VC Investor: ‘Half the White-Collar Staff at Google Probably Does No Real Work’

Andreessen Horowitz investor David Ulevitch has some harsh words for tech industry, saying there is a proliferation of "irrelevant" and "BS jobs."...
VC Investor: ‘Half the White-Collar Staff at Google Probably Does No Real Work’
Written by Matt Milano
  • Andreessen Horowitz investor David Ulevitch has some harsh words for tech industry, saying there is a proliferation of “irrelevant” and “BS jobs.”

    The tech industry has laid of hundreds of thousands of workers over the past two years, with some CEOs saying their companies were overstaffed with employees who weren’t doing any meaningful work. Ulevitch appears to agree with that sentiment, as he made clear in an interview for Emily Sundberg’s “Feed Me” newsletter, via Business Insider.

    After saying that “irrelevant jobs proliferate,” Ulevitch said that in many white-collar companies, “a bunch of the people can probably be let go tomorrow and the company wouldn’t really feel the difference. Maybe it’d even improve with less people inserting themselves into things.”

    Ulevitch says he himself was part of the problem after his company was bought by Cisco.

    “The growing professional managerial class in America, and more importantly, the societal perception that those jobs are ‘really important,’ is a weakness, not a strength,” he added. “I should note, I have been a part of this class in my career, and it’s great — people really treated me like I was very impressive and important when I was an SVP at Cisco, and so naturally I thought I was, too. This dynamic is endemic across corporations and is lame.”

    Ulevitch believes theses unnecessary jobs pose a significant issue, not just for companies but also for their shareholders and pensioners.

    “Another issue with all the ‘BS’ jobs in large corporations is that it takes profits away from shareholders who are most often the pensioners and retirement accounts of the rest of America,” he said. “So those people aren’t just being useless (and being coddled to think useless jobs actually matter — they don’t), but they are also taking money away from the rest of the workforce’s retirement programs.”

    Google singled out Google as a prime example of the problem, especially when considering the countless projects the company has invested billions in, only to kill off later.

    “I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work,” he said. “The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts.”

    Google is so well-known for killing off beloved projects that users have come to rely on that it has begun to hurt the company’s reputation and willingness of users to invest in its new products. Ulevitch’s commentary on the financial impact is one of the most telling statements yet about Google’s commitment issues.

    While the tech layoffs have definitely slowed down, they are ongoing with Google and Tesla recently in the news for fresh rounds. If Ulevitch is correct, workers should expect to see many more in the future.

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