'$190k to do nothing': Fired Meta employee shares how she did no work in 6 months

A Meta employee shared a video describing how she had nothing to do at the social media company for six months straight. She also revealed that she was getting paid $190,000 (roughly Rs 1.57 crore) annually. 

A post by Madelyn Machado, a former recruiter at Meta, went viral after she described how employees had nothing to do, especially in the recruiting space. Her post was labeled 'Getting paid $190K to do nothing at Meta'. She informed her viewers on TikTok about the last few months at the company. Meta recently removed 10,000 employees in its second round of job cuts, resulting in a total of 21,000 firings within a matter of months. 

Machado revealed that despite being recruiters they were not allowed to hire anyone for the first six months, even the entire first year. She said, "we weren't expected to hire anybody for the first six months, even the first year. That really blew my mind. Like perfect, I'm just going to ride this out for a year.'

However, she acknowledged that she never got to cross that threshold and really start hiring. Even if she managed to evade the second round of layoffs, Meta's new hiring freeze could go on for an extended period. 

Also read: ‘Has Mark Zuckerberg taken a pay cut?’ Laid-off Meta employee questions Facebook founder

Machado described that most of her time at the company was spent in training. She acknowledged that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was very thorough when it comes to the training and 'learning' process. 

Even with a hiring freeze in place, Meta employees in the recruiting space continued to conduct meetings. Machado said, "Why are we meeting? We’re not hiring nobody. Just to hear how everyone else isn’t hiring anybody. And also, I was on a team where everyone was new, so none of us were hiring anybody.”

Machado received flak from some of her TikTok viewers calling her lazy and saying that she was "skating through life". Some even blamed her for robbing accountability from the performance of other people who actually worked at Meta. Machado took to LinkedIn to explain how she had worked really hard in the past. 

Also read: 'Time to go home?' Indian techie urges others to return to India after layoffs at Google, Amazon, Meta