However, it’s become apparent that they aren’t as productive as we’ve been told to think. Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” Over at Google, a company known to have pioneered the modern tech workplace, one designer complained of spending 40 percent of their time on “the inefficien[cy] overhead of simply working at Google.” Some report spending all day on tasks as simple as changing the color of a website button. Working the bare minimum while waiting for stock to vest is so common that Googlers call it “resting and vesting.” (...)
In tech, bullshit jobs—which the late David Graeber defines as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” even though they are obliged to pretend otherwise—come mostly from bullshit projects. At Google, such projects are aplenty. According to Killed By Google, an archival project that documents discontinued Google services, products, devices, and apps, the company has discontinued nearly three hundred projects since its founding. These range from software systems to help businesses distribute and manage job applications (Hired by Google) to social media platforms that tried to mimic Facebook’s success (Google+) to manifestly uncool wearable technology (Google Glass). But projects at that scale are far and few between. Many were small and hackathon-sized in ambition. All failed to make a splash on the balance sheet. These “dead” projects are also just the tip of the iceberg. The website only documents projects that have been publicly launched; untold more have been nixed before ever being announced.
Google has always had a founders-first mentality; it’s ingrained into the company’s DNA. According to a former employee, Google tries “to reproduce the circumstances that led to their initial success” by recreating the environment in which it was founded: On top of having the flexibility to decide when to work, how to work, and, in some cases, what to work on, Google allows employees to spend 20 percent of their paid working time on side projects. Senior employees can also pitch project ideas to upper-management and get funding to work on them, while junior employees are encouraged to “take ownership” over their assigned projects and to act as if they were the CTO of it. Google even has a literal startup incubator—called Area 120—for employees to pitch projects and start new companies.
To tech optimists, projects that don’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line are seen as sustaining the intrepid spirit of innovation—necessary to achieve breakthrough technologies that could generate profit at some point in the future. As one employee puts it, Google is into “generating luck,” since they are willing to try “a whole bunch of stuff in the hopes that a few efforts will pay off” for the rest of their failed projects. Many will fail but those that succeed are supposed to rake in so much cash that they pay for the failures. But for this model of innovation to work as intended, employees have to believe in it; to the faithless, it has become little more than a means of personal advancement.
The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon. “The [promo] incentive throughout,” as explained by a former employee, “is to create a product, launch it, apply for promotion, and move on to bigger and better things as soon as possible.” For years at Google, promotions weren’t given at the discretion of an employee’s manager; instead, employees initiated a promotion by compiling a “promo packet”—a collection of essays that explain why their contributions merit a promotion, corroborating evidence, and recommendations from teammates. This packet was then evaluated by upper-level engineers and management, who then determined an employee’s “impact.” But because the vast majority of projects do not, in any direct way, contribute to revenue, impact can be difficult to assess. So the number of product launches became a proxy measure of value. As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”
Writing promo packets became an artform at Google, one untethered to productivity. Instead of solving legitimate problems, many engineers found themselves gravitating toward tasks that could build their case for a promotion. This frequently led teams to build new products that compete internally, creating confusion for all parties involved, while pressing engineering tasks get neglected for months at a time. Sometimes, projects were simply redundant. One employee told me that “there are some people who launch a project then switch to another org to launch the same project.” The performance of usefulness thus replaced the act of actually being useful.
Even failed launches could land someone a promotion. One employee told me the story of his team’s tech lead, who was “super-gifted [and] one of the smartest engineers” he has worked with, but “going from project to project without a final launch is routine to the way he did things.” Even after eight years at Google where he worked his way up to the title of staff engineer—a highly respected role—none of his code has ever made it to Google’s production servers. Instead, he has swung from one failed or canceled project to the next, collecting promotions along the way. As the employee put it to me: “It’s literally failing upwards with no end in sight.”
Bullshit projects are abundant, in large part, because of the LPA cycle, and its proliferation is only aggravated by Google’s army of increasingly despised middle managers. Employee dissatisfaction with middle management is hardly a new phenomenon. Writing in the 1990s, labor economist David Gordon argued that U.S. businesses are addicted to expanding the ranks of middle management, resulting in corporations that are “Fat and Mean,” which is also the title of his last book. According to Gordon, the waning competitiveness of American industries could be attributed to the bloating of middle managers who are at once expensive (fat) and prone to suppress wages (mean).
Google managers may not be mean, but they have—by Gordon’s definition—become fat. In the early days of the company, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought that middle managers were a layer of bureaucracy that obstructed engineers from doing good work, so they kept the number of managers to a minimum—and even experimented with eliminating them altogether. In 2009, they funded a multiyear research initiative called Project Oxygen to test whether managers mattered (the results indicated that, yes, apparently, they did). But while the project gave Google the data to justify the role of management, the ensuing lack of scrutiny over the role has resulted in bloat. Today, about 15 percent of Google’s workforce is made up of middle managers, roughly one manager for every five to six employees, far surpassing the average manager to employee ratio in the service sector of one to fifteen. Where it was possible for a hundred engineers to report to a single manager in the aughts, most engineers are now placed on teams of no more than a dozen, frequently less. (...)
Another major stumbling block to actual innovation is that projects that may not actually be bullshit get nixed all the time, transforming all that work into bullshit. The primary reason projects get cut is because of Google’s pathological addiction to reorganization, or reorgs—when organizational boundaries get shuffled often because of a power struggle among managers. Sometimes reorgs are productive and can result in the elimination of redundant work. However, reorgs aren’t always economically motivated. If a manager can use a reorg to expand the size of their team, it is almost certainly the right career choice even if it doesn’t make the company more efficient. For employees, this can inhibit their ability to perform their jobs, participate in launching projects, and, as a result, build their case for promotions. According to a why-I-quit-Google blog post by former employee Michael Lynch, this was a central concern:
Six weeks before the performance period ended, my project was canceled. Again. Actually, my whole team was canceled. This was a common enough occurrence at Google that there was a euphemism for it: a defrag . . . My teammates and I all had to start over in different areas of the company.In some cases, workers anticipating a re-org may stop working altogether since they expect their project to get canned. Lynch sums it up: “Google kept telling me that it couldn’t judge my work until it saw me complete a project. Meanwhile, I couldn’t complete any projects because Google kept interrupting them midway through and assigning me new ones.” Between the drive for headcount and the never-ending square dance of reorgs, it’s clear that middle management is just as responsible for waste as their promo-hungry employees. Bullshit, it would appear, permeates every level of the organization.
Innovation at Google is clearly in crisis. After establishing search advertising as a veritable cash cow, Google has spent hundreds of millions trying to reproduce that initial success—with little to show for it. In its early years, the company quickly developed platforms like Gmail, Google Maps, among others that locked users into the company’s ecosystem, driving traffic and ad spending. Today, the platform economy has calcified. The platforms that most people might want already exist; and major ones like Facebook and X, the platform previously known as Twitter, are even past their peak.
“Google got lucky 15 years ago and managed to turn on an absolutely massive firehose of money in ads,” wrote a Google employee on HackerNews. This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.” For Google, however, this stagnation hasn’t produced an urgent existential crisis: advertising revenue has grown to $224 billion from $43 billion in 2012. Today, Google has over 90 percent of the search market in the United States. With virtually no credible competition to threaten the firm’s position, it can sit back and collect its fat paycheck.
