This certainly appears to have been the case at Twitter. Many employees, if appearances are to be believed, seemed to socialize and eat (free) for a living while proudly declaring themselves and their organization to be 'not really capitalist, more like socialist,' or whatever that one hidden camera quote was.
The well-meaning technocracy cannot sustain indefinitely, it seems, which is a relief.
How much revenue has twitter lost since the layoffs? At least a 22% decrease. Which is enough to mean shareholders would have gotten more money if all the useless employees had continued executing their "useless" function.
And this is assuming 2024 is going well for twitter. I doubt it.
Am I wrong in saying if it was an generous estimate of 1 million per employee there is 6.5 billion, and that's insane generous. 20% being around 9billion... Back of napkin math would disagree..
Your dramatically overestimating Twitter's revenue. In 2021 it was about $5 billion in total. [1] Probably more like $100k per employee so around $650 million in labor cost reductions, and then around $1 billion loss in revenue. They are expected to become profitable sometime this year, so these numbers are probably roughly in the right ballpark.
Yes, financial activism can have quite the wide ripple if you piss off the wrong big city liberals by taking away their ability to remove entire stories from the internet in direct cooperation with un-elected portions of the government.
Edit: We tech types are so predictable it's almost trite. Sorry I don't agree with your well-meaning technocracy and disingenuous moralistic posturing.
Not to mention the value. Went from 55 to what 15 billion? Maybe 10? I don't think the cost cutting of a few hundred people making 6 figures makes that worth it.
I doubt X's employees are that much more productive anyways. Before Musk the feature rollout was slower than molasses, and post-Musk all we get are reactionary changes that make the website suck more for non-users. It would not surprise me to hear that now 1/3rd or 1/4th of Musk's retainers are coasting by on their 9-5.
I don't know if it's that great. They're tasked with adding features that no one actually wants and when rolled out, no one will use: like phone calls, and eventually payments. And then there will be features that aren't particularly well-thought out, like Grok, which mostly seem to garner bad news headlines. There's the constant threat of being laid off for no reason.
I heard or read a tasteless old joke (maybe on Gawker as I can't find it now) about a VC complaining you could lob a grenade into Twitter's SF offices after 5 pm on a weekday and no one would be hurt or even notice.
What, people working 9-5?! How dare they! Clearly they should be working 80 hours a week for the greater glory of, er, improving the retweet functionality or whatever.
(There is, in any case, little evidence that people who work extremely long hours in white-collar jobs are, on average, particularly productive. It just doesn't work that well for most people.)
> This certainly appears to have been the case at Twitter. Many employees, if appearances are to be believed, seemed to socialize and eat (free) for a living while proudly declaring themselves and their organization to be 'not really capitalist, more like socialist,' or whatever that one hidden camera quote was.
That was an interesting case. Given that Musk took over and it laid off all those engineers, I'd really want to disagree with you, but I remember all the claims of "just watch it implode", "yeah it will run for a month and then everything will melt down and they'll learn their lesson". But it's been a while and the service still seems to be up and I see people still posting links to it and so on. So I guess, I'd have to agree with you about Twitter.
It's vexing to me why a company like Google has so many employees. Does running an ad server and search engine really need tens of thousands of people? Perhaps many of these engineers are on-call if something goes wrong to fix the problem ASAP. Investors ought to care how much money is being wasted on superfluous hiring.
When was the first time? This doesn't really pass the sanity test. Half of the staff merely has to be available? For firefighters or ambulance drivers, this kind of ratio might make sense.
> "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."
He would rather that Google focuses on Ads and cuts the rest of the company.
Everyone that tried to do what Google does with less people has failed.
Anyway, my experience working at a startup that went from a few hundred customers to hundreds of thousands (B2B, with each customer being very high volume): Scale requires headcount. Our customer base increased 2000x and our engineering headcount went up 50x. But our product is now far more capable than it was back when I started. It was simple enough I could fit the whole thing in my head as a mid-level engineer. Not the case anymore...
Google in 2004 didn't have YouTube or GSuite or Android. It was not a cloud provider. They did not have a de-facto monopoly on search. It hadn't even acquired DoubleClick yet. It was only just emerging as a major Internet advertiser. It didn't have a lot of things we now take for granted.
He isn't stating a fact, from what I can tell. The actual quote in the article is "I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work."
It's not controversial to think that there is likely waste at Google. This particular article, though, has no insight in it. It's an inflammatory statement with no conversation or intelligence about it. Maybe there's something more in the Substack they reference.
Then again, I don't think it's crazy to believe that 50% of Substack newsletter content is full of nonsense /joke
Worst of all, I don't think the authors generally get to write the headlines. Can you imagine how frustrating it must be to have your boss make the most salient part of your work contradict the work itself?
