> 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. Meta declined to comment.
How can you work at one of the most desirable (by others) companies and not be expected to hire anyone in the first year? Sounds like a very low bar for a recruiter?
> 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.
Clearly living the hi-life, and for $190k. Jesus. "Checking recruiting efforts on LinkedIn" -- aka, letting the surveillance show recommendations for you?
I was contacted via linked in. I suspect they were using the "nuke from orbit" hiring approach. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd hired so many recruiters that recruit to developer hire was <10
I have to wonder if she was simply told that their expectations for junior recruiters were lower than more senior recruiters and maybe that they even had people who, despite their best efforts, were unable to get anyone signed for up to a year. That's quite different from saying that she wasn't expected to hire anyone for a year.
edit: or as others have pointed out they were hired at the beginning of a hiring freeze and heard that hiring may not pick back up again for a year. In that situation I'd expect them to have been laid off rather soon, but certainly not informed ahead of time.
If they literally couldn't hire anyone because of a freeze, I'd expect a person being paid $190k to be networking and identifying groups in other organizations that might be good to poach from based on the estimated needs of your company.
There are things recruiters can do that aren't recruiting. Just like any other job, there's important stuff to do in downtime.
This is the legacy of our antitrust policy. It shouldn’t take too much mental imagination to understand why something like this is a classic symptom of a lack of effective competition in a market segment.
> 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.
This is what happens when you centralize all of your recruiting. Central planning doesn’t work for certain types of activities because the realities at the edge cannot be sensed or controlled for.
The main problem is they hired too many people just before the bubble burst so had people doing nothing until they figured out which way the economy was heading.
They clearly did have problems because if they were closer to the actual business they would have not hired so many people because the way that Facebook and Google work is they hire people externally to find work internally. There is a lag time between being hired by Google and joining your team for example. At Facebook they do bootcamp and whatever. The point is that since team isn't doing their own hiring you will ALWAYS have this cohort of unusable people. In the best case its the same as if teams were hiring their own people, but in the worst case you will have teams who don't need anyone but still have all of these unused people in the cohorts you are recruiting.
It's only efficient for the use-case of making sure there is always someone available to recruit.
The recruiter was hired at the beginning of the hiring freeze in 2022 when the storm was setting in. What did she expect to work on before they cut her contract?
IMO it's less about calling out how Meta was honoring contracts and more about trying to exploit this to raise her profile to get more leads for her career counseling gig.
The real issue is FAANG has paid top talent to sit around all day in meetings solely to blunt competitive risk of those people getting any real work done.
Too bad for megacorps that the layoffs are just gasoline for a million AI startups being launched in the last two months.
I’ve never met a top talent person that would just sit around all day waiting to get tasked.
Maybe this is just a standard filter. Hire people that fit the top talent criteria. Then just wait and see what the accomplish. If the answer is nothing interesting, you counsel them out.
It’s hyperbole of course, but more like work on inconsequential things. Big tech has sucked up talent to both prevent competitors from finding it and to stop them from starting their own companies.
I expect these layoffs to lead to the next big tech in a decade.
I’m going to disagree with you on a definition basis. Top talent doesn’t stay still. Even if it once was top, it degrades. But more fundamentally, bullshitting isn’t a common attribute among people with and utilising a talent. (Apart from a talent for bullshitting. Go away.)
FAANG wanted to do this. But they wound up with legions of nonperformers while the top talent found other places.
I agree eventually, but top (for some definition) talent are still people. Pay someone a lot of money to work on yet another chat app, and most people can convince themselves it's worthwhile for a time. Most people are risk adverse and if someone is good enough to get a job at a FAANG, that's the least risky way to end up financially secure.
where are you getting this information? I've never heard of an engineer working at a top tech company sitting around all day in meetings and not having deliverables. Maybe some people could do this for six months but they would be fired after that.
I'm sure that some very productive engineers could coast, but they would be eventually promoted and will have higher expectations. These big companies have perfected the art of management and know how to milk their employees.
People seem convinced that these new AI startups are going somewhere and ... boy I dunno. Has anybody figured out the business model? It seems totally unproven to me. This stuff has high costs, so people better be able to pay for it, or peoples' attention better be even more monetizable than the current ads based business models. I'm really just not sure I'm seeing it! How many AI-infused subscription services are people really going to be buying?
Yes I have seen midjourney. Indeed it is a great example of what I'm talking about. What is the business model?
Yes I started doubting Bitcoin about a decade ago and have been right about it ever since. (I've been more ambivalent about Ethereum and remain unsure whether my cynical phases or optimistic phases were closer to the mark.)
Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for? Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments. But that didn't work for obvious reasons. There has never been another plausible explanation of what it's for since the failure of that first narrative.
Nope. Just a subscriber and see thousands of others using it on Discord. You pay to get access to their awesome models, it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling.
> Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for?
Go back to 2013 and read what they predicted, and try to fathom how something like this happened. Fastest growing asset ever and you don't understand it, and it's in your (presumably) computer science realm.
> Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments.
What's the first message in the first block of Bitcoin? "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." ................................................ some serious dunning kruger going on here.... "failure of that first narrative, that I just made up"
Yeah I find all the AI stuff really amazing and mind boggling. But that's not the point I made. My point is that I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable. I think it's currently being subsidized by investors, but I'm curious whether the marginal revenue will ever be able to exceed the marginal cost by enough to justify many businesses. Things can't just be cool, they also have to be cost effective.
(I wish we hadn't gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's boring while the midjourney discussion is interesting, but oh well.)
I don't have to go back in time, I remember what the idea of Bitcoin was, and it had nothing to do with speculation on its price. There were two ideas: 1. That it would be useful for digital payments; a secure and anonymous way to pay for things on the Internet, and 2. That it would be an inflation and banking crisis hedge (as your second paragraph alludes to). It's been a laughable failure at both of those things and now all anyone talks about is price speculation.
It doesn't, really, for these big ML models. Most of the cost savings, and thus progress, in recent years has come from innovations in the algorithms. It remains very expensive to run ML systems at huge scale. Everyone is betting (for example, Microsoft through its billions subsidizing OpenAI) that either hardware or software breakthroughs will make this all cost effective over time. That bet may well be right. All I'm saying is that it isn't obvious to me that it will be, and there's this entire mini-boom of companies is dependent on how that gamble turns out.
Why? Because you just blindly assume computing power is always cheap and have trouble with that assumption being challenged?
The whole reason chatgpt burst on the scene years after the techniques it is based on were developed is that the incumbents were unwilling to take the hit to their margins by releasing a fundamentally more expensive product category. OpenAI and Microsoft decided to take the gamble on that. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won't. That's how gambles work.
Starting to think I should just fake my resume and collect one of those sweet subsidies. If we're going to have market failures I might as well cash in.
Edit: in fact, if you're an exec at a large tech company staring down the barrel of some previous bad decision, consider paying me to just not talk about you for a year.
> 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.
I mean we aren't farmers working the sun-baked land, but where is this notion that the job is easy coming from? Am I alone?
There's a narrative being pushed (I don't know if anyone is intentionally pushing it, but you can see it recently). These recruiters have been in many news articles and the circumstances make you understand why they weren't doing much work (one was a Meta recruiter hired at the beginning of the hiring freeze).
It depends. I know plenty of "professional meeting attenders" in tech. Most of them are not engineers, but occasionally we get roped into it. One day I had 7 meetings. All of them were useless.
Some people are pretty invested in a return to in-person work (possibly invested in a literal sense, like they own office buildings) which is why a lot of articles like this sorta pivot to vague complaints about WFH part way through. Starts off as "some tech workers say their employers didn't give them any work" and then switches to "some CEOs have a hunch WFH people are slackers"
There’s a concerted PR campaign to push the “tech workers do nothing” meme for two reasons:
- justify layoffs that are pushed by activist investors
- union busting (as in “why would these lazy so-and-so’s need a union?”)
On the latter, the fallout from things like the firing of Timnit Gebru and other incidents alarmed a lot of board members. This is part of that fallout.
I was hired by a Fortune 500 company. In a class of twenty people being trained for three months for an entry-level job, only six were new hires and one of those six could not hack it and washed out of training. The rest were people who previously worked at the company and were returning (one was a military wife, back in the area again) or internal transfers or internal promotions from an even lower level entry-level job.
They also went from pages and pages of job listings to only a handful of job listings overnight during a recession. This was followed by a period of little to no hiring and few promotions.
My department got shiny new offices and we were moved there because we didn't have enough space for everyone and desk sharing for different shifts was the norm. Then the hiring freeze happened, the department shrank and we couldn't fill all the desks even after eliminating the night shift and the practice of desk sharing. They began repurposing some sections.
Hiring takes time. Training and onboarding take time. Best guesses about future needs can be wrong.
So far, no one has perfected the art of predicting the future. Business planning at this scale is hard and often looks stupid to outsiders.
If you said Meta research, I'd believe you. Between Cambridge Analytica and the Metaverse that billions of dollars was wasted on for releases that don't even compete with VRChat, I really don't know what to conclude apart from a lot of busywork going on there from the past few years.
Yeah, personally I can't see what Meta actually deliver with 86,000 employees. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have barely changed in years, they even all still have most of the same bugs I experienced about 5 years and 3 phones ago. They go through occasional restyling which could realistically be handled by a few teams, and Messenger gets features removed (events, polls etc) but hasn't added anything valuable since replies and reactions years ago. Not to mention WhatsApp still looks like it was built using components from Android 4. The Metaverse seemed entirely misguided, considering nobody in the world really ever wanted janky VR telecommuting, and they have failed to deliver anything revolutionary there so far - footage they've released seems like a worse version of both VRChat and Second Life, which is saying something.
