Big Tech Hires Because It Can Afford To
Big tech companies mostly hire because they can afford to, which makes those jobs less secure than they look.
Behind the glossy careers pages, most of the hiring at big tech companies happens simply because they can afford it. Google, Meta and Amazon add thousands of people every year, and not every one of them is needed. When Elon Musk laid off 80% of Twitter’s workforce, the core product was surprisingly little affected. In most tech companies, perhaps only 20% of employees work on the projects that really matter and bring in revenue. Search and ads make up the lion’s share of Google’s revenue, yet only a fraction of its people work directly on them. Meanwhile, entire teams work on projects that might never ship, kept around for optionality.
Once a company is rich enough, hiring stops being careful selection. Think of shopping in a supermarket. On a tight budget, you compare prices, check the ingredients and think about nutrition. If you had millions, you wouldn’t bother. You would take the most expensive things on the shelf and trust the price to tell you the quality, even though it often doesn’t. Big companies hire the same way. With money to spare, they don’t look hard at whether each new hire is needed. They hire expensive people and assume that a higher salary buys better results.
Hiring also turns into a kind of luxury, and into something close to empire-building. Managers grow their teams to handle the work, but also to show their status and pave the way for their next promotion. Inside a company, a manager’s value and pay usually depend on how many people report to them. The head of a 200-person division has more influence and more earning power than someone who manages 20, no matter how many of those 200 people actually contribute to the core business.
Then there is optionality. Rich companies treat hiring like venture capital, as low-risk bets that might bring huge returns, and many hires are made on a “hope it works” basis, without much calculation. Once in a while one of them pays off big, like Google’s early investment in AI, but most go nowhere. When a company earns hundreds of billions a year, burning a billion dollars on long shots is no disaster, though the same spending would ruin a startup. Because nobody has to make hiring cost-effective, you end up with PhDs labeling datasets and people with master’s degrees running routine operations.
So joining a famous tech giant doesn’t necessarily make you indispensable, or even secure. These companies grow and shrink mostly with macroeconomic factors like interest rates, and much less with how well their employees perform. You could see this clearly in the downturns, for example the cycle around 2021. When layoffs come, the first to go are often these “luxury hires,” people whose roles were never central to the business.
If you are planning your career, especially early on, keep this in mind, because prestige alone can mislead you. Often the smarter move, I think, is to board a ship where your work visibly affects the company’s course, even if it is not the largest or most prestigious one. Look for roles clearly tied to the core business, where your own impact can be seen and measured and doesn’t get buried under layers of internal politics.