Inside the perverse system of 'lazy management' that's destroying the tech industry

He spent the next two years bouncing around — switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon's formal performance-management plan.

Facing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon's music recommendations, which he described as "the first really interesting thing I worked on." He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't see the light of day. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Graham left Amazon soon after.

As tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees this year, venture capitalists and executives have leaned on the term "fake work" to describe the output of employees like Graham. The layoffs are necessary and even prudent, the argument goes, because thousands of workers at Big Tech firms such as Google and Meta are sitting around trying to look busy while doing very little productive work.

"There's nothing for these people to do — it's all fake work," Keith Rabois, a famous tech investor, opined at a March event hosted by the investment bank Evercore. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings."

Some tech workers seemed to confirm Rabois' claims on social media, sharing stories of being paid by giant tech firms to do very little. In one viral TikTok video, Brit Levy, Meta's former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy analyst, said she had to "basically fight to find work" and the company was simply holding on to employees "like Pokémon cards."

But based on conversations with over 30 people involved in the tech industry, including current and former tech employees, some in management positions, the conception of lazy employees raking in big paychecks to do little lays the blame in the wrong place. Oftentimes, employees are getting plenty of work done; it's just that the projects are of little to no importance to the company's bottom line. The tech employees spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

"Most workers want to come and work. They want to show up, give a fair eight hours of work, and they want to feel good about themselves," said Scott Latham, a strategic-management professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the tech industry during the start of the internet boom.

There's only one real culprit for the culture of "fake work," he said. "It's lazy management."

What we talk about when we talk about 'fake work'

"Fake work," as consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson define it in their 2009 book of the same name, is "effort under the illusion of value." The crimes, they wrote, include pointless meetings, reports, and presentations. In the tech industry, specifically, the term "fake work" is used to conjure up an image of lazy engineers "resting and vesting" — long-tenured, high-paid employees doing very little work while waiting on a lucrative payday from their company stock.

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."

The latest version of fake work emerged as part of the tech industry's pandemic-driven boom and bust. Lockdowns and work from home meant Amazon, Google, Meta, Shopify, and many other giants saw an explosion of demand for their products. Assuming the consumer shift was a harbinger of a new normal of shopping, socializing, and working online all the time, companies aggressively hired thousands of recruits. But firms often gave little thought about where to place them or what their role would be, insiders say.

"I think COVID was an accelerator for fake work because a lot of these tech companies hired. Then they weren't sure what to do with a lot of the people," Moran said.

One former Google manager told us she was instructed to lower her standards for hiring earlier in the pandemic and watched as teams she worked with doubled in size. As new hires flooded in, it felt as if teams were reorganized on a weekly basis, making it harder for people to do solid work.

The sudden head-count increase was destabilizing, but the real trouble began when business started to slow down. Rather than a permanent reorientation, many of the behaviors people adopted turned out to be short-term modifications. And as the economy turned on the tech industry, companies scrambled to figure out what to do with all the employees they no longer needed. That's when the "fake work" talk, finger-pointing, and unceremonious layoffs took off.

"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."

Another ex-Meta employee said that there were so many workers in his department when he joined in 2022 that on multiple occasions, he'd complete a project to learn that as many as four other people had been given the same assignment separately. The former employee described the work he did at Meta as "intern-level' — putting together graphs based on preexisting data, polishing presentations, or practicing how to "work a problem backward" — despite having nearly a decade of experience in tech. He said he found the environment "stifling" and was often deterred from trying to increase the scope of his work.

Sure, there were some employees, as pundits and executives have suggested, who could have helped tackle projects but chose not to. But for the most part, insiders told us, workers were stuck in circumstances beyond their control.

"I think there's very few people sitting around doing nothing," Moran said. "I think people are very skilled at filling their time. Whether or not it helps the organization is another question."

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.

Others, like Graham, were assigned to seemingly key parts of the company, only to find that there wasn't enough work to go around. The former Googler also noticed this type of fake work. "There were so many of us, people just started trying to look busy," she told us. "There were too many chefs in the kitchen," she added.

One former contract worker hired by Meta during the pandemic became so frustrated with feeling idle that she took on a second contract job at Microsoft at the same time (neither company knew she was working for the other). She decided if "they're not going to give me anything to do then I guess I'm just getting paid."

"It's a little bit of a symbiotic relationship where the people that you report to aren't saying that you're not doing anything and you're not saying that you're not doing anything," she told us.

Empty empires

While the pandemic's boom and bust brought the issue into stark relief, the various types of fake work have been growing within tech companies for years. Many of these issues come down to one fundamental problem: managers trying to get ahead.

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.

"People are often measured not in contribution but in head count." Moran said.

"The bigger your team you have, the more qualified people you have in your team, the more weight you have in the company," Graham, the former Amazon employee, said. "It's what we call empire building. You're not focused on building a product; you're focused on building an empire. That leads to fake work and unnecessary bloating."

To create an empire, managers simply add employees underneath them with little sense of what they should be doing. "Instead of planning in the most efficient way, they just say, 'I need a head count,'" Anna Tavis, a clinical professor of human-capital management at New York University's School of Professional Studies, said.