Journalists have been milking this story for weeks now. All stories are about the same two junior recruiters who were hired just before hiring slowdown/pause. Meta was graceful enough to leave them in the payroll, and the new hires decided to shitpost on TikTok instead.
Recruiters in big tech have basically zero visibility about work happening in engineering orgs. Which in my experience is generally intense, even when the ideas are too bad to ship. I'm waiting for journalists to report on actual engineers who were paid to sit on their ass. But I am skeptical these people (if they exist) will be dumb enough to post videos on TikTok about it.
Rest-and-vest is different from "hired to do nothing". Rest-and-vest people have accrued enough seniority and tenure that the business either believes they're worth retaining or is too inefficient to detect the change in behavior and quickly manage them out.
I know a couple of engineers who've done nothing for 3 to 6 months on end. Then they get transferred to another team, rinse-and-repeat. One person I know did this for a little over a year before getting laid off. He literally did about 1 day of work a week!
In organizations I've been in it takes a while to file or lay someone off. It's generally easier to get them transferred out somewhere where they're miserable instead. Some people don't find those jobs terribly miserable though and are finally laid off when "value" and "impact" decisions are made. This is why I chuckled so much when Big Head got sent to the roof.
Yeah, I laughed at that part of Silicon Valley, too.
The "miserable job" only works if the person plans on working. For many, you can just continue slacking off, coming up with delays/blockers, and dragging things out indefinitely.
I think most of them also get commission. Depending on how many people they recruit that could be a sizeable amount per year. Recruiters do work really hard, I've personally known a few, so I don't think that's an indictment on recruiters as much as it's an indictment on how much you take home vs how much you earn the company.
This is a terrible point. Hiring someone to do nothing is not a fulfilling job. People, for the most part, care about what they do and want it to be important. The only thing that likely kept her there was the prestige of working for Meta and the economic stability. That doesn't mean having a job where you're expected to look busy but do nothing isn't stressful.
It's a lot less stressful than having no income during a pandemic while a lot of companies have hiring freezes on and you are either living on savings or not paying rent while you watch the bills pile up and have no idea how you will pay it when the eviction moratorium ends or ending up homeless during a pandemic.
It’s better to over hire based on a reasonable chance of growth projections becoming a reality and missing rather than to under hire and hit your targets for growth. With the former you can layoff people and eat the hit. With the later you are falling behind and giving up ground to competitors.
So it looks dumb eventually but all the way up, possibly for many years, you’re staying ahead of growth perfectly.
Ok, so this is fake news from The Wall Street Journal to amplify the idea that remote workers are slackers. That and union-busting is what is going on here, and it's clearer now from everyone's responses on the thread. Also sounds like somebody has bought too many REITs.
Famous problem of the bullshit jobs. Even if some people appear busy it's way too often they do nothing of the actual value to the company. All these giants probably need only 1/3 of all staff to operate at the same efficiency.
When I interviewed at Facebook I was told they hire people without active positions to fill. They beach them until the roles need to be filled. Nope I ain’t ever doing that.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadHow can you work at one of the most desirable (by others) companies and not be expected to hire anyone in the first year? Sounds like a very low bar for a recruiter?
> 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.
Clearly living the hi-life, and for $190k. Jesus. "Checking recruiting efforts on LinkedIn" -- aka, letting the surveillance show recommendations for you?
edit: or as others have pointed out they were hired at the beginning of a hiring freeze and heard that hiring may not pick back up again for a year. In that situation I'd expect them to have been laid off rather soon, but certainly not informed ahead of time.
There are things recruiters can do that aren't recruiting. Just like any other job, there's important stuff to do in downtime.
> 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.
The main problem is they hired too many people just before the bubble burst so had people doing nothing until they figured out which way the economy was heading.
It's only efficient for the use-case of making sure there is always someone available to recruit.
If meta was hoarding recruiters, then truly the stock deserved to go down.
Too bad for megacorps that the layoffs are just gasoline for a million AI startups being launched in the last two months.
Maybe this is just a standard filter. Hire people that fit the top talent criteria. Then just wait and see what the accomplish. If the answer is nothing interesting, you counsel them out.
I expect these layoffs to lead to the next big tech in a decade.
I’m going to disagree with you on a definition basis. Top talent doesn’t stay still. Even if it once was top, it degrades. But more fundamentally, bullshitting isn’t a common attribute among people with and utilising a talent. (Apart from a talent for bullshitting. Go away.)
FAANG wanted to do this. But they wound up with legions of nonperformers while the top talent found other places.
