Google over-hired talent to do ‘fake work’ and stop them working for rivals, claims former PayPal boss, Keith Raboishttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-over-hired-talent-fake-114331193.htmlThe thousands of layoffs in Big Tech are thanks to an over-hiring spree to satisfy the "vanity" of bosses at the likes of Meta and Alphabet, according to a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia.
Speaking remotely at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore, Silicon Valley VC Keith Rabois said Meta and Google had hired thousands of people to do "fake work" to hit hiring metrics out of "vanity".
Rabois, who was an executive at PayPal in the early 2000s alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said the axing of droves of jobs is overdue. "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 said, according to Insider.
"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."
The DoorDash investor added Google had intentionally hired engineers and tech talent to stop them from being snapped up by competitors.
The downside, Rabois said, was that the new hires just had to "be entitled, sit at their desks, and do nothing." Rabois suggested that this was not a bad strategy, even going as far as to say that hiring skilled workers to keep them out of competitor's offices is "pretty coherent".
