Investor Andreessen Horowitz says half of Google’s knowledge workers are probably ‘not working’

• Discussion on David Ulevitch Andreessen Horowitz “fake job” in technology in an interview published on Monday.

• He said: “Half of Google’s white-collar workers are probably not working.”

• In recent years, tech companies like Google and Meta have carried out mass layoffs.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm investor Andreessen Horowitz is the latest VC to get involved in the “fake job” debate in the tech industry.

In an interview published Monday with Emily Sundberg in her newsletter “Feed Me”: David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitzcalled Google an “amazing example” of a corporation hiring people for “BS jobs.”

Ulevitch said that megacorporations are “creating nonessential jobs” and that employees at these large white-collar firms know that “you could probably lay off a bunch of people tomorrow and the company wouldn’t really know the difference. Maybe it would even do that. improve when fewer people engage in things.”

Ulevitch was previously CEO of network security startup OpenDNS, which he sold to Cisco in 2015 for $635 million.

“The growing number of professional managers in America, and more importantly, the public belief that these positions are ‘really important,’ is a weakness, not a strength,” he added. “I should note that I’ve taken these classes throughout my career, and it’s great – people actually treated me like I was impressive and important when I was a senior vice president at Cisco, so naturally I thought I was too. This dynamic is common in corporations and it is poor.”

Ulevitch said one effect has been “the decline of the small businesses that power America’s industrial and manufacturing base” as people in those industries lose the workforce, jobs are outsourced overseas and those jobs are seen as less desirable than white-collar jobs .

“Another problem with all the ‘BS’ positions in large corporations is that they take profits away from shareholders, who are most often retirees and the retirement accounts of the rest of America,” he said. “So not only are these people useless (and spoiled to think that useless jobs actually matter – they don’t), but they also take money from other workers’ retirement plans.”

Ulevitch pointed the finger at Google specifically, saying it was an “amazing example.”

“I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half of Google’s knowledge workers probably don’t work,” he said. “The company spent billions of dollars a year on projects that went nowhere for more than a decade, and all of that money could have been returned to shareholders with retirement accounts.”

Google did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. Meanwhile, Ulevitch told BI via email: “My only comment is that I consider this statement to be one of the least controversial things I have ever said.”

In recent years, other venture capitalists have entered the debate about “fake work” and overemployment at large tech companies.

Marc Andreessen has criticized what he calls managerial “laptop class” and tweeted in 2022: “Good, large companies are twice as overstaffed. Bad big companies are understaffed by a factor of four or more.”

Keith RaboisTesla investor and former PayPal executive said last year that recent layoffs at Meta and Google were the result of overstaffing.

“All these people were strangers,” he said. “That’s been true for a long time. The vain yardstick for hiring workers was, in a sense, this false god.”

“These people have nothing to do,” he said. “It’s all fake work,” and adds: “Now it’s coming out. What are these people actually doing? They go to meetings.”

Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.ai, said last year that Google and Meta were over-hiring workers and not having enough work for them.

“They really didn’t do anything working from home,” he said. “If you want to work from home, like four days working in your pajamas, go work at Facebook.”

Although some laid-off tech workers say they have to “basically fight to get a job”, in their old companies, others found that their companies employed too many people and management assigned employees with minor tasks to create the illusion that they are necessary.

Since 2022, tech companies such as Meta and Google have laid off thousands of workers, often citing a desire to increase productivity.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year that 2023 would be the company’s “best year”year of efficiency“and expressed his disapproval of the bloated organizational structure of “managers managing managers.” And Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff in 2022 that “there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the number of employees we have.”

Read the original article on Business Insider