I agree eventually, but top (for some definition) talent are still people. Pay someone a lot of money to work on yet another chat app, and most people can convince themselves it's worthwhile for a time. Most people are risk adverse and if someone is good enough to get a job at a FAANG, that's the least risky way to end up financially secure.
The potential is insane ...
Did you doubt Bitcoin as well?
Yes I started doubting Bitcoin about a decade ago and have been right about it ever since. (I've been more ambivalent about Ethereum and remain unsure whether my cynical phases or optimistic phases were closer to the mark.)
Bitcoin is the fastest growing asset ever.
What.
I don't know, do you?
Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for? Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments. But that didn't work for obvious reasons. There has never been another plausible explanation of what it's for since the failure of that first narrative.
Nope. Just a subscriber and see thousands of others using it on Discord. You pay to get access to their awesome models, it works incredibly well. It's mind boggling.
> Bitcoin's growth as an "asset" is not very interesting to me. What is it for?
Go back to 2013 and read what they predicted, and try to fathom how something like this happened. Fastest growing asset ever and you don't understand it, and it's in your (presumably) computer science realm.
> Back when it was conceived, it was for digital payments.
What's the first message in the first block of Bitcoin? "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." ................................................ some serious dunning kruger going on here.... "failure of that first narrative, that I just made up"
Yeah I find all the AI stuff really amazing and mind boggling. But that's not the point I made. My point is that I'm not sure it's going to be sustainable. I think it's currently being subsidized by investors, but I'm curious whether the marginal revenue will ever be able to exceed the marginal cost by enough to justify many businesses. Things can't just be cool, they also have to be cost effective.
(I wish we hadn't gone down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, it's boring while the midjourney discussion is interesting, but oh well.)
I don't have to go back in time, I remember what the idea of Bitcoin was, and it had nothing to do with speculation on its price. There were two ideas: 1. That it would be useful for digital payments; a secure and anonymous way to pay for things on the Internet, and 2. That it would be an inflation and banking crisis hedge (as your second paragraph alludes to). It's been a laughable failure at both of those things and now all anyone talks about is price speculation.
Hard to take this seriously, sorry man.
The whole reason chatgpt burst on the scene years after the techniques it is based on were developed is that the incumbents were unwilling to take the hit to their margins by releasing a fundamentally more expensive product category. OpenAI and Microsoft decided to take the gamble on that. Maybe it will pan out, maybe it won't. That's how gambles work.
Edit: in fact, if you're an exec at a large tech company staring down the barrel of some previous bad decision, consider paying me to just not talk about you for a year.
* Owners of Twitter need not apply
I mean we aren't farmers working the sun-baked land, but where is this notion that the job is easy coming from? Am I alone?
There’s a concerted PR campaign to push the “tech workers do nothing” meme for two reasons: - justify layoffs that are pushed by activist investors - union busting (as in “why would these lazy so-and-so’s need a union?”)
On the latter, the fallout from things like the firing of Timnit Gebru and other incidents alarmed a lot of board members. This is part of that fallout.
“He takes off his tinfoil hat…”
I was hired by a Fortune 500 company. In a class of twenty people being trained for three months for an entry-level job, only six were new hires and one of those six could not hack it and washed out of training. The rest were people who previously worked at the company and were returning (one was a military wife, back in the area again) or internal transfers or internal promotions from an even lower level entry-level job.
They also went from pages and pages of job listings to only a handful of job listings overnight during a recession. This was followed by a period of little to no hiring and few promotions.
My department got shiny new offices and we were moved there because we didn't have enough space for everyone and desk sharing for different shifts was the norm. Then the hiring freeze happened, the department shrank and we couldn't fill all the desks even after eliminating the night shift and the practice of desk sharing. They began repurposing some sections.
Hiring takes time. Training and onboarding take time. Best guesses about future needs can be wrong.
So far, no one has perfected the art of predicting the future. Business planning at this scale is hard and often looks stupid to outsiders.
??????
After layoffs probably those who didnt work started to. Or were let go.
Recruiters in big tech have basically zero visibility about work happening in engineering orgs. Which in my experience is generally intense, even when the ideas are too bad to ship. I'm waiting for journalists to report on actual engineers who were paid to sit on their ass. But I am skeptical these people (if they exist) will be dumb enough to post videos on TikTok about it.
And also, based on posts on tik tok where people regularly make up or exaggerate stories for social clout.
Vest and rest is a real example and I've know a few people who fit that category.
https://www.insider.com/rest-and-vest-millionaire-engineers-...
amateur
The "miserable job" only works if the person plans on working. For many, you can just continue slacking off, coming up with delays/blockers, and dragging things out indefinitely.
And this is how she repays them.
So it looks dumb eventually but all the way up, possibly for many years, you’re staying ahead of growth perfectly.
SMH