Andreessen Horowitz investor says half of Google's white-collar staff probably do 'no real work'
Andreessen Horowitz's David Ulevitch discussed "fake work" in tech in an interview published Monday.
He said: "Half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work."
Tech firms such as Google and Meta have conducted mass layoffs in recent years.
An investor at the Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is the latest VC to get involved in the debate about "fake work" in the tech industry.
In an interview published on Monday with Emily Sundberg in her "Feed Me" newsletter, David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called Google "an amazing example" of a corporation employing people in "BS jobs."
Ulevitch said that "irrelevant jobs proliferate" at megacorporations and employees at these big, white-collar firms know that "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 was previously the CEO of the web-security startup OpenDNS, which he sold to Cisco for $635 million in 2015.
"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 said one effect was "the decline of small businesses that power America's industrial and manufacturing base," as people in these industries age out of the workforce, the work gets outsourced abroad, and these jobs are seen as less desirable than white-collar gigs.
"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."
Ulevitch pointed the finger at Google specifically, saying it's "an amazing example."
"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 didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Meanwhile, Ulevitch told BI via email: "My only comment is that I think it ranks as one of the least controversial things I've ever said."
In recent years, other VCs have entered the debate around "fake work" and overstaffing at Big Tech companies.
Marc Andreessen has criticized what he calls the managerial "laptop class" and tweeted in 2022: "The good big companies are overstaffed by 2x. The bad big companies are overstaffed by 4x or more."
Keith Rabois, an investor in Tesla and former PayPal executive, said last year that recent layoffs at Meta and Google were the result of overstaffing.
"All these people were extraneous," he said. "This has been true for a long time. The vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways."
"There's nothing for these people to do," he said. "It's all fake work," adding: "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings."
Thomas Siebel, the billionaire CEO of C3.ai, said last year that Google and Meta overhired staff and didn't have enough work for them to do.
"They really were doing nothing working from home," he said. "If you want to work from home, like four days of work in your pajamas, go to work for Facebook."
Though some laid-off tech workers have said they had to "basically fight to find work," at their old companies, others have said their companies over-hired and management assigned workers menial tasks to create the illusion that they were necessary.
Tech firms such as Meta and Google have laid off thousands of workers since 2022, often citing an interest in becoming more efficient.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year that 2023 would be the company's "year of efficiency" and expressed his distaste for a bloated organizational structure of "managers managing managers." And Google CEO Sundar Pichai told staff in 2022 that "there are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have."
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