Happy St. Patrick’s Day! ☘️ This is LGTM, the newsletter that simply wishes you a happy st. patrick’s day and doesn’t try to shoe-horn in a corny pun…

Here’s what we got for you this week:

• Does Meta fumble talent?

• Don’t be a doomer

Laid-off Meta worker says she got paid to not work

What were Meta employees doing to deserve their massive compensation packages? Apparently, not much of anything at all.

Brit Levy, a former Meta employee and current lifestyle Tiktoker, explained that after joining the company she was immediately placed in a role that had no work for her. According to Levy, the situation was common enough that she met many others who were also being paid to not do anything.

It’s the real life version of Silicon Valley’s unassigned

Getting paid big tech wages to do nothing was no dream job however, Levy reports that it was “really screwing up” her career. Creating Jira tickets and moving them around is, in fact, a perishable skill like dunking a basketball or running lines as a wide receiver. Spend a few months not doing it and you may be out of the game for good.

Luckily, Zuckerberg came to the rescue and with his infinite compassion freed these poor workers stuck in jobs that paid too much and expected too little. The Year of Efficiency has cracked down on exactly this kind of fiscal waste and has been doing so quite successfully. Brit Levy was laid off just six months after joining the company.

Don’t be a tech doomer, just keep coding 🐟

If you’ve scrolled through any tech newsfeed recently, then you’ve become familiar with the weekly harbingers of tech’s impending implosion. We’re talking mass layoffs, people being replaced by AI, apps tracking your every move and selling the data, etc, etc.

An average Joe reading the news might think that everyone in tech is getting absolutely hosed and that we’re entering into a dystopian sci-fi future. Something not covered in these news stories: the day-to-day of basically everyone in tech.

If you ask around you’ll realize that most people are just up to business as usual. Sure, the SVB news ruined the weekend for tons of founders and startup employees, but this past Monday guess who was back to attending standup and closing out tickets? Everyone.

Wacky stories like Meta’s employees getting paid with literally no work to do are great for getting clicks, though. That’s why we included it. 😉

The truth of what’s going on in tech right now is way more boring. Tons of us are still working away on software that isn’t anything glamorous like crypto or AI but still makes money. Yes, there have been layoffs but just because tech isn’t getting tons of free money anymore doesn’t mean it’s not still lucrative.

The major trend right now is that most tech companies are:

1. scaling back growth

2. focusing on their core products to maintain revenue

Don’t get caught up in the first point, as a refocus on bolstering core products means now is as good a time as ever to continue growing your career in tech. Pick your head up, hit the books and hop on leetcode to give yourself the competitive edge. Who knows, scoring a job might even be easier now that CNN Business readers think the industry is dying.

Other Noteworthy Stories 🔍

📣 Meta floats Twitter killer A Meta spokesperson says the company is “exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates” and would be under Instagram’s branding. It seems this is still pretty early stages and follows Meta’s if you can’t beat em, join em strategy, but it really remains to be seen if Instagram power-users can handle text based communication…

📣 Apple delays the bread Following the “deliberate hiring” strategy CEO Tim Cook announced, Bloomberg reported that Apple is making changes to some employee’s biannual bonuses, and instead receiving payment in-full in the fall. Apple’s conservative approach has helped them stave off layoffs.

📣 AI for Pi? You can now run Meta's new GPT-3-class AI large language model, LLaMA, locally on your laptop, phone and even Raspberry Pi thanks to software developer Georgi Gerganov. This allows anyone to run LLaMA locally without the much contested censorship and without paying API fees to OpenAI.

📣 Microsoft says sayonara to AI ethics team During Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs, a team responsible for making safeguards to prevent “social harm” on products using OpenAI technology was cut. This responsibility now falls under the ominously named “Office of Responsible AI.” Interesting for Microsoft to shed this team after its Bing chat bot famously went off the rails.

Well, that's all we have for you this week. Until next week 👋 LGTM. If you want more, be sure to follow our Twitter (@ReadLGTM) and Instagram (@ReadLGTM).