An opinionated and accomplished investor and veteran of the tech industry has a theory on why so many workers in his industry are being fired at big companies like Google and Meta because they serve no purpose in their position whatsoever.
Harsh, but Keith Rabois, the CEO of OpenStore, a company that finances merchants selling with Shopify, think thousands of employees do “fake work.” So why are they getting a salary? And fake working from home when they don’t contribute? Because it looks good for the company. Here’s what he told Insider.
“All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways.”
It’s hard to fathom this goes on, but Rabois is steadfast in his belief. It’s not like they contribute a little. Or are moderately valuable. They don’t do a darn thing.
“There’s nothing for these people to do — they’re really — it’s all fake work. Now that’s being exposed, what do these people do? They go to meetings.”
He has a point there, and there are probably thousands of fake workers in every industry in corporate America, where workers scurry from one meeting to the next — or post-pandemic, from one zoom call to another.
His opinion is shared by Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley personality who is not known for saying outlandish things. He believes good companies have twice as many employees as they need. The bad companies, he said, have four times too many workers.
Now it’s the season of cutting headcount. Meta, Facebook, whatever the heck it’s called these days, is canning thousands of employees this week, just four months after pink-slipping 11,000 in November.
It makes what Elon Musk has done since he took over Twitter almost sensible in comparison, as he’s cut nearly half of the workforce there since buying the company.
Two remarks.
First it reminds me of the then topic-du-jure in 2018 about b/s jobs. Were these jobs necessary in the first place?
With the reported letting go of half the Twitter workforce, did it make any difference to the user experience of Twitter?
Sometimes letting go of staff has a material effect on the quality of service. For example in Australia major department stores have little or no staff serving customers.
The one factor that should differentiate a bricks and mortar store from an online store is not there.
So the acid test is will reducing staff levels have a noticeable effect on serving customers and/or production of a good or service?
Second, the flip side is why add to the staff numbers in the first place only to let go of them later? People should not be treated like a number. To hire staff in order for the staff member to mark time in their job is a waste of resources and may do harm to the employed.
Thank you
Anthony of Sydney