Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'

This was an interesting article until it started praising musk for slashing half of twitter - I don’t think the HR and legal departments were doing fake work, and the current lack of stability seems to indicate that a good portion of those people layed off where actually important.

Actual title provides better context:<p>&gt; Google overhired talent to do ‘fake work’ and stop them working for rivals, claims former PayPal boss Keith Rabois<p>The submitted title makes it look like a settled fact&#x2F;conclusion, but there&#x27;s no evidence provided AFAICT.

&quot;Fake work&quot; is a pretty funny accusation from guy whose company (Opendoor) is 97% down from all time high and dangerously close to getting delisted from NASDAQ.

“There’s nothing for these people to do—it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings.”<p>Wait, what do VCs like him do with <i>their</i> time? Or are those meetings somehow more legitimate?

This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She&#x27;d been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn&#x27;t done anything useful for a year and was just there to put it on her CV and was suicidally bored. I bet she got laid off recently.<p>Anyway it&#x27;s not like it doesn&#x27;t happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn&#x27;t show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We&#x27;re talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.

This article is a word salad. The headline is not supported by evidence and looks like a causal fallacy.<p>The outcome can be explained by the archetype of too much money, large company politics, leadership that lacks understanding of the problem space, the Peter principle and the innovator&#x27;s dilemma.

Pfft, these guys are amateurs, I work in government contracting and we’ve been doing this for years!<p>Note that I think <i>my</i> job is at least somewhat important, I write code so at least I produce <i>something</i>. But there’s dozens of not hundreds of people whose jobs consist entirely of meetings, signing paperwork, and taking multi-hour lunch breaks…

&gt;Sundar Pichai previously said he takes &quot;full responsibility&quot; for the decisions which lead to mass layoffs, and has now been accused of hiring sprees for &quot;vanity&quot;.<p>How does one take &quot;full responsibility&quot; for such decisions? Give yourself pat on a back? Pay raise to compensate for moral losses?

There is absolutely a trend of empire growing. Managers vying to get head count just to grow their power

Ok so, apologies, didn&#x27;t read, but it&#x27;s a juicy idea unto itself.<p>Personally I really want companies to build like ~4 teams with the same mission, same goal. Not fake work, but duplicative work. (Whether we tell folks this is happening or not: either way.)<p>Over time, try to figure out what are the best potentials&#x2F;possibilities, what are the most promising components&#x2F;people. Organizationally iterate. Developers are iterative as fuck, imo. Organizations just kind of have people &amp; stay there, doing whatever. Trying to explore the space of dynamical organizations is a huge huge huge interest that I think society is no where near, but could greatly better the world &amp; what happens.<p>Imo, we have a very: your org goes to battle with the team they have mentality. Personally I think orgs would, long term, do much better with a more deliberate effort to explore broader takes. I have a hard time connecting it explicitly, but I really dug the thinkpiece MIT paper <i>&quot;Two Scenarios for 21st Century Organizations: Shifting Networks of Small Firms or All-Encompassing &#x27;Virtual Countries&#x27;?&quot;</i>[1], which to me suggested more dynamical orgs that had more than the single-poker-in-each-fire view that predominates the corporate world.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccs.mit.edu&#x2F;21c&#x2F;21CWP001.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ccs.mit.edu&#x2F;21c&#x2F;21CWP001.html</a>

We want to think that the people who run companies are very smart and would not do such things. but what we have to accept is that they are human too. So they&#x27;re all essentially stupid.

I mean this is true in that large organizations are internally wasteful - a lot of people are just there to shuffle resources around and a lot of the decisions are bad, entire teams are working on worthless projects, etc.<p>But what people forget is that small organizations are also quite wasteful, it&#x27;s just that some of this waste is only visible at a higher level. For example, most startups, just like many internal teams at large organizations, are building things that no one will use. So while your work might be less wasteful from the standpoint of the company, this is offset by the fact that your entire company might be a complete waste.<p>Likewise, middle managers vying for resources and funding useless projects are surely wasteful and hurt the bottom line, but this is no different from mediocre VCs becoming good at convincing wealthy clients and other money managers that they are good at investing, then doing a poor job of actually allocating that capital.

This is consistent with my bias that FAANG salaries are where they are to discourage developers from accepting equity stakes at start-ups that could eventually disrupt the FAANG companies - that these salaries exist to starve the start-up ecosystem.<p>I have no evidence of this, and I have no reason for my priors to be set like this, but I do love bias confirmation.

- According to some guy with no direct knowledge of the situation.

So what is fake work then?<p>Maybe he is implying smaller impact but that is case for all mega crop<p>It seems a useless accusation tbh

I can&#x27;t think of anything more demoralizing than being hired simply to warehouse my talent to keep me out of competitors&#x27; shops while feeding me bullshit go-nowhere projects or leaving me to twiddle my thumbs.

John Gruber was saying this months ago, pointing out that Apple hasn’t had big cuts because they didn’t do this sort of vanity hiring.

let&#x27;s see all the FAANG people rise up in HN and defend their bullshit jobs.<p>I&#x27;m a FAANG-er with a (partially) bullshit job too and I&#x27;ve been tired of all these engineers with fake jobs living of the teat of their money-printing corp and pretending that their little over-engineering is so essential.

I think &quot;fake work&quot; seems a reasonable phrase to describe what a lot of the mouse-moving class do, or at least it&#x27;s difficult to connect it to real world value - and I wouldn&#x27;t necessarily exclude the digital workers looking in here at a remove from the redundancies.<p>When you consider the mental and physical energy and time it takes to produce the life of relevant comfort and safety of the average Western digital worker against the raw materials and environment that life is extracted and fashioned from (compared, say, to the prospect of surviving against nature on your wits and bodily power alone or the plight of a penniless war refugee), can you honestly say with a straight face: &quot;yes, I deserve that&quot;?<p>We - most of us - live off the value provided us from the great good fortune of having been born in to a society fashioned and built over hundreds of years; it seems to me that provides the bulk of what we &quot;earn&quot; as individuals, and particularly so in the digital economies.

Making fake work look like real work seem hard

rabois telling on himself again