The Silicon Valley Engineers Who Get Paid Millions To Do Nothing

It’s a well-known secret in Silicon Valley: big tech companies employ “resters and vesters,” employees who collect full pay and stock without having to do much, or any, actual work.

Though it might sound like an administrative error, with employees who have somehow fallen through the cracks, there are a few very good reasons why companies allow employees to “rest and vest,” according to former “coasters” interviewed by Business Insider.

What “Vesting” Means

To see why anyone would sit and wait, it helps to know how tech pay works. At large tech companies, a big share of an engineer’s pay often comes as stock rather than salary. That stock isn’t handed over all at once. It “vests,” or becomes the employee’s to keep, gradually over several years, and only as long as the employee stays.

That schedule is what makes resting possible. Once someone has stock on the way, the cheapest thing they can do is stay put and let it arrive. If a company has no pressing work for them, or doesn’t want them anywhere else, that arrangement can suit both sides. When the stock is worth a lot, the amount being collected for very little work can run into the millions, which is where the “paid millions to do nothing” label comes from.

Keeping Top Talent Away From Competitors

Some tech companies use “rest and vest” jobs as a way to claim top talent and keep it away from the competition, according to Manny Medina, a former Microsoft executive.

At Microsoft, he saw how the tech giant locked up talent in fields like AI, robotics and quantum computing.

“You keep engineering talent but also you prevent a competitor from having it, and that’s very valuable,” he told Business Insider. “It’s a defensive measure.”

The logic is easiest to see in specialist fields. When only a small number of people in the world can do a particular kind of work, an engineer who isn’t busy today still has value: they’re not building the same thing for a rival, and they’re on hand the day the company needs them.

Buying Silence

“Rest and vest” can also be used to buy an employee’s silence about the problems facing a project before they leave a company.

“Everyone knew I had a big mouth and would speak out,” said a former “rest and vest” Facebook engineer. “He figured, ‘Hey, it costs us next to nothing keep this person happy for six months.'”

Like a paid period of transition, employees can use “rest and vest” time to cool off and start looking for other work. For the company, a few months of pay can be a small price for a quiet, orderly exit.

Hanging Onto the Most Effective Employees

Some employees can simply do more in a shorter period of time. “10x engineers,” for example, are supposedly 10 times more effective than other engineers, or so the legend goes.

“They might know where the bodies are buried on some project, be called in as a last resort to debug a project, or they are known as a great pinch hitter,” said the former Facebook engineer.

Seen that way, a resting engineer is closer to insurance than to waste. The company is paying to keep someone who knows how a critical system really works, in case it breaks.

The Cost to the Employee

Though “resting and vesting” can be good for companies, it can kill the careers of employees, especially those “working” on long-term research projects, according to an engineer at X, run by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Engineers can spend years “never shipping anything.”

That’s the hidden price. In engineering, what you’ve built and launched is your track record. Years without anything to show for them are hard to explain in an interview, and skills that aren’t used fall behind a field that moves quickly. The money is real, but so is the risk of coming out the other side less employable than when you went in.

What’s Changed Since 2017

In 2017, big tech was hiring fast and money was cheap, so carrying a few idle engineers barely registered. That changed in the early 2020s, when the largest companies began cutting staff and talking openly about efficiency.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is the clearest example. Mark Zuckerberg named 2023 the company’s “Year of Efficiency.” In March 2023 he announced about 10,000 more job cuts and the closing of about 5,000 open roles, and said the company would remove layers of management and ask many managers to go back to hands-on work. In January 2025, an internal memo said Meta would cut roughly 5% of its staff, focusing on its lowest performers, and refill those roles. That’s a direct challenge to the idea that anyone at Facebook could coast for long.

The debate about idle engineers also came back in a new form. In November 2024, Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch posted that his team’s data on more than 50,000 engineers suggested about 9.5% of software engineers “do virtually nothing,” calling them “ghost engineers.” He reