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 Emmanuel Maggioli, who worked as an AI specialist and data scientist for some of the world's top companies and now 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.
Maggioli clearly remembers the moment he realized that working very little was the norm in 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 without it. ”
Over the next few years, while working as a freelance software engineer, 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.”
“I heard that someone in a previous job used to scuba dive during work hours. Another person I know spent all day just watching online courses, and his employer paid for his subscription. If I stop doing that, I might quit,” he added.
In some cases, the data supports these anecdotes. In an anonymous survey posted on the online career community Blind, one user asked, “As a software engineer, how many hours of concentration do you spend each day working?”
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.
trying to stay busy
Determined to be proactive, Maggioli said he was given tasks such as constantly requesting work and “chasing” people for updates, until his boss told him: did not respond). Maybe not. ”
It was in the banking industry that 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.”
“I have to fight for my job,” Britt Levy said on TikTok, adding that her teammates spent hours on “dog food” (searching for bugs in the Metaverse) to look busy.
A source at one of America's top 10 banks said: luck The majority of software developers they work with are not forced to do anything when they are first hired due to complex onboarding.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained: “Working in software is incredibly complex with lots of rules, and the financial sector is made even worse by all the regulations.
“A lot of it is process-dependent, and it's often difficult to get the process access to the right level for it to work. That can take weeks. You can also get someone to start it for you. But that person can't even access the system.
“They can literally just sit there, and a bunch of software developers come in and are ready to start. They try to log into their laptops and they can't access anything. Then they go to the help desk and… I'd say this happens to seven out of 10 software engineers I join.”
Why do companies hire people for these roles?
Maggioli added that there are various motivations for companies to continue onboarding talent without knowing what they'll be doing.
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 am. 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?
Getting paid six figures for doing nothing may sound like a dream to some.
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 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 have worked in a variety of companies, including startups and financial services,” he said.
“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 isn't known as a place to go without work. We've always had a 'hard work gets paid' culture.
“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 an example of 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 it's much easier to hide,” he says, adding that laziness doesn't necessarily come from the lowest levels of a company, but rather, ” He pointed out that the problem lies with middle managers who “delegate.” their laziness.
Furthermore, he added: “They're hiding behind a wall of being very busy. In the small business and hedge fund space, there's just no room for that.”
