Silicon Valley insider reveals damning truth about Big Tech workers

A Silicon Valley insider has revealed that the majority of jobs at Big Tech companies don’t do “real work.”

David Ulevitch, general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said a “bunch of people” at the giant tech giants have “BS jobs.”

In fact, it’s not new news that Big Tech over-hires talent just to have them available for future projects, a practice that individuals call “scripted talent.”

More often than not, Ulevitch told Fortune that most employees who are rehired have no intention of moving the company forward and are just going for the six-figure paychecks.

Google, he says, is a “great example” of this.

Ulevitch said Google is a “great example” of a company participating in a practice where Big Tech companies hire talent to have them available for future projects, a practice that individuals refer to as “talent penned” (photo: Google CEO Sundar Pichai)

Although layoffs peaked in 2023, they are set to continue into 2024 as Google embarks on a ‘major’ restructuring

“Anyone who works in a company with more than 10,000 employees or a larger office with white-collar jobs knows that a number of people could probably be let go tomorrow and the company won’t really feel the difference, perhaps things would even improve if there were fewer people in come on duty. getting into things,” he said.

He further explained how the abundance of employees not contributing to the company is actually hurting employee retirement programs.

‘Google is a great example of this. “I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar workforce at Google probably isn’t doing any real work,” he said.

“The company has spent billions and billions of dollars a year on projects that have gone nowhere for more than a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders with retirement accounts. So real people lose out when BS jobs exist.”

But Google, with its extensive overhead, has been able to quickly adapt to and even imitate technological developments.

As AI chatbots became increasingly popular in 2023, Google jumped on the bandwagon and merged its chatbot, Bard, with their new service, Gemini – an AI model similar to ChatGPT that responds to queries with a human-like cadence.

While Ulevitch isn’t impressed with Google’s projects, shares of parent company Alphabet are up 22% year-on-year and 57% in the past twelve months.

One consequence of Ulevitch’s theory of “BS jobs” is that the US is struggling to develop the workforce needed to produce goods for its own future industry.

“We’ve outsourced a lot of their work abroad, increasingly to countries we’re becoming less and less friendly with (China), but also because we’ve just made those jobs look less desirable,” he said.

While Ulevitch recognizes the potential risks of depending on economic competitors, he also sees this as an opportunity for innovative startups to step in and fill the manufacturing gap.

The “tech wreckage” engulfing Silicon Valley has wiped out tens of thousands of jobs that pay a combined $12 billion annually, an analysis of the biggest recent cuts shows.

Google recently laid off about 200 employees from its core team in California and will fill a number of positions in India and Mexico as Silicon Valley tech companies continue to shed workers en masse.

While Ulevitch isn’t impressed with Google’s projects, shares of parent company Alphabet are up 22% year-on-year and 57% in the past twelve months.

Ulevitch said the flood of employees not contributing to the company is actually hurting employee retirement programs.

In January, Alphabet became the latest tech giant to announce layoffs, saying it would lay off 12,000 employees, or about 6 percent of its workforce.

The recent wave of sharp job cuts has hit high-wage skilled workers the hardest, as companies that boomed during the pandemic now cut costs to brace for an economic slowdown.

Just seven major tech companies have job losses announced in recent months approaching 70,000: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, HP and Twitter.