It's Monday morning and the alarm clock goes off. He has an hour-long meeting to drink coffee, check his diary, and listen to his team lead manager. Then I'm off to scuba dive for the rest of this week.
This is reportedly the reality for a group of sought-after technology professionals who have been “banned” from major industries such as banking, telecommunications and travel.
This term refers to a hiring trend in which companies hire rare candidates even though there are no jobs available, but they remain on standby in case they are needed.
said Dr. Emmanuel Maggioli, an AI specialist and data scientist who has worked with top global companies and currently works as a freelancer at a multinational investment bank. luck He left academia hoping to make an impact in the commercial field, but found himself twiddling his thumbs.
Dr. Maggioli clearly remembers the moment he realized that doing little or no work was the norm for some teams.
“I spent several months on a project and my bosses were very happy with it,” he said.
“One of them said to me, 'You made this happen. If you didn't do any work for a year, we'd be glad we hired you.' I didn’t want to be rewarded for not working.”
Over the next few years, working as a freelance software engineer, Dr. Maggioli worked with various large companies, but his career continued to stagnate.
He said team meetings were filled with people pitching the tasks they were working on.
A colleague blocked him for weeks to complete what he claimed was a 10-minute task, a practice known as “task hypertrophy.”
“In a previous job, one person used to scuba dive during work hours. Another person I know just watches online courses all day. His employer paid for his subscription. If I quit, I might retire,” he added.
In some cases, data supports these anecdotes. Google Cloud's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) 2022 State of DevOps report finds that the number of “low” performers in the software supply sector has more than doubled compared to the previous year. I did. From 7% to 19%.
Poor-performing respondents are categorized as those who deploy services infrequently, take time to make changes and restore services, or are engaged in update efforts that degrade service quality and require remediation.
trying to stay busy
Determined to be proactive, Dr. Maggioli was given tasks such as constantly asking for work and “chasing” people for updates, until his boss told him: He said there was no. , but probably not. ”
It was in the banking industry that Dr. Maggioli first witnessed the full scope of candidate “penning.”
Under a new contract that paid him $978 a day, he waited two months for his requests to do something to be answered.
“For those two months, all I had to do was attend weekly management meetings that said things like, 'If you're coming to the office, make sure you reserve a desk.' “It was,” he said.
There are similar stories at Big Tech's peers, with one former Meta staffer saying the company collected candidates “like Pokemon cards.”
Britt Levy said on TikTok that she had to “fight for her job,” adding that her teammates spent hours on “dog food” exploring the metaverse looking for bugs to look busy.
In an anonymous survey posted to an online career community. blindnessOne user asked, “As a software engineer, how many hours of focused work do you spend each day?”
Of the 4,246 respondents, the majority (71.3%) reported working six hours or less per day.
The largest percentage of voters, 32.4%, said they worked 3 to 4 hours a day, followed by 26.7%, who said they worked 5 to 6 hours a day.
12.2% said they went for 1 to 2 hours a day.
A source at one of America's top 10 banks said: luck The vast majority of software developers they work with are not forced to do anything upon first hire due to complex onboarding.
They explained on condition of anonymity: “Working with software is incredibly complex with lots of rules, and all the regulations make it even worse in the financial sector.
“A lot of it is process-dependent and it's often difficult to get the right level of access for the process to work. It can take weeks, and you can get someone to start, but… That person can't even access the system.''
“They can literally just sit there. A bunch of software developers come in and they're ready to start, but they try to log into their laptops and they can't access anything. Then they… for days on end. Call the help desk. This happens to 7 out of 10 software engineers I join.”
Why do companies hire people for these roles?
Dr. Maggioli added that there are various motivations for companies to continue onboarding talent without knowing what they will do.
The authors said the pace remains slow due to a lack of understanding of the complex work that professionals are hired to do.
There's also a collusion in not pointing out task overload for fear that all colleagues will be asked to do more work.
“If someone says, 'We need to spend millions of dollars to make this work,' they will do it,” he added.
Other hiring motivations include hiring people quickly who can be deployed when needed, but more cynically, Maggioli believes that middle managers simply want bigger teams. I was there. He says, “The idea is that the more people you manage, the better. They want to hire to meet metrics.”
This is a theory supported by Silicon Valley VC Keith Lavoie, a member of the so-called PayPal mafia.
Lavoie, who was a PayPal executive along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in the early 2000s, said at an event hosted by banking firm Evercore that Google and Meta were trying to hit employment metrics “out of vanity.” He said he hired thousands of people to do “fake jobs” for him. ”
What is the impact?
Earning a six-figure salary for “doing nothing” may sound like a dream to some people.
Reality is boring and demotivating, Maggioli said.
“If you don't work and no one cares, you feel like there's no point in doing anything,” he explained. “It's not laziness, it's demotivation.”
Ignatius Nothnagel added that the responsibility for fostering a spirit of positivity lies with the employer, not the employee. He worked at Amazon for six years and then launched his own coaching company, working with tech startups.
he said luck In all his years working for Amazon Web Services in South Africa and the Netherlands, he never once saw his staff looking for something to do.
Nothnagel said the e-commerce giant encouraged its employees to “think like owners,” which led them to think creatively and proactively and find work for themselves. Ta.
He said his experience working at Amazon was like working at any other startup with the end goal of making a difference.
After all, Nothnagel added, companies that don't make the most of their talent are “paying very expensive talent to use 1% of their brains.”
Another side of the coin
Other people working in the technology industry said: luck Their days were filled with similarly meaningless tasks, or simply “doing what you love.”
But this is a very different reality than Adam McCannick, who has spent more than 20 years working in data-related roles in the U.S. financial industry, has witnessed.
he said luck In a phone interview, he said the lack of work sounds like “a whole other world” to him.
“I've worked in a variety of companies, including startups and financial services,” he says.
“In a startup, the founders need to get the business off the ground as quickly as possible, so you work hard to get there.
“The financial industry is not known as a place to go and do no work. We always have a culture where hard work rewards you.
“The idea of someone sitting there and working three hours a week is completely foreign to me.”
Mamechanic made a similar comparison to Lavoie, saying layoffs in technology departments such as Meta, Google, and Salesforce are a reflection on how companies can survive even if they lay off thousands of workers. He said that it shows.
“I've never worked in a large organization, but I can only assume that it's much easier to hide,” he said, adding that laziness doesn't necessarily come from the lowest levels of a company, but rather that “delegation” He pointed out that there are middle managers who are their laziness.
He added: “It's hidden behind a wall of being very busy. There's no room for that in the small company or hedge fund space.”
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com
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