On May 7th, David Ulevitch, a general partner at the renowned Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, stated in an interview that many large companies employ numerous employees engaged in "meaningless work," with Google being a prime example.
"When our society and economy lean towards favoring large companies and corporate giants, useless jobs proliferate like weeds," Ulevitch said. "If you've worked in a large company with tens of thousands of white-collar employees, you'll realize that even if many people were laid off tomorrow, the company would hardly feel the difference and might even operate more smoothly due to reduced interference."
Ulevitch, who previously served as the CEO of the cybersecurity startup OpenDNS and sold the company to Cisco for $635 million in 2015, highlighted the growing size of the managerial class in the U.S. He emphasized that the perception of the importance of these jobs in society is a weakness rather than a strength.
He pointed out that this trend has led to the decline of small businesses supporting the foundation of American industry and manufacturing. Workers in these industries are aging out of the labor market, jobs are being outsourced overseas, and these positions are no longer seen as attractive, especially compared to white-collar professions.
Ulevitch also raised another issue: "The 'useless' jobs in large companies not only waste the talents of these individuals but also mislead them into thinking these jobs are truly important (when they are not), draining funds from the retirement accounts of ordinary American workers."
He specifically cited Google as "a prime example."
He stated, "I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that half of Google's white-collar employees are not actually doing any real work. The company invests billions of dollars each year in many fruitless projects, funds that could have been returned to shareholders with retirement accounts."
Google has not yet responded to these comments. When contacted via email, Ulevitch remarked, "I just want to say that this may be one of the least controversial things I've ever said."
In recent years, other venture capitalists have joined the discussion on the existence of "fake jobs" and employee redundancies in large tech companies.
Marc Andreessen criticized the "laptop class" in management and tweeted in 2022, "Good large companies have twice as many employees as they need, and bad large companies have four times as many or more."
Keith Rabois, a technology investor and member of the "PayPal Mafia," attributed the massive layoffs at Meta and Google last year to this issue.
He stated, "All these people are redundant, this situation has been going on for a long time, and hiring employees was a vanity metric, essentially meaningless." "These people have nothing to do... it's all fake work. It's now blatantly obvious, what are they actually doing? Just attending meetings."
Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.ai, also expressed last year that Google and Meta have too many employees and not enough work for them.
He said, "Their so-called remote work from home is actually doing nothing. If you want to work in your pajamas at home for four days, go to Facebook."
While some employees at tech companies claim they are "running around looking for work," others blame improper management. Leaders, in order to appear more important and secure promotion opportunities, continuously increase the number of employees and assign them a significant amount of busywork. In recent years, tech companies like Meta and Google have laid off thousands of employees, often citing the goal of improving efficiency.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced 2023 as the company's "efficiency year," stating his dislike for a bloated organizational structure of "managers managing managers." Reports indicate that Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees at a company-wide meeting in 2022, "The real issue is that our overall productivity does not align with the current number of employees."
