David Ulevitch, a general partner at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is tired of the “BS jobs” at big companies.
Ulevitch lamented the proliferation of “irrelevant jobs” at megacorporations and conglomerates in an interview with Emily Sundberg for her Substack newsletter, “Feed Me,” published Monday. These positions, he argued, have contributed to the decline of the small businesses behind America’s industrial and manufacturing base, and rob profits from shareholders, who are often pensioners and retirees.
Ulevitch pointed to Google as an “amazing example” of the phenomenon of real people losing out “when BS jobs exist.”
“I don’t think it’s crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work,” he said. “The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts.”
“So those people aren’t just being useless (and being coddled to think useless jobs actually matter – they don’t), but they are also taking money away from the rest of the workforce’s retirement programs,” Ulevitch said.
Ulevitch said that at large white-collar companies — with 10,000+ employees or more — “a bunch of the people can probably be let go tomorrow and the company wouldn’t really feel the difference, maybe it’d even improve with less people inserting themselves into things.”
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Quartz.
Ulevitch said in a post on X Monday that his comment “ranks as one of the least controversial things I’ve ever said.”
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