Hashtags: #TechCompany #Engineer #CompanyStrategy #EmployeeRetention
🤔 Why would a big tech company hire an engineer to do nothing? 🤔
If you’ve ever heard of a situation where a big tech company hires an engineer to do nothing, you may be scratching your head and wondering what the catch is. It seems counterintuitive to pay someone a handsome salary without expecting them to produce any tangible work or output. So what’s the deal? Let’s dive into this intriguing scenario and explore the possible reasons behind it.
## Understanding the Company’s Strategy
In the fast-paced world of technology and engineering, companies often have complex strategies and long-term goals that may not be immediately apparent to outsiders. Hiring an engineer to do what seems like “nothing” could actually be part of a strategic decision made by the company. Here are a few reasons why a big tech company might take this approach:
### Research and Development
Big tech companies are known for their relentless focus on innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the tech industry. By hiring engineers to explore and experiment without the pressure of immediate deliverables, these companies can foster a culture of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. This “do nothing” time could be dedicated to research and development of new ideas and technologies that may not yield immediate results but could have a significant impact in the long run.
### Employee Retention and Satisfaction
In the fiercely competitive tech industry, retaining top talent is crucial for the success of a company. By offering engineers the freedom to explore their interests and passions without the constraints of daily tasks, big tech companies can attract and retain high-caliber individuals who value intellectual freedom and creative autonomy. This can lead to a more satisfied and engaged workforce, ultimately benefiting the company in the long term.
### Future Projects and Initiatives
It’s possible that the engineer who appears to be doing “nothing” is actually involved in highly confidential projects or initiatives that are not yet ready to be disclosed to the public or even to other employees within the company. This level of secrecy and compartmentalization is not uncommon in the tech industry, where companies are constantly working on cutting-edge technologies and products that require a high level of confidentiality until they are ready for launch.
## Addressing Concerns and Misconceptions
Now that we’ve explored some potential reasons why a big tech company might hire an engineer to do “nothing,” let’s address the concerns and misconceptions that often arise in such scenarios.
### Job Security
One of the biggest worries for the engineer in question is whether his days are numbered at the company. He fears that someone outside of his department will discover that he is not adding value and will subsequently get rid of him. However, it’s important to remember that big tech companies invest significant time and resources into their hiring process. If they saw potential in this engineer and offered him a generous compensation package, it’s likely that they have a plan for utilizing his skills and expertise in a way that may not be immediately apparent.
### Company Culture and Values
It’s essential to consider the culture and values of the company in question. Some tech companies prioritize a culture of exploration, experimentation, and intellectual freedom, which could explain the decision to hire an engineer for seemingly undefined work. Understanding the ethos of the company and its long-term vision can provide valuable insights into why such unconventional hiring practices might be in place.
### Career Development and Growth Opportunities
Instead of viewing the lack of immediate tasks as a sign of impending doom, the engineer could reframe his perspective and see it as an opportunity for personal and professional growth. He could use this “do nothing” time to pursue professional development, learn new skills, or even propose his own projects and ideas to contribute to the company’s long-term success.
## Conclusion
In the world of big tech companies, the decision to hire an engineer to do “nothing” may seem perplexing at first glance. However, when we delve deeper into the company’s strategy, values, and long-term goals, we can begin to understand why such decisions are made. It’s essential for both employees and outsiders to consider the broader context and potential reasons behind seemingly unconventional practices within big tech companies. By doing so, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the complexities of the tech industry and the strategic decisions that drive it forward.
That’s weird. I had someone in my team that did NOTHING (he was apparently developing some solution that no one asked him to do!) for more than 5 years before he got let go. He started playing in a Band after losing his job !
>Why would a company that puts prospects through the ringer during the interview process pay someone so much money for doing nothing?
I wish I had that kind of job too. Most people I know in tech work quite a bit tbh.
>What’s the catch?
Performance reviews. Need to be able to write something. That said, some people are just good at politics and bs-ing so really depends.
>Also, would you say this guy’s days are numbered?
Again. Depends how good he is at bs-ing. Politics + BS-ing/ass-kissing can work in basically any industry.
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>Why would a big tech company hire an engineer to do nothing?
It’s harder to track every individual in a larger company. Some teams get royally screwed (aka work 24/7) while some teams get away doing nothing (leeching off other teams/bureaucracy).
I knew two engineers at Google pre-covid with very different work-life balance. One of them said he was bored to death because of no work and politics (almost impossible to get any code changes committed without endless meetings and docs). The other was working to midnight having to videochat with international teams as well.