Since no one outside Google knows what real work the white-collar staff at Google do, no one can prove him wrong. He may be quoting a disgruntled Google employee. He's using an appeal to authority argument - his own as one half of Andreessen-Horowitz. That's a neat trick.
> He isn't stating a fact, from what I can tell. The actual quote in the article is "I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work."
Contrast that with "Half of Google's white-collar staff 'does no real work,' Silicon Valley VC says".
So the title of the article is an outright lie. That probably should be flagged?
VCs have a lot of vested interest in getting more engineers out of companies like Google for working on their own startups. It might well be true the productivity rate is low for Google employees, but they also need to look at how much money the company is making per engineer and that number is very high - much higher than any pre/post IPO startup.
The VCs hate that Google and others bid up salaries. It means their investments don't go as far. He'd love for Google to lay off a ton of employees so his portfolio companies could get significantly cheaper labor.
If a lot of people in a company do no real work, that means there is potential to trim down the workforce, decrease costs and still get the same amount of stuff done?
On the other hand, people said the same thing about Twitter. Elon Musk bought it and fired most employees. Indeed, Twitter works kinda similar to before. But revenue is said to be down 50%.
Turns out that it took a lot of staff to keep out spam and hate speech, and advertisers hate being next to hate speech. It took even more staff to work in sales so that the advertisers would have a point of contact and stay happy.
The higher up you go in the corporate ladder, the easier your job is. Less stress, more respect, less hours. Decisions you make are hard to tie back to incompetence
The same holds true for companies with too much cash on hand
> The higher up you go in the corporate ladder, the easier your job is. Less stress, more respect, less hours. Decisions you make are hard to tie back to incompetence
Curious how far you've gotten and where because this doesn't track with my experience at all.
Was L7 at FAANG and ~250 employee startup CTO, you are basically on-call 24/7, no such thing as "not my job/responsibility" as everything below you bubbles up to you eventually. Constantly have to juggle priorities and make difficult decisions with limited data. If VP/director needs a report by Monday AM your weekend is gone. If production database goes down at 2am you're awake and have to facilitate communication between stressed engineers fixing the problem and angry upper management/customers.
You have lots of authority and get plenty of respect and compensation to match, but low-stress or fewer hours? that's reddit-brained /r/antiwork BS from a clueless 2x-year-old who watches TV and thinks CEOs just go golfing all day.
Worked at a high level at FAANG, meetings with L8+. Half of the directors/VPs are just there to keep a cool head and make a few decisions. Directly sat in management consulting meetings with C level at american express. They just made decisions by picking from one of three options on a slide deck.
Also L7 in faang is not that high level, you can still be an individual contributor.
The thing about automation is that if you're good at it, you don't need very many people. Managers do need people in order to build their empires and get promoted. It seems to be the nature of modern work that these cross pressures create the weather systems that roil large companies.
How automation could work: we have to work less because automation decreass the amount of work done. Everybody has a greater quality of life.
How automation actually works: we fire half the staff and use that to suppress wages of those remaining ("you might be next", "you can be replaced"), increase the amount of work each person has to do and move the costs of the unemployed onto the state. For slightly higher profits.
So "bullshit jobs" are both a way of a company protecting itself (like in Google's case, by having people avilable) and society protecting itself where people create BS jobs because they may have a bS job themselves or may have one someday.
This is going to reach a breaking point in the future and it's long been predicted that at some point we'll only need 20% of people to do the work.
It's really shortsighted too because companies will have no one to sell to if no one earns enough to afford what they sell. But this system has no long-term planning. It's all a series of short-term local decisioning-making where we cut labor costs 20% to increase profits by 1%.
You'll hear this kind of thing from VCs, but VCs are used to investing in a number of bets that they expect to fail, but profit from the winners. The VC here seems to be criticizing Google for doing the same thing internally ("The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade"), complaining that most of the projects that are funded don't make money, as if management can magically know in advance which bets will work and which won't work.
I think the problem at Google is that they start too many things and don't follow through, and that they kill too many projects and products with happy users. But that's a management problem: they aren't using the workers as effectively as they could be doing.
Your comment highlights that the "does no real work" verbiage is disingenuous / inflammatory. "Does no real work" is _very_ different from "does a bunch of work that gets thrown away".
If only we had some sort of people who are supposed to provide this knowledge, in advance, of which projects will work and which won't. We might even call such a skill "vision".
Even the most successful companies have had more than one expensive misfire. As long as things that work make more money than the things that don't work lose money, you're doing OK. A large and well-off company can afford to act like a VC for internal, experimental projects.
Stupid, especially coming from a VC that is very knowledgeable of the amortization of returns on a portfolio: 9 companies fail for every single success. Google acts like a big VC fund, obviously many initiatives fail. Why would he judge Google for failed initiatives while he himself is a poster child of waste?
No doubt there are useless jobs but the main example he gives is failed initiatives by Google.
