A PayPal Mafia member blamed Big Tech's hundreds of layoffs on over-hiring to fulfill Meta and Google managers' "vanity."
As reported by Insider, Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois is the CEO of OpenStore and a general partner at Founders Fund, two companies that provide investment to Shopify merchants. He is also a member of the PayPal Mafia due to his time spent as an executive at the online payment company in the early 2000s.
'Fake Work'
Appearing remotely at an event organized by banking company Evercore, Rabois claimed Meta and Google had employed hundreds of staff members to conduct "fake work" to achieve recruiting metrics out of vanity.
Rabois agrees that massive layoffs are long needed. According to Insider, via Fortune, he remarked, "All these people were extraneous. This has been true for a long time. The vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways."
Rabois added, "There's nothing for these people to do. It's all fake work. Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings."
Rabois also said Google had employed engineers and other tech workers on purpose to prevent them from being snatched by rivals.
Rabois claimed the new employees were stuck doing nothing but sitting at their desks.
Though, Rabois implied that this was not a terrible tactic, going so far as to call it quite logical to hire competent individuals to keep them out of competitors' offices.
Widespread Layoffs
Employees in the tech industry have felt the effects of widespread layoffs. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, let off 12,000 employees in January, and CEO Sundar Pichai said he accepted full responsibility for the move.
In 2022, Meta reportedly fired off 11,000 employees at the cost of $88,000 per person, with more layoffs possible in the future.
Facebook is said to be cutting even more employees in 2023 as part of founder Mark Zuckerberg's "Year of Efficiency," with middle managers and those working on unsuccessful projects taking the brunt of the cuts.
Praising Elon Musk
Keith Rabois worked closely with Tesla CEO Elon Musk at PayPal in the early 2000s.
Rabois lauded Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who eliminated half the company's staff a month after taking over in October 2022. Rabois said people are following Elon and Twitter, and he is definitely setting an example.
According to Insider, Musk's techniques are controversial, and his relentless cost-cutting has sometimes backfired on him.
Security and stability difficulties have plagued Twitter since Musk gained control, with a big outage occurring just last week. He apologized for mocking laid-off Twitter employee Haraldur Thorleifsson and accused him of exploiting his handicap as an excuse not to work.
