“Fictitious work” of thousands of IT specialists: accusations at the Evercore conference

At the Evercore conference in Miami, Keith Rabois, a venture capitalist and former PayPal executive, accused the tech giants of over-hiring for a long time. As a result, Big Tech is responsible for the industry’s job losses, Rabois said, as their executives previously made hiring a measure of tech vanity.

During the speech, Rabois also claimed that thousands of technicians were doing “dummy work” and were hired to fulfill a “vanity measure”. Strongly expressing his conviction, he argues that the current job cuts in IT were overdue, and that “these people have nothing to do … all they do is go to meetings.”

Rabois also cited another reason for over-hiring: the desire of tech giants to steal qualified IT specialists from competitors. Blaming all of Google’s hired engineers of being happy “to have the right to sit at their desks and do nothing,” he advocated changing the industry’s focus from growth at any cost to profitability metrics like revenue per employee.

Rabois cited the example of Elon Musk’s personnel policy on Twitter, which has led to the reduction of almost half of the staff since the purchase of the social network. In his opinion, such an approach should be a role model.

Despite the provocative comments made at the event, Rabois is not alone in criticizing company staff. Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen expressed similar views on the management class a year ago.

Evercore Industrial Conference is an annual event hosted by investment bank Evercore to provide a platform for companies from various industries to meet with investors, analysts and other professionals. The conference covers a wide range of topics and includes company presentations, panel discussions, policy briefs and more.