When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while being paid an amount of money some people wouldn’t even dream of.
What is happening right now in tech may be one of the greatest market inefficiencies—or even deceptions—in history. I am writing this article because I think outsiders deserve to know what’s really going on in the field.
I know my statement may sound a little bit hyperbolic—how could people be consistently paid a lot to do close to nothing? Surely that can’t be right! Well, let me share some examples from my own experience.
Five months ago, I was hired as a software developer by one of the world’s most prestigious investment banks. While I prefer to do freelance work because it involves real work, I was looking to have a bit more stability for a while, so I gave a chance to a normal corporate technology job. Since the beginning of my employment, five months ago, I’ve worked for around three hours in total (not counting non-focused Zoom meetings which I attended without paying much attention).
When I first joined the company, I was excited. However, since I joined they’ve only given me tasks that were exceedingly easy to complete, in just a few minutes, but allocating days or even weeks to them. At first, I wanted to speed things along. I genuinely wanted to build a cool product, so I connected with people across the organization to ask questions about our intended users, their needs and how our product would satisfy them. But it was soon made clear to me, a few times, that I shouldn’t do that. One person told me, “I don’t want to tell you not to ask too many questions, but…” and she basically told me not to ask too many questions.
I soon realized that the project was overstaffed and most people were pretending to work. And I also realized that was the job I was hired to do; my job was to pretend. If this had been the only time this ever happened to me, I would consider it an anomaly. Unfortunately, this has been the case with almost every tech job I’ve had for years.
Consider the case of my previous tech job, in which I was hired as a data engineer for one the world’s largest telecommunications companies. In the year and a half that I worked for them, there was only one two-week period during which I worked at full capacity. Other than that, I did almost nothing at all for the remaining 18 months. Outside those two productive weeks, most of my work involved attending irrelevant meetings, performing small tasks to pretend that a broken product worked well and even generate fake results. It felt ethically compromising and it was boring; I only worked half an hour a week or so, non-focused meetings aside.
I could go on with many other similar personal stories, but you get the gist.
This isn’t just me. All of the people I know who work in tech seem to be going through the same thing. One of my former colleagues, for example, told me all he does at work is watch Coursera courses. He’s considering resigning after the company-sponsored Coursera subscription ends. Another former colleague was hired a year ago as a data scientist for a large oil company. She’s making 200,000 pounds a year. All she does is prepare a PowerPoint presentation every week, and she’s utterly bored.
Another one of my friends was hired two years ago as a quant for one of the world’s most important investment banks (yes, that one). The interview process for that kind of job is among the hardest you can imagine—brain teasers, differential equations, graph algorithms. He was very excited at first, thinking he’d be building cutting-edge technology. However, while people always seem to appear busy from the outside, in reality he does almost nothing at all and is horribly bored but well paid.
It is hard to speak about this with others. Someone once told me that my frustration with the traditional tech workplace reminded him of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry because I kept complaining about stuff despite being in a highly desirable situation. Indeed, for a lot of people, the idea of being paid a lot to do nothing sounds like a dream come true. However, while we may not do almost any real work, we do have to constantly pretend that we do. That can be extremely frustrating and soul draining. Moreover, this shaky situation cannot last forever; it’s like a poorly balanced house of cards. With the recent massive layoffs and the collapse of SVB, the signs of strain are already there.