>He feels like it’s only a matter of time before someone outside of his department will “discover” that he is of no value to the company, and they will get rid of him.
Really depends on luck.
Larger companies have more variance/inefficiencies in the system.
Sometimes it’s because upper management has ordered headcount for an ambitious project that no one has any idea how to do, or has some factor actively blocking it. This happened with Facebook’s “metaverse” pivot, for example. Or in my case, the company was trying to wrest control of a project from an unsatisfactory outsource vendor who wouldn’t let go.
The catch is unemployability when you don’t have any interesting stories to tell about your most recent job.
Because of politics
You are a manager, you fight for additional budget every year
One year, you go and tell finance there’s not enough work for the team, so you didn’t use half the budget.
Do you think the next year they will provide the same budget? No, they will cut it in half because apparently you didn’t need it. They will say thanks for saving us so much money! You now have the reward of firing half your team.
And then in the future, when it gets really busy, you’re not going to be able to just double up their headcount because they tell them it is busy now. It is hard to increase headcount by one, much less by double. There is the getting approval, then the actual hiring which takes time and $$.
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So managers expand their teams as much as possible and when things get slow they keep everyone they like around. Their goal is just to have the rockstars in case/when they need them. Also, when there are layoffs, they have a little extra room without forcing everyone to take on 2x the work of one job.
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Not to mention, the more people under them, the better they look. It is only to their advantage to have more people and as some mentioned in the thread it becomes tough to quantitatively assess need. Allocation is more based on the manager “selling” their need as reality and being part of the “good circle” with people in charge. That’s how at the same company you end up with massive teams that sit around and do nothing, while another team is understaffed and swamped.
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Added details, fixed grammar.
Employees are just cogs in the machine. There’s so many reasons for stuff like this. It could be he was only hired to keep other companies from having him. In makes sense in some narrow scenarios. It could be they thought they would have work for him but didn’t really. It could be the work is coming but isn’t available yet.
Just walk around with a clipboard in hand. Everybody will think you’re doing something important.
> He does “nothing” on the job…his words, not mine.
When people say “nothing” like that they generally don’t mean it literally. It could mean “nothing I feel is useful” or “I can finish it all in an hour or two”, or “they want me to contribute to a project but haven’t decided which one and they may not do so until Q1 planning is complete so I’m idle”
> Why would a company that puts prospects through the ringer during the interview process pay someone so much money for doing nothing?
In the case of Meta and Google, their philosophy is to hire the best people and be confident they can excel at any project they want. Therefore they hire first and team match later. The job listings you see and apply to are not actually specific, individual roles they’re trying to fill.
Apple and Amazon do their own hiring for specific roles, so I imagine it’s less of an issue there.
This is one explanation: [https://vimeo.com/27060669](https://vimeo.com/27060669)
There are many other explanations too. A lot of times teams plan on a lot of upcoming work in future quarters, decide they need more employees to handle that workload so they have to start hiring early.
Sometimes the hiring process goes smoothly, but now that person is on a team that doesn’t really have work for them until they get to those upcoming quarters.
Sometimes that person gets hired, but the work the team had planned gets completely scrapped. Now the team has its original workload, but an excess of employees, but they don’t want to lose the person they just spent all this time/money hiring.
Or maybe your friend is one of those types that’s really good at avoiding work, but communicating their status as if they’re actually busy. People can get away with this for *months.* Sometimes years.
Or maybe your friends team is a team that just has “easy” work. Some teams are dedicated 100% to maintenance, so all they do is basic bug fixes and never any new features. A SWE on a team like that might say they do “nothing”, but mean their tasks are few, trivial and low effort. But somebody’s gotta do them.
Or maybe there’s a lot of bureaucracy so things move very, very slowly and many of their days are them literally twiddling their thumbs.
Or maybe a million other things. Why don’t you ask your friend for some details? How would we know what’s going on in their specific situation?
Big companies are like hulking great beasts. No matter what they say, they’re very unresponsive to short-term change. Person A over here estimates the amount of work needing doing in this part of the company and the extra budget they need to get the work done. Person B in another department OKs hiring x new people. New hire C goes into manager D’s team, but by the time they’re there, it turned out the work wasn’t. It’s in none of these people’s interests to either admit a mistake, give up a job, or lose one of their managerial headcount, so nothing happens.
Big companies move forward and make profits through sheer weight. But generally speaking, they’re pretty unresponsive and not massively efficient. I mean, the tech giants went on a hiring spree, then decided 12 months later, they hired too many people and laid thousands off.
Meta must have had an eye watering number of people sitting around wasting their time on the fucking metaverse when anyone with their eyes open could see it was a god awful idea.
Ah, I miss being young and naive. The corporate world is an imperfect game of politics and bullshits.
You’re not getting paid based on your output, for the most part. When a company makes billions in revenues, is not so easy to track back each dollar to each employees. Instead, there are politics and power games being played, that dictate how the billions get distributed in the hierarchy.
In that particular case, you need to understand that managers and leadership has a vested interest in showing “growth”. A team growing is a KPI. Whether the team builds something that actually generates profit is sometimes hard to tell, if the company is big enough.
at my last company, half my team didnt do anything for 6 months. not a single PR from some folks. just a lot of “research”. management had no guidance or what to do with the team. PMs couldnt get new work going. I told my cowoker, this was bad and im gonna bounce. He did so too. another 6 months later. CTO was terminated. Engineering manager laid off. then a year later, the entire team was laid off except for a few low performance skeleton crew to keep the lights on. I was actually surprised they kept the low performers, but maybe they wanted to keep the payroll low.
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remember the old saying. people fail up. so some of these people in technical management had no reason to be there and had no skill in leading teams or companies in technical directions.
Empire building middle managers who are solely responsible for the layoffs we’ve seen recently. They are the ones that need to be purged first
Reminds me of a situation where a coworker was loaned to another team project, a few years passed and he’d always talk about his frustrations with the project, but he would get good reviews based on input from his delegated manager. We decided to look at the repo for the other project and looked up his name, and he had made changes here and there, but they were almost all typo fixes or comment updates. Turns out the other team thought he couldn’t do more because he was so busy helping our team, and we thought he couldn’t do more for our team because he was so busy helping on the other project (and each manager thought the same). He basically got $300k a year for three years and did essentially nothing during that time. Something I think is much more likely to happen in the remote era than it was in office (but I still would never give up remote).
lol if I were him, I’d stay as long as I can in my cushy job, start my own business on the side since he’s got “nothing” to do for 8 hours a day.
The top answers are right but one thing to add: companies have a hierarchy/chain amongst people and teams. The company/owner has a goal or vision. CEO and upper management run the company. Then you have a product team to design the product, sales team to sell it, engineering team to build it, QA to test it, etc. Each of these groups has subgroups too.
The unique thing about the tech world is the people doing the work often know more about the details than the person above them. For example my team lead may have assigned a task to me and estimated a week of work, but as I actually do the work I may realize it should only take 1 day. I think there is a lot of “I don’t know exactly what work my direct team is doing” at all levels. So you end up with roles where you really don’t have good visibility into what they do or how long it should take. If person A is getting their assigned work done on time, great! Is their assigned work requiring them to work 5 hours a week or 60? In some cases the only person that knows is person A.
There are ways to track work, but many people have different schedules and it’s hard to gauge how much time they are actually spending developing, testing, designing, in meetings, etc. essentially you’d have to micromanage them to an insulting degree to know for sure that they “do nothing”. And for the most part everyone just assumed that’s not the case. Unless you aren’t getting your assigned work done – that’s the main give away in my experience
Politics is usually the answer.
By nothing your friend probably meant nothing of substance, could range from maintenance work to bug fixes.
There is an incentive for managers to empire build, meaning the managers are rated on the scale they manage (which usually is gamed by “how many people are under you?”), which is then used to influence other org within the company or make them seem more important, all for climbing that corporate ladder
Our division torches 40M every year. ~125-150 FTEs and we’re just one division. Having a couple people doing nothing isn’t a big difference in the grand scheme of things.
A whole bunch of people busting ass and producing something that isn’t profitable is a bigger concern than the people doing nothing. Lighting 40M on fire every year isn’t great.
Then the question becomes will there be enough other projects to absorb the staff when/if it gets canned.
Sometimes it’s worth paying to keep institutional knowledge in house (keeping the team idle between projects.) This might be your friend’s case, but it happens. Or the manager is just starting to staff up and isn’t kicking off the project until the team is ready.
Is he at risk? Maybe. I mean, when you’re the go to person, then everyone knows it. But those people can get laid off too. I think this makes his next interviews unnecessarily harder too: what does he have to talk about?
I would think if you found yourself in a situation like this,. your best bet is just to “keep quiet” and dedicate yourself to self-improvement and learning.
Eventually somewhere down the line,. the question is going to come up:.. “So, I see you worked at Company-A,.. what did you accomplish while there?”
Maybe that question won’t come up (depending on how you scope your Resume). Maybe just sit low and take in the paychecks for a while ?
