who worked at Facebook and Salesforce before the pandemic, says that during his time at Salesforce, he often felt as though 20% of employees did 80% of the work, while their peers did on-site yoga and took long lunches. Mr. McMillen said he felt that some co-workers there pushed work onto peers, and that anyone pushing back risked being seen as having a bad attitude.
 
“There’s this fluffy image of everyone’s just so nice,” he says. “But when the culture doesn’t let you tell people they’re underperforming, you end up with a team of slackers.” says Mr. McMillen, now head of engineering at a small startup, Niche Protocol Inc., a social-media company. He prefers a smaller company, he adds, where he says people are more accountable. 

Marc Benioff, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this year that while it’s possible to keep a company going with “excess employees,” it’s not healthy. The company announced in January that it would be laying off 10% of its staff, or around 8,000 workers.
 
Val Katayev, an investor and entrepreneur who has founded several ad-tech companies, says the temptation is great for rich, growing tech companies to pile on hires. “They hire everybody, whether they need it or not, just to have a reserve of talent,” he says. “They can afford it.”
 
Lately, though, he says he has heard from tech executives who have done layoffs and have been startled to realize the cuts didn’t have a big effect on productivity.

“They’re saying, I think I’m going to do another, because the first worked out so well,” he says. “We didn’t realize how inefficient we were.”