“$190,000 for doing nothing”: Meta employee boasts at Tiktok and therefore loses her job

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“I did nothing and got $190,000”: Meta employee brags on Tiktok – and therefore loses her job

For months, one employee said she was just twiddling her thumbs – and getting tens of thousands of dollars a month for it. She wasn’t alone in that.

It’s a tough time for the tech giants: tens of thousands of employees from Meta, Amazon and Co. have been thrown onto the streets in recent months. A series of videos by a former employee now gives a new perspective on how this could happen: According to her own statements, she earned almost $ 200,000 at Meta – and simply had nothing to do.

This reports “Maddie” on her Tiktok channel. She earned $190,000 during her time with the group – even though she only worked there for just under six months. “I didn’t really do anything there,” she admits frankly. And that’s probably one of the reasons for the subsequent mass layoffs.

Recruiters on hiring freeze

Because the fact that Maddie and her teammates did absolutely nothing all day apart from team meetings was not due to their own laziness. “I was responsible for hiring. And we were told in no uncertain terms: We won’t be hiring anyone for the next six months,” she recalls. “So I met my team all the time and we told each other that we hadn’t hired anyone,” she laughs about her absurd work situation.

In fact, her working hours at the group fell into an exceptional situation. When the tech companies experienced an unprecedented boom during the early days of the corona pandemic, they also hired new employees on a piecemeal basis – and outbid each other with the promised job advantages. Observers see the fact that a year and a half later mass layoffs on an unprecedented scale can be observed in the industry – Meta alone has laid off more than 10,000 employees, at Amazon there are even 27,000 so far – as a direct result of this previous hiring frenzy.

Training as the only task

According to Maddie, she was also able to observe the effect in her team. “We were all new hires,” she recalls. “No one knew what he was doing. We all figured out together how not to hire anyone.” She therefore used her time for further training. “Meta actually has the best onboarding and training process I’ve ever experienced,” she says, impressed.

Incidentally, she never complained that she had nothing to do, she replies in a follow-up video to viewers’ responses. “I love doing nothing. It’s the one thing in my life that I really get into,” she jokes. There was another reason why she still hated the job: she felt that she was being monitored far too closely for her use of social media.

That bothered her especially at Tiktok. With a video about her job advantages at Meta, she went viral on the video service – i.e. with a competitor. “I didn’t think anything of it. It was like advertising to work there,” she explains. But then she was caught by a team monitoring employees’ social media behavior. “And suddenly, in this uncomfortable situation, I had to look at 20 of my Tiktok videos and be asked if I thought that was appropriate and helpful for the group.” After half a year, Meta apparently had enough. And put Maddie out the door. She doesn’t blame the group. She still raves about the relationship between work and pay: “It was the best time of my life,” she says. “I really miss that.”

Sources:maddie macho, New York Times, CNBC