Silicon Valley insider reveals damning truth about Big Tech workers

A Silicon Valley insider has revealed that a majority of the jobs at Big Tech companies aren’t doing ‘real work.’

David Ulevitch, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, said a ‘bunch of people’ at the behemoth tech giants are working ‘BS jobs.’

In fact, it’s not new news that Big Tech over-hires talent to have them at their disposal for future project, a practice individuals have referred to as being ‘talent penned.’

More often than not, Ulevitch told Fortune that most of the workers retained don’t intend on helping the company move forward and are just in it for the six figure paychecks.

Google, he said, is an ‘amazing example’ of this.

‘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 really feel the difference, maybe it’d even improve with less people inserting themselves into things,’ he said.

He went on to explain how the overflow of workers who are not contributing to the company is actually detracting from the workforce’s retirement programs.

‘Google is an amazing example of this. I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work,’ he said. 

‘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. So real people actually lose out when BS jobs exist.’ 

But Google, with its extensive overhead, has been able to quickly adapt to technological advancements, and even mimic them.

As AI chatbots grew in popularity in 2023, Google hopped on the bandwagon, merging its chatbot, Bard, with their new service, Gemini – an AI model similar to ChatGPT that responds to questions with a human-like cadence.

Although Ulevitch has not been impressed by Google’s projects, the shares of their parent company, Alphabet, have gone up 22% from last year and 57% in the past 12 months.

A consequence of Ulevitch’s theory of ‘BS jobs’ is that the U.S. is struggling to develop the workforce needed to manufacture goods for its own future industry.

‘We have outsourced much of their work overseas, increasingly to countries we are getting less and less friendly with (China) but also because we’ve just made those jobs seem less desirable,’ he said.

However, while Ulevitch acknowledges the potential risks of relying on economic competitors, he also sees this as an opportunity for innovative startups to step in and fill the manufacturing void. 

The ‘tech wreck’ sweeping Silicon Valley has wiped out tens of thousands of jobs paying a combined $12 billion annually, an analysis of the largest recent cuts shows.

Recently Google laid off around 200 of its core team in California and will fill some of the positions in India and Mexico as tech companies in Silicon Valley continue to shed employees en masse.

Back In January, Alphabet became the latest tech giant to announce layoffs, saying it will cut 12,000 employees, or about 6 percent of its workforce.

The recent wave of steep job cuts has hit highly paid skilled workers the hardest, as companies that soared during the pandemic now slash costs to brace for an economic slowdown.

At just seven large tech firms, the job cuts announced in recent months total nearly 70,000: Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, HP and Twitter.