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Software engineers at Google can make a base salary of up to $718,000 a year — and one says he is earning six figures working approximately five hours a week.
Devon, a Google software engineer in his 20s, told Fortune that he works for the tech giant for approximately one hour daily while earning a $150,000 salary. He typically gets out of bed around 9 a.m., showers and cooks breakfast, then works for Google until 11 a.m. or noon. For the rest of the day, he works on his startup, he told Fortune.
Devon told Fortune he couldn't justify working hard when he saw colleagues working late nights without moving up the corporate ladder.
"It's not like you'd really get promoted for going above and beyond," Devon told Fortune. Fortune said it used the pseudonym Devon to protect the engineer's privacy. The outlet said it viewed the engineer's Google offer letter verifying his salary, and reviewed screenshots detailing his startup work throughout his workday. Google didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Devon isn't alone in his work habits. Jason, a 22-year-old, previously told Insider he worked two full-time remote software engineering jobs for no more than 30 hours a week to increase his income.
"I felt my workload at my first job was low enough, and I knew that if I couldn't handle it then I could simply quit one of the jobs," Jason said.
Stories like these have helped inspire debate over whether employees at tech companies like Google and Meta are getting paid top salaries just to put in minimal hours at work — a trend that some tech experts call "fake work."
Tech giants went on hiring sprees during the pandemic in pursuit of what Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley investor, calls the "vanity metric" of headcount, where employers expand their workforce in an attempt to stand out among their rivals.
Some critics have said companies didn't have enough work to keep their new hires busy. Google and Meta laid off thousands of employees earlier this year.
"They really were doing nothing working from home," Thomas Siebel, a billionaire CEO who runs the enterprise AI company C3.ai, told Forbes, regarding new hires at the two companies.
Whether "fake work" comes from over-hiring or is a product of poor management, Devon's work schedule shows how attitudes around work have shifted in pursuit of work-life balance, especially among Gen Z workers.
These shifting attitudes are reflected by buzzy workplace trends like quiet quitting, where workers do what's expected of them — sometimes less — to keep their jobs, or bare minimum Mondays, in which employees do as little work as possible on Mondays to avoid burning out during the rest of the week.
Devon told Fortune that nobody at Google seems to suspect him of working few hours. When he interned at Google prior to his current role, he said he worked "probably under two hours a day," which freed up time to take a weeklong hush trip to Hawaii while on-the-job.
"If I wanted to work long hours, I'd be at a startup," Devon told Fortune.