What about failed initiatives (“startups”) at a16z?
Random VC says some random inflammatory thing with no evidence to support it. 15% growth, a dividend, and a buyback but those poor disenfranchised capitalists still want more.
Lol, project much Andreessen? He's been complaining about this for at least 1 years because I remember him complaining about this when I joined twitter in 2012. And what exactly has he done to earn his billions?
I think there are a number of advantages of having extra staff if a company can afford it.
1. Talent is pulled away from competition that can threaten Google's dominance.
2. Talent is prevented from creating their own startups that can threaten Google's dominance.
3. Engineers are available to handle extra work that suddenly shows up leaving the others to keep focusing on "real work".
4. Engineers are available to do work that is not "real". Meaning work that nobody wants to do but still has to be done.
5. Hiring more people shows that the company is growing causing the stock value to go up.
6. Firing people can also cause the stock price to go up because it shows company is doing something to cut costs.
The article literally has no substance. Who isn't doing any real work? What are they doing instead? How can companies improve? Literally nothing is said about anything.
I clicked through to the linked interview, and it elaborates in slightly more detail, saying that he wants the BS jobs eliminated so more capital can be returned to the shareholders. This is just "kill R&D so that I can have some cash now". (That sounds like the current state of the VC world. In a world with 7% interest rates, what do VCs do exactly? They aren't investing in startups, that's for sure. Maybe their job can be eliminate so a16z can return some capital to its shareholders, eh?)
Is this basically a restatement of the old cliche that only 50% of advertising works, but it's almost impossible to know which 50%.
He says "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade" - are these just the missed bets - the projects which if they had succeeded would have added billions and billions to the bottom line, but for any of a number of reasons, failed.
I think it would be crazy to believe that 50% of people at Google do "no real work." Or if not crazy, definitely stupid.
Why? First because it's a proposition that doesn't have any fixed meaning. What counts as real work? Many work initiatives in tech are inherently speculative. If the speculation pans out, then the airhead VCs will call it "real-work" in retrospect. If it doesn't, then they condemn it as fake work. Even Theranos, which was a scam, spent a lot of money TRYING to be more than a scam. They failed, but it was real work to try to make her dumb idea a reality. VCs loved Theranos, didn't they?
The other thing that bothers me about this is the idea that investors should be given their money back instead of Google, you know, trying to use that money to make their company more successful. Besides all that, there is a value to employing lots of tech people even if you aren't having them do very much.
Why, you ask?
Because if you don't employ tech people, then the upper working class collapses even more than it already has. This is not good for society.
Somehow rich people must be made to understand what rich people in the late Roman Empire never understood until the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, wiped them out: that naked self interest without any civic responsibility leads to the collapse of the very systems that protect you.
> "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."
... So a lot of those projects ultimately helped result in the current AI bubble, into which the VCs are so enthusiastically pumping money. LLMs didn't suddenly appear one day, as if by magic, a gift from god; they're the result of decades of companies spending money on projects which go nowhere for a long time.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadThe well-meaning technocracy cannot sustain indefinitely, it seems, which is a relief.
And this is assuming 2024 is going well for twitter. I doubt it.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/274568/quarterly-revenue...
Edit: We tech types are so predictable it's almost trite. Sorry I don't agree with your well-meaning technocracy and disingenuous moralistic posturing.
(There is, in any case, little evidence that people who work extremely long hours in white-collar jobs are, on average, particularly productive. It just doesn't work that well for most people.)
That was an interesting case. Given that Musk took over and it laid off all those engineers, I'd really want to disagree with you, but I remember all the claims of "just watch it implode", "yeah it will run for a month and then everything will melt down and they'll learn their lesson". But it's been a while and the service still seems to be up and I see people still posting links to it and so on. So I guess, I'd have to agree with you about Twitter.
You'll always need pigs for breakfast. Chickens are the ones who are probably in BS roles.
1. Jobs that are inherently BS — whatever the modern equivalents of telephone sanitisers are
2. Jobs working on BS projects — projects that never go anywhere. This will include engineers working on those projects
I wonder whether startups that don’t make it count as BS companies from his viewpoint?
Remind me what killed the Golgafrinchans.
> "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."
He would rather that Google focuses on Ads and cuts the rest of the company.
Anyway, my experience working at a startup that went from a few hundred customers to hundreds of thousands (B2B, with each customer being very high volume): Scale requires headcount. Our customer base increased 2000x and our engineering headcount went up 50x. But our product is now far more capable than it was back when I started. It was simple enough I could fit the whole thing in my head as a mid-level engineer. Not the case anymore...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915
There's also the Fortune article of the same VC.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40292924
It's not controversial to think that there is likely waste at Google. This particular article, though, has no insight in it. It's an inflammatory statement with no conversation or intelligence about it. Maybe there's something more in the Substack they reference.