This is common and normal. People overworked to the bone just responding, putting out fires is also normal. Someone with balance who actually works on something of value, that matters is the exception.
Politics would be #1 (eg: nepotism/favoritism, alpha dog empire building, use it or loose it budgets)
#2 Incompetent management (performance, project, general); dearth of metrics, analysis & visibility
This sounds like a dream to some people but it’s actually pretty taxing on your mental health to be in this position unless you overemploy or something.
Being useless isnt a good feeling and feeling the need to bullshit progress when there is none isnt either. It can lead to burnout.
Managers gain leverage when they have more people under them and they loose it when they have less.
So they will tend towards hiring over firing.
Companies do however implement policies to counteract this and some managers simply don’t realise it’s in their best interest to keep even unproductive employees.
Its called as “empire building”, managers like to hire as many people as they can so that they can show that they manage a large team and then get promoted to the next level. Its very common at large companies with poor work culture.
Your friend could also be the sacrificial lamb come review time. He might have been hired to be fired to protect others on the team from getting a required low rating.
I work in defense. Been doing nothing for awhile now. Too bad I’m not WFH.
Used to work at a MAJOR company and the first 6 months I did nearly nothing but cash a check. I didn’t hide from work. I actively sought it out. At every turn there was nothing. Made a killing financially but eventually work did pick up. The problem was it was meaningless, below my skill level, never ending, had no path forward, wasn’t at all what I originally signed up for, and eventually ended up being absorbed by a different and horrible team. I saw that and layoff writing on the wall and got the hell out of dodge.
It was a lot of money but not sustainable.
Welcome to most corporate swe jobs
Labor hording. Keeps them from working for a competitor.
I got hired 3 months ago and do very little. I have suggested implementing CI/CD and rewriting a 15 year old web forms app and all I get is a shoulder shrug. I’ve been able to upgrade some APIs to the current .net framework but only because I had nothing else to do. I get blocked for days at a time waiting for some access to some resource yet my manager still asks me for status at every day’s standup and it is awkward because he then tries to find some shit bugs in the backlog that the legacy devs have ignored for months.
I just try to look busy on the two days I have to go in because I sit right in front of my manager so I try to learn more skills in the event that I do have to deliver something.
We have a new CIO and a new VP of development and I think everyone is just paralyzed because we have no direction on tech standards and some apps are getting outsourced to consulting companies. Half the team works blatantly on side hustles.
But I still get paid and this is not my first rodeo, but I hope it is my last. I just have a few more years in an IT backwater and I am done with this shit business.
So that competitors don’t have the top talent.
some part of the company has some idea like “we need someone to do x”, but then the actual team who this person would be on has no idea about this plan. a lot of companies are super disorganized, and you need multiple parts to come together to execute on something, and then sometimes that doesn’t happen or takes forever. I had a job where they were in a hurry for me to start then had 0 stuff for me to do. First day they gave me some manuals to read about something super tedious like rpc or something super dry and pointless without a project to apply to. Then they’d give me about 30 mins of work to do a day, but I’d have to sit at my desk for 8 hours. I’d write one method in like 20 min then spend the whole day refactoring it in more and more complicated ways because I was dying inside. This is why I refuse to work in an office anymore lol, that shit kills me.
or jobs where the interview is super complicated, then ultimately what they want is someone to write super huge sql queries for an important department. it’s like dating lol, what people say they want and what they really want and need are different lol
So there’s this old engineering joke:
It’s the 1920s, and they opened this huge factory with hundreds of workers on an assembly line. One day, out of the blue, the big machine stops.
The boss, worried about all the money he’s losing, calls a mechanical engineer in to fix the problem. The engineer shows up, looks around, makes a cup of coffee. The boss looks on impatiently. The engineer pulls out a pad of notes, starts looking at parts of the machine and his notes. Finally, he walks to the back of the machine and taps a panel with his wrench. Suddenly the machine whirrs back to life.
The engineer then walks to the boss and says “that’ll be $1000”.
The boss is shocked – “$1000? That was barely 10 mins of work! I’m not paying a cent unless I see an itemized bill!”
The engineer shrugs, and writes something in his notepad and tears off a page, and hands it to the boss. The note reads:
Tapping the machine … $10
Knowing where to tap the machine … $990
Sometimes it’s worth keeping people around on a process that’s working to fix stuff when it breaks. It’s how high level engineers get paid, they know the system so well that they can tell you why something is broken or where it can be fixed much faster than someone new can. Atleast, it’s how I justify my job 😬