The former Meta employee who joined the company in 2022 felt that stuffing teams was a byproduct of middle managers looking for a promotion, leading to employees having less to do. One of his managers hired so many people that within three months, there became four levels between him and the person who was supposed to be managing him. "A lot of the time, my managers had no idea what I was doing," he said.

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. Former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast that without financial hurdles, managers had every reason to keep hiring.

"The more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization," he said.

To secure their fiefdoms, managers often pitch projects they created that are sometimes referred to as "vanity projects" or "promo projects." These may ultimately contribute zero to a company's top line, but the flashy presentations and demos associated with the projects often lead to a promotion and nice pay bump for the person leading the work. One Google manager who recently left the company said the head-count process at Google "rewards bad behavior" by promoting people based on "having a bigger team and creating decks." Google had "dozens" of teams, he said, that did "think tank-like strategy work with no real practical way of impacting the business or a customer or user."

"I do think that process favored the people who were better at bullshitting and storytelling," he told us.

At Meta, one current employee said it was common to see employees all the way up to vice presidents invent workshops or "sprints" to set "strategic visions" for projects, while only a small fraction made it onto a road map, an actual timeline for a product to launch to the public, the employee said.

"I've rarely seen a large-scale vision be referenced after it's presented, despite the fact that upwards of 20 people are called to participate, usually by making and remaking decks for leadership," they added. "You can always tell when performance reviews are about to happen because there's almost always one or two workshops on the calendar a month before."

When that manager gets promoted — or the project falls apart — the team is sometimes shuffled into other parts of the business. Several tech employees told us these situations led to a lot of work that ultimately made little or no material impact on the business.

"One reorg after another led to fake work," a former longtime Google employee said. "I got used to getting introduced to a multiyear product, for a project I would look at and say, 'This is a poster piece for some executive to implement while job hunting for another role so they can go be a CEO somewhere.' They were show products."

The power-jockeying adds layers of unnecessary complication, making it nearly impossible to complete simple tasks. One former manager at Salesforce said the company had in recent years become stuffed with middle managers and power structures that sucked up resources but made it hard to get anything of substance done.

"Trying to get anything done in that organization takes 40 people to get aligned," the former employee told us. He said the meeting culture at the company had also gotten out of hand and "work" was defined as "making slide decks and giving speeches and having a really full calendar that shows you're in a lot of meetings."

What's next?

Over the past year, tech companies have made it very clear how they plan to deal with fake work — layoffs

In almost every layoff announcement — those from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and others — executives have focused on the need to get more efficient. After announcing the company's first round of job cuts last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be the "year of efficiency." Other tech CEOs, such as Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, have also talked of increasing their companies' productivity.

Some companies have also shown signs that they're trying to curb busywork. In September, Google told staff it would cut down "redundant meetings" and asked employees to make stronger and specific agendas for the meetings they did have. In January, Zuckerberg told staff that he could no longer tolerate a company structure of "managers managing managers," the newsletter Command Line reported. He also told middle managers to find roles as individual contributors or leave.

While many big tech companies have emphasized the need for more "efficiency" over the past six months, they have also generally downplayed concerns about their workplace cultures. In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said that Graham's story "doesn't reflect the experience of most employees." A Google spokesperson denied that managers had been told to lower hiring standards during the pandemic and pointed us to to an interview with Bloomberg where CEO Sundar Pichai remarked that the company was "sharpening its focus." Representatives from Salesforce, and Microsoft declined to comment. Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

Greg Selker, a managing director at the executive-search and consulting firm Stanton Chase, said he thought the fake-work phenomenon was already reaching a natural conclusion. The "smartest companies" that overhired have already gone through significant bloodletting, while others will soon realize they have to do the same, he said

But not all insiders are convinced. Some said these companies would need to make more drastic changes to the culture if they wanted to undo years of "fake work." "The dirty secret of these layoffs is that they're not materially changing these businesses," a former longtime Google executive said.

Addressing the issue of bloat and poor management takes more than a few layoffs. Jessica Kennedy, an organizational expert out of Vanderbilt University, said it came down to clear communication and proper incentives, adding that the issue could be solved with better organization and a clearer, more transparent differentiation between roles.

"It's natural for a worker to try and find a way to increase their status or differentiate themselves, but cultures are set by the people at the top of the organization, and it's their job to incentivize the right things," Kennedy said. "This is probably an issue a company would face if it focused too much on rewarding social status instead of performance. It's important employees understand the overlying purpose of the work they do. Good leaders know how to properly motivate their employees."

Some level of redundancy is a good thing if companies want to "build for resilience and innovation," but there needs to be careful thought given to it, NYU's Tavis said. "Companies making profits can become lazy around really planning for what they want," she told us. "Yes, you need to create resilience and innovation, but you need to plan for it."

As for Graham, he's since moved to another tech company, where he said he felt his contributions were more valued. "It's really good work so far," he said. "We have a good leader, which makes all the difference."

Hugh Langley is a senior correspondent at Insider covering Alphabet and tech investigations. He can be reached via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 628-228-1836 and email at hlangley@insider.com

Grace Kay is a reporter on Insider's business news team. You can contact her at gkay@insider.com