Then again, I don't think it's crazy to believe that 50% of Substack newsletter content is full of nonsense /joke
While every large company is going to have some waste, saying it's half is quite the claim that needs more data.
Contrast that with "Half of Google's white-collar staff 'does no real work,' Silicon Valley VC says".
So the title of the article is an outright lie. That probably should be flagged?
> I don't think it's crazy
> to believe
> Google probably does
So many hair splitting qualifications so as to be meaningless
If a lot of people in a company do no real work, that means there is potential to trim down the workforce, decrease costs and still get the same amount of stuff done?
On the other hand, people said the same thing about Twitter. Elon Musk bought it and fired most employees. Indeed, Twitter works kinda similar to before. But revenue is said to be down 50%.
The higher up you go in the corporate ladder, the easier your job is. Less stress, more respect, less hours. Decisions you make are hard to tie back to incompetence
The same holds true for companies with too much cash on hand
Curious how far you've gotten and where because this doesn't track with my experience at all.
Was L7 at FAANG and ~250 employee startup CTO, you are basically on-call 24/7, no such thing as "not my job/responsibility" as everything below you bubbles up to you eventually. Constantly have to juggle priorities and make difficult decisions with limited data. If VP/director needs a report by Monday AM your weekend is gone. If production database goes down at 2am you're awake and have to facilitate communication between stressed engineers fixing the problem and angry upper management/customers.
You have lots of authority and get plenty of respect and compensation to match, but low-stress or fewer hours? that's reddit-brained /r/antiwork BS from a clueless 2x-year-old who watches TV and thinks CEOs just go golfing all day.
Also L7 in faang is not that high level, you can still be an individual contributor.
Also, go read the letter to future shareholders published at the time of the IPO. They told you they were going to run the company this way.
How automation could work: we have to work less because automation decreass the amount of work done. Everybody has a greater quality of life.
How automation actually works: we fire half the staff and use that to suppress wages of those remaining ("you might be next", "you can be replaced"), increase the amount of work each person has to do and move the costs of the unemployed onto the state. For slightly higher profits.
So "bullshit jobs" are both a way of a company protecting itself (like in Google's case, by having people avilable) and society protecting itself where people create BS jobs because they may have a bS job themselves or may have one someday.
This is going to reach a breaking point in the future and it's long been predicted that at some point we'll only need 20% of people to do the work.
It's really shortsighted too because companies will have no one to sell to if no one earns enough to afford what they sell. But this system has no long-term planning. It's all a series of short-term local decisioning-making where we cut labor costs 20% to increase profits by 1%.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I think the problem at Google is that they start too many things and don't follow through, and that they kill too many projects and products with happy users. But that's a management problem: they aren't using the workers as effectively as they could be doing.
Oh wait.
That's management's ONLY job.
No doubt there are useless jobs but the main example he gives is failed initiatives by Google.
What about failed initiatives (“startups”) at a16z?
About 50%.
I clicked through to the linked interview, and it elaborates in slightly more detail, saying that he wants the BS jobs eliminated so more capital can be returned to the shareholders. This is just "kill R&D so that I can have some cash now". (That sounds like the current state of the VC world. In a world with 7% interest rates, what do VCs do exactly? They aren't investing in startups, that's for sure. Maybe their job can be eliminate so a16z can return some capital to its shareholders, eh?)
He says "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade" - are these just the missed bets - the projects which if they had succeeded would have added billions and billions to the bottom line, but for any of a number of reasons, failed.
20% of folks do 80% of the productive work, Of that 20%, a 20% subset create 80% of the impact?
But an organization is an ecosystem, and it probably wouldn't function if you stripped it back to that 20% of 20%.
Why? First because it's a proposition that doesn't have any fixed meaning. What counts as real work? Many work initiatives in tech are inherently speculative. If the speculation pans out, then the airhead VCs will call it "real-work" in retrospect. If it doesn't, then they condemn it as fake work. Even Theranos, which was a scam, spent a lot of money TRYING to be more than a scam. They failed, but it was real work to try to make her dumb idea a reality. VCs loved Theranos, didn't they?
The other thing that bothers me about this is the idea that investors should be given their money back instead of Google, you know, trying to use that money to make their company more successful. Besides all that, there is a value to employing lots of tech people even if you aren't having them do very much.
Why, you ask?
Because if you don't employ tech people, then the upper working class collapses even more than it already has. This is not good for society.
Somehow rich people must be made to understand what rich people in the late Roman Empire never understood until the Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns, wiped them out: that naked self interest without any civic responsibility leads to the collapse of the very systems that protect you.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40278915
... So a lot of those projects ultimately helped result in the current AI bubble, into which the VCs are so enthusiastically pumping money. LLMs didn't suddenly appear one day, as if by magic, a gift from god; they're the result of decades of companies spending money on projects which go nowhere for a long time.