Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in the famous Silicon Valley firm, is the latest venture capitalist to wade into the debate over “fake labor” in the tech industry.
In an interview published Monday with Emily Sundberg for her Substack newsletter “Feed Me,” David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called Google an “amazing example” of a company employing people in “BS jobs “.
“As we (society/our economy) prioritize conglomerates and mega-corporations, irrelevant jobs proliferate,” he said. “Anyone who works in a company with more than 10,000 employees or a large company knows that a number of people could probably be laid off tomorrow and the company won’t really feel the difference, maybe even it would improve with fewer people inserting employees themselves into things.
Ulevitch was previously CEO of web security startup OpenDNS, which he sold to Cisco for $635 million in 2015.
“The growing class of professional managers in the United States, and more importantly, the societal perception that these jobs are ‘really important,’ is a weakness, not a strength,” he added. “I should note that I’ve been in this class throughout my career, and it’s been awesome: people really treated me like I was very impressive and important when I was a senior vice president at Cisco, and so naturally, I thought I was too. This dynamic is endemic in all companies and is lame.
Ulevitch said one effect is “the decline of small businesses that power America’s industrial and manufacturing base,” as people working in these sectors age and no longer work, work is outsourced overseas and these jobs are considered less desirable than white-collar jobs. . He also highlighted another consequence:
“Another problem with all the ‘BS’ jobs in big business is that they take profits away from shareholders who are most often the retirees and retirement accounts of the rest of America,” he said . “So these people are not only useless (and coddled into believing that useless jobs actually matter – they don’t), but they are also taking money away from the state’s retirement programs. remainder of the workforce.”
Ulevitch then pointed the finger at Google in particular, calling it an “amazing example.”
“I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half of Google’s white-collar workers probably aren’t doing real work,” he said. “The company has spent billions and billions of dollars a year on projects that have gone nowhere for over a decade, and all of that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reached by email, Ulevitch told BI: “My only comment is that I think it’s one of the least controversial things I’ve ever said.”
Other venture capital firms have also entered the debate over “fake labor” and overstaffing within Big Tech in recent years.
Marc Andreessen criticized a managerial “laptop class” and tweeted in 2022: “Good big companies are 2x overstaffed. Bad big companies are overstaffed by 4 times or more.
Tech investor and member of the PayPal mafia, Keith Rabois, blamed massive layoffs last year, as well as Meta and Google.
“All these people were foreigners, that’s been true for a long time, the vanity of hiring employees was sort of this false god,” he said.
“These people have nothing to do…it’s fake work,” he continued. “Now it’s being revealed, what these people are actually doing, they’re going to meetings.”
Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.ai, said last year that Google and Meta were overhiring staff and didn’t have enough work for them to do.
“They weren’t really doing anything working from home,” he said. “If you want to work from home, like four days of working in your pajamas, go work for Facebook.”
While some tech workers say they’ve had to “fight to find work,” others say poor management is to blame, with bosses overhiring and assigning busy tasks to workers to make themselves look more important and get promotions.
Tech companies like Meta and Google have laid off thousands of workers in recent years, often citing an interest in becoming more efficient.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta declared that 2023 would be the company’s “year of efficiency” and expressed his distaste for an organizational structure bloated with “managers managing managers.” Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told staff at a 2022 all-hands meeting that “there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it should be for the workforce that we have.”
businessinsider
