A Silicon Valley expert has revealed that most jobs at big tech companies don’t do “real work.”
David Ulevitch, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said a “group of people” at the tech giants are doing “nonsense jobs.”
In fact, it’s not new for big tech companies to hire excess talent to keep them at their disposal for future projects, a practice people refer to as “locked talent.”
More often than not, Ulevitch told Fortune that most hired workers have no intention of helping the company advance and only do so for six-figure salaries.
Google, he said, is a “striking example” of this.
David Ulevitch, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said a “group of people” at the tech giants are doing “nonsense jobs.”
Ulevitch said Google is a “striking example” of a company engaging in a practice in which big tech companies hire talent to make them available for future projects, a practice that individuals have referred to as “written talent.” ” (pictured: Google CEO Sundar Pichai)
Although the number of layoffs peaked in 2023, it will continue through 2024 as Google embarks on a “large-scale” restructuring.
‘Anyone who works in a white-collar company with over 10,000 people or more knows that a bunch of people could probably be laid off tomorrow and the company wouldn’t really feel the difference, maybe even be better off with fewer people inserting themselves into things. ,’ said.
He went on to explain how the excess of workers not contributing to the company is actually detracting from workforce retirement programs.
‘Google is a striking example of this. “I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half of Google’s management staff probably don’t do any real work,” he said.
‘The company has spent billions of dollars a year on projects that go nowhere for more than a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts. So real people lose out when nonsense jobs exist.’
But Google, with its large overhead, has been able to quickly adapt to technological advances and even imitate them.
As AI chatbots grew in popularity in 2023, Google jumped on the bandwagon and merged its chatbot, Bard, with its new service, Gemini, a ChatGPT-like AI model that answers questions with a human-like cadence.
Although Ulevitch has not been impressed with Google’s projects, shares of its parent company, Alphabet, are up 22% over the past year and 57% in the past 12 months.
One consequence of Ulevitch’s theory of “dumb jobs” is that the United States is struggling to develop the workforce needed to manufacture goods for its own future industry.
“We have outsourced much of their work overseas, increasingly to countries we are becoming less and less friendly to (China), but also because we have made those jobs seem less desirable,” he said.
However, while Ulevitch recognizes the potential risks of relying on cheap competitors, he also sees this as an opportunity for innovative new companies to step in and fill the manufacturing gap.
The ‘tech wreck’ sweeping Silicon Valley has eliminated tens of thousands of jobs paying a total of $12 billion annually, an analysis of the biggest recent cuts shows.
Google recently laid off about 200 members of its core team in California and will fill some of the positions in India and Mexico as technology companies in Silicon Valley continue to lay off employees en masse.
Although Ulevitch has not been impressed with Google’s projects, shares of its parent company, Alphabet, are up 22% over the past year and 57% in the past 12 months.
Ulevitch said the glut of workers not contributing to the company is actually detracting from workforce retirement programs.
In January, Alphabet became the latest tech giant to announce layoffs, saying it will cut 12,000 employees, or about 6 percent of its workforce.
The recent wave of steep job cuts has hit highly paid skilled workers the hardest, as companies that soared during the pandemic now cut costs to prepare for an economic slowdown.
In just seven large technology companies, the job cuts announced in recent months total almost 70,000: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, HP and Twitter.