1/15/2024 0 Comments Culture amp twitter"The tech sector is more willing to try different things," he told us. Rich Moran, a venture capitalist, consultant, and author of several books about the workplace, prefers to call it a "false sense of activity" and said it's "more rampant" among tech companies. In the tech industry, specifically, the term "fake work" is used to conjure up an image of lazy engineers "resting and vesting" - long-tenured, high-paid employees doing very little work while waiting on a lucrative payday from their company stock. "Fake work," as consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson define it in their 2009 book of the same name, is "effort under the illusion of value." The crimes, they wrote, include pointless meetings, reports, and presentations. "It's lazy management." What we talk about when we talk about 'fake work' There's only one real culprit for the culture of "fake work," he said. They want to show up, give a fair eight hours of work, and they want to feel good about themselves," said Scott Latham, a strategic-management professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the tech industry during the start of the internet boom. The tech employees spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. Oftentimes, employees are getting plenty of work done it's just that the projects are of little to no importance to the company's bottom line. In one viral TikTok video, Brit Levy, Meta's former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy analyst, said she had to "basically fight to find work" and the company was simply holding on to employees "like Pokémon cards."īut based on conversations with over 30 people involved in the tech industry, including current and former tech employees, some in management positions, the conception of lazy employees raking in big paychecks to do little lays the blame in the wrong place. Some tech workers seemed to confirm Rabois' claims on social media, sharing stories of being paid by giant tech firms to do very little. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings." "There's nothing for these people to do - it's all fake work," Keith Rabois, a famous tech investor, opined at a March event hosted by the investment bank Evercore. The layoffs are necessary and even prudent, the argument goes, because thousands of workers at Big Tech firms such as Google and Meta are sitting around trying to look busy while doing very little productive work. Graham left Amazon soon after.Īs tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees this year, venture capitalists and executives have leaned on the term "fake work" to describe the output of employees like Graham. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon's formal performance-management plan.įacing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon's music recommendations, which he described as "the first really interesting thing I worked on." He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't see the light of day. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. He spent the next two years bouncing around - switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. But within four months of his start at the company, it became clear that Amazon had no idea what to do with him. Graham, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, assumed he would soon be using his expertise in machine learning to work on cool, new features that would make Alexa more personal to every user. He was brought on as a research scientist to help develop features for Alexa, the company's ubiquitous voice assistant. When Graham was hired by Amazon, it sounded like his dream job. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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