--- title: "Big Tech Employees Say They Were Paid a Fortune to Do Essentially Nothing" description: "Tech workers got paid six-figure salaries to do nothing. That may be by design, as experts say the industry overhired to hoard talent." date: "2023-04-08" modified: "2023-04-08" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/big-tech-employees-paid-fortune-do-nothing" categories: - "Future Society" tags: - "Google" - "Meta" - "tech industry" - "the digest" --- # Big Tech Employees Say They Were Paid a Fortune to Do Essentially Nothing ![Btech workers got paid six figure salaries to do nothing. That may be by design, as experts say the industry overhired to hoarde talent.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* ## Much Ado A lot of big tech workers are admitting they basically had to do nothing at their jobs — though not necessarily as a shameless brag, but to spotlight their employers' sloppy business practices. Take 33-year-old Madelyn Machado, who says she worked as a recruiter for [Facebook-turned-Meta]() starting in the fall of 2021. The verb "worked" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though, to hear Machado tell it. In a viral [TikTok video](), Machado claims she got paid $190,000 a year to, yes, "do nothing." In a follow up [video](), she recalls how when she talked to some of the other recruiters at Meta, they told her they'd been there for two years without hiring a single employee. Machado was dumbstruck. "So you just hired more recruiters… to not hire anybody?" "The writing was on the wall so I got out of there," she added. ## Fake Jobs Industry experts aren't exactly shocked. "They were hiring ahead of demand," Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, [told *The Wall Street Journal*](). Like dragons slumbering on a hoard of gold, big tech firms that feared hiring difficulties during the pandemic wanted to snatch up all the talent they could, just so their competitors couldn't — even if it meant paying money out the ass for fake jobs. That impression wasn't lost on some new hirees. "It kinda seemed that Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn't have us," said Britney Levy, a former Meta employee hired last year, in [another TikTok](). "They were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards." In the roughly eight months she worked there, she "had to fight to find work," and only received a single assignment. So what did she and other newbies end up doing all day? The general consensus is meetings, meetings, thumb-twiddling, sitting around, and more meetings. "I mean we were just like sitting there," Levy added. ## The Bigger They Are... Now, tech monoliths and their handsomely compensated workers are paying the price for handing out Silicon Sinecures like candy. For all the overhiring they did, they're now [culling]() their [workforces]() [by the thousands](). Sleazy a practice as it is, when you're sitting on billions of dollars, it makes cynical sense to hire people you don't need now just in case you need them in the future (or if a competitor needs them, in which case: too bad for them, good for you). "They hire everybody, whether they need it or not, just to have a reserve of talent," Val Katayev, a tech entrepreneur, told *WSJ*. "They can afford it." **More on:** *[Company Lays Off 8,000 While Paying Matthew McConaughey $10 Million a Year]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()