When Graham was hired by Amazon, it sounded like his dream job. He was brought on as a research scientist to help develop features for Alexa, the company’s ubiquitous voice assistant. Graham, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, assumed he would soon be using his expertise in machine learning to work on cool, new features that would make Alexa more personal to every user. But within four months of his start at the company, it became clear that Amazon had no idea what to do with him.

He spent the next two years bouncing around — switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon’s formal performance-management plan.

Facing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon’s music recommendations, which he described as “the first really interesting thing I worked on.” He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham’s manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn’t see the light of day. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Graham left Amazon soon after.

As tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of employees this year, venture capitalists and executives have leaned on the term “fake work” to describe the output of employees like Graham. The layoffs are necessary and even prudent, the argument goes, because thousands of workers at Big Tech firms such as Google and Meta are sitting around trying to look busy while doing very little productive work.

“There’s nothing for these people to do — it’s all fake work,” Keith Rabois, a famous tech investor, opined at a March event hosted by the investment bank Evercore. “Now that’s being exposed, what do these people actually do? They go to meetings.”

Some tech workers seemed to confirm Rabois’ claims on social media, sharing stories of being paid by giant tech firms to do very little. In one viral TikTok video, Brit Levy, Meta’s former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy analyst, said she had to “basically fight to find work” and the company was simply holding on to employees “like Pokémon cards.”

But based on conversations with over 30 people involved in the tech industry, including current and former tech employees, some in management positions, the conception of lazy employees raking in big paychecks to do little lays the blame in the wrong place. Oftentimes, employees are getting plenty of work done; it’s just that the projects are of little to no importance to the company’s bottom line. The tech employees spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal.

“Most workers want to come and work. They want to show up, give a fair eight hours of work, and they want to feel good about themselves,” said Scott Latham, a strategic-management professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who worked in the tech industry during the start of the internet boom. 

There’s only one real culprit for the culture of “fake work,” he said. “It’s lazy management.”

What we talk about when we talk about ‘fake work’

“Fake work,” as consultants Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson define it in their 2009 book of the same name, is “effort under the illusion of value.” The crimes, they wrote, include pointless meetings, reports, and presentations. In the tech industry, specifically, the term “fake work” is used to conjure up an image of lazy engineers “resting and vesting” — long-tenured, high-paid employees doing very little work while waiting on a lucrative payday from their company stock.

Rich Moran, a venture capitalist, consultant, and author of several books about the workplace, prefers to call it a “false sense of activity” and said it’s “more rampant” among tech companies. “The tech sector is more willing to try different things,” he told us. “And so you get assigned to a project that you know may be going nowhere, but they have a hard time saying, well this isn’t going anywhere.”

The latest version of fake work emerged as part of the tech industry’s pandemic-driven boom and bust. Lockdowns and work from home meant Amazon, Google, Meta, Shopify, and many other giants saw an explosion of demand for their products. Assuming the consumer shift was a harbinger of a new normal of shopping, socializing, and working online all the time, companies aggressively hired thousands of recruits. But firms often gave little thought about where to place them or what their role would be, insiders say.

“I think COVID was an accelerator for fake work because a lot of these tech companies hired. Then they weren’t sure what to do with a lot of the people,” Moran said.

One former Google manager told us she was instructed to lower her standards for hiring earlier in the pandemic and watched as teams she worked with doubled in size. As new hires flooded in, it felt as if teams were reorganized on a weekly basis, making it harder for people to do solid work. 

Most workers want to come and work. They want to show up

The sudden head-count increase was destabilizing, but the real trouble began when business started to slow down. Rather than a permanent reorientation, many of the behaviors people adopted turned out to be short-term modifications. And as the economy turned on the tech industry, companies scrambled to figure out what to do with all the employees they no longer needed. That’s when the “fake work” talk, finger-pointing, and unceremonious layoffs took off.

“There was just no guidance at all,” an ex-Meta worker said of his two months at the comp