and the company was simply holding on to employees"like Pokémon cards."
Rich Moran, a venture capitalist, consultant, and author of several books about the workplace, prefers to call it a"false sense of activity" and said it's"more rampant" among tech companies."The tech sector is more willing to try different things," he told us."And so you get assigned to a project that you know may be going nowhere, but they have a hard time saying, well this isn't going anywhere.
"There was just no guidance at all," an ex-Meta worker said of his two months at the company, when he was waiting to be placed on a team as an entry-level data scientist."I remember one day literally having absolutely nothing to do, and I just went surfing instead because I'm remote. I have no one to report to. It seems like no one knows I'm here."
Some people were assigned plenty of tasks, but they ended up serving no mission-critical purpose. The former Google program manager said that people were working hard but what qualified as work had seemingly changed."They gave us a lot of work that was just a waste of time," she said. At almost all tech companies, current and former employees said, bosses were rewarded for overhiring since it made them look important. Bloated org charts resulted in too many people fighting for work, a poor understanding of what each segment of the company was doing, and a rise in projects spun up merely to help managers get themselves promoted.
In addition to the incentive structure encouraging projects to nowhere, there's a lack of oversight from the top into how these miniature empires are being run, employees said. And in many cases, executives are oblivious to the value of the work that's presented to them. Some executives have even admitted that there seems to be little incentive to address company bloat.