(NewsNation) — Former employees from major tech companies say they were paid not to work and now are left facing layoffs and stifled careers.

On the surface, being paid not to work sounds desirable, but former tech employees say their careers and ambitions were suppressed. They say they were collected like cards and left to do nothing — and even being set up to be laid off.

“I’ve been hired many times by large companies in tech. And I haven’t done anything,” software engineer Emmanuel Maggiori said. “I’m not saying that I wasn’t working hard. I wasn’t working.”

A veteran of big tech, Maggiori believes this pattern is partially to do with tech companies’ emphasis on gaining funding from venture capital firms rather than focusing on what clients actually want and are willing to buy.

“Everybody wants to ride that wave, right? So, what I’ve seen happen a lot is before any validation of whether a product is going to serve clients, if people are going to buy it, they just go all in and they put a team of 20 people to work on something,” Maggiori said.

Maggiori even calls the environment “cult-like”

“I actually tried many times to approach people to see what they were working on, to try to get some work, to even devise solutions to problems. And I was told not to not just stay there, don’t ask questions,” he said.

Tech companies flush with money during the pandemic went on hiring sprees in 2021, only to change course, cutting more than 330,000 jobs since the start of 2022.

Facebook parent company Meta announced its most significant round of layoffs in November, getting rid of 13 percent of staff. The cuts came after the tech giant had expanded headcount by 60 percent during the pandemic.

Brit Levy is a former Meta employee who was hired in April 2022.

“I was in a diversity program. And myself and other individuals within the program, some of them, most of the employees, got something to do. But some of us were put on teams and told to do nothing,” Levy said.

She chose not to take the severance package offered to her, which would have required her to sign an NDA, so that she could share her experience.

“In a lot of cases, Meta actually hired people that would still be with their normal employers with their previous jobs and wouldn’t be unemployed. Now, they wouldn’t be in this situation,” Levy said.

And frustrated tech employees fear layoffs aren’t over, as a leaked Google memo signed by the company’s CFO says Google will continue to cut costs.