Meta Worker says she was paid $190,000 to ‘do nothing’

Meta made headlines again this week after announcing it would lay off 10,000 workers. Those layoffs come on top of the 11,000 employees laid off last November — meaning Meta laid off over 20,000 employees in four months.

These layoffs come at an interesting time for Meta, which made a $36 billion bet on Metaverse that so far hasn’t yielded the desired results. The company now appears to be focusing on developing “generative artificial intelligence.”

As more employees are laid off from companies like Meta, many are turning to social media to share stories from their time at the company. Now a user on TikTok has sparked a discussion after explaining what she did at Meta.

In short, it wasn’t much at all.

@maddie_macho In reply to @laurendaniellehtx those were the days man. *sigh* #meta #layoffs #google #workingintech #metalayoffs ♬ Original sound – Maddie | The career finesse

In a video with over 122,000 views, TikTok user Maddie (@maddie_macho) writes that she “was paid $190,000 not to do anything at Meta.”

How did this happen? According to Maddie, she was hired as a recruiter but was also told not to hire anyone for the first 6 months to a year.

Rather than hire, Maddie said she spent her days going through the company’s onboarding process and attending team meetings — something that left her confused.

“Why are we meeting? We don’t hire anyone!” she says in the video.

In another video, Maddie reveals she was fired from the company after questions surfaced about her use of social media. Maddie says this intense monitoring of social media usage is one of the main reasons she didn’t like the job, despite the small amount of work and high pay.

“The crazy thing is they hired people to do this job, and by ‘doing this job’ I mean they hired people to watch people’s social media,” she recalls in a later video. “This is crazy to me.”

“All they were doing was hoarding talent,” she said of Meta at the time. Maddie speculates that one of the reasons Meta has invested so heavily in its recruiters is because it has enabled them to attract and retain top talent even when they didn’t already have a place for them in the company.

“They had a bunch of bogus jobs so they could hoard talent and nobody else could get on,” she concludes.

In the comments section, users revealed that Maddie’s situation is more common than most people realize.

“Also! I made a lot of money on Amazon and didn’t hire anyone. I raised an $80,000 signup and a voluntary settlement,” shared one user.

“Same… it was scary that my highest paying job let me do NOTHING all day. And I wasn’t even in recruiting,” claimed another.

“FACTS!!! I hired 3 engineers. But mostly played bingo!” exclaimed a third.

Still, many were in disbelief at Maddie’s experience.

“Getting paid 190,000 to do nothing is wild,” shared one user.

“Yup layoffs way overdue,” said a second.

We contacted Maddie and Meta via email.