VIRAL ‘IDLE’ CHAT
On Meta ‘no-work’ job
A former recruiter for Meta said that she was paid a $190,000 salary to do “nothing” at the social-media giant — where CEO Mark Zuckerberg in recent weeks has revealed plans to slash 21,000 jobs.
Career strategist Madelyn Machado posted a video on TikTok Friday titled “Getting paid $190k to do nothing at Meta” — recalling a six-month stint at the owner of Facebook and Instagram that ended last spring.
Machado said in her TikTok video that upon her arrival in September 2021, she was told by her bosses not to hire anyone.
“We weren’t expected to hire anybody for the first six months, even the first year,” she said. “This is something they tell you when you start.”
“That really blew my mind,” she added. “Like ‘perfect, I’m just going to ride this out for a year, obviously I didn’t make that.’”
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social-media giant, along with other bluechip tech firms including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, have fired tens of thousands of workers in recent months as they reverse their pandemic-era hiring sprees meant to keep up with explosive growth.
In her viral video — viewed more than 342,000 times as of Wednesday — Machado then revealed that instead of hiring, her days were filled with “learning.”
She praised Meta for offering “the best onboarding and training I’ve seen from any company ever.”
Machado said that the
“expectations” her bosses had at the beginning of her Meta tenure was “learning and taking it all in.”
She said the experience was akin to “drinking from a fire hose” — or being inundated with information.
Machado then described “the crazy part,” saying: “We had so many team meetings.”
“Why are we meeting? We’re not hiring nobody,” she said.
Machado told her 221,000 TikTok followers that the meetings were “just to hear how everyone else isn’t hiring anybody.”
Machado said that she, her colleagues, and her boss were “trying to figure things out.”
“I really miss it,” she added. “I wasn’t doing sh-t pretty much. Um, that’s nice.”
Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Facebook this month announced a second round of layoffs impacting 10,000 jobs — fresh on the heels of the 13% workforce reduction claiming 11,000 jobs that the tech firm unveiled in November.