Andreessen Horowitz is the latest venture capitalist to weigh in on the IT industry’s “fake work” dispute affecting work and employment
David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, described Google in an interview with Emily Sundberg for her Substack newsletter “Feed Me” on Monday. He described the company as an “outstanding example” of a corporation that employs individuals in “BS jobs.”
“As we (society and our economy) prioritize conglomerates and megacorps, irrelevant jobs proliferate,” he indicated.
“Anyone who works in a 10,000+ person or larger white-collar job company knows that a bunch of the people can probably be let go tomorrow, and the company wouldn’t feel the difference; maybe it’d even improve with fewer people inserting themselves into things.”
Before 2015, Ulevitch oversaw the operations of web security startup OpenDNS before selling it to Cisco for $635 million.
“The growing professional managerial class in America, and more importantly, the societal perception that those jobs are ‘critical,’ is a weakness, not a strength,” he pointed out.
“I should mention that I have been a member of this class at some point in my career, and it’s fantastic; when I was an SVP at Cisco, everyone treated me as if I were extremely influential and remarkable, and I naturally believed the same. This feeble dynamic is pervasive throughout corporations.”
According to Ulevitch, one consequence is “the decline of small businesses that power America’s industrial and manufacturing base,” as workers in these sectors retire, the work is outsourced overseas, and these positions are regarded as less desirable than white-collar positions. He also highlighted an additional repercussion:
“Another issue with all the ‘BS’ jobs in large corporations is that it takes profits away from shareholders, who are most often the pensioners and retirement accounts of the rest of America,” according to him.
“So those people aren’t just being useless (and being coddled to think useless jobs matter – they don’t), but they are also taking money away from the rest of the workforce’s retirement programs.”
Further, Ulevitch targeted Google at length, describing the company as “an incredible example.”
“I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work,” according to him.
“The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts.”
Google declined to comment in response to a request for clarification. Ulevitch responded to BI’s email: “My sole observation is that I consider it among the least contentious statements I have ever made.”
In recent years, additional VCs have joined the discussion regarding “fake work” and overstaffing in the big tech industry.
Marc Andreessen criticized a “laptop class” of managers and stated via Twitter in 2022, “The excellent, large companies are two times overstaffed. “Big bad companies have staffing levels four times or higher than average.”
Keith Rabois, a PayPal Mafia member and tech investor, ascribed massive layoffs at Meta and Google to this last year.
“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,” according to him.
“There’s nothing for these people to do; it’s all fake work,” continued the investigator. “Now that’s being exposed, what do these people do? They go to meetings.”
Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.AI, stated that Google and Meta overhired employees and failed to assign them sufficient work last year.
“They were doing nothing, working from home,” according to him. “If you want to work from home, like for four days in your pyjamas, go to work for Facebook.”
While some technology workers claim they have “virtually fought for work,” others attribute the situation to poor management, which involves employers overhiring and designating employees tormented with work to secure promotions and appear more influential.
In recent years, technology companies such as Google and Meta have cast off thousands of employees, frequently citing the need to increase efficiency.
Meta’s chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, proclaimed 2023 the organization’s “year of efficiency” and lamented a “managers managing managers” structure.
Reportedly, in a 2022 all-hands meeting with employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated, “There are genuine concerns that our overall productivity does not meet the requirements for the number of employees we employ.”