Entrepreneur and investor Keith Rabois has recently claimed that tech giants Meta and Google have hired thousands of tech staff member to do ‘fake work’ and meet the ‘vanity metric’ of the company. Rabois is the chief executive of OpenStore and general partner at Founder Fund. He is also one of the members of ‘PayPal Mafia’ – a group formed by ex-employees of the fintech firm.
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Rabois said major tech firms were ‘over-hiring’ and that the ongoing mass layoffs to limit cost was ‘overdue’. "All these people were extraneous, this has been true for a long time, the vanity metric of hiring employees was this false god in some ways," he said at an event organised by a banking firm Evercore, as cited by Business Insider India.
The tech entrepreneur further said that Google and Meta had thousands of employees ‘who don’t do anything' and added that ‘it’s all fake work'. "Now that's being exposed, what do these people actually do, they go to meetings."
He recommended industries to shift their focus from vanity metrics to profitability metric and that cutting head count was ‘one of the best ways to preserve and generate free cash flow’.
{{/usCountry}}He recommended industries to shift their focus from vanity metrics to profitability metric and that cutting head count was ‘one of the best ways to preserve and generate free cash flow’.
{{/usCountry}}Vanity metric is referred to company's statistics that look healthy from the surface, however, they don't necessarily translate to meaningful result.
According to Layoffs.fyi, over 1,000 companies laid off more than 1.6 lakh staff in 2022 and it reached the 1 lakh-mark so far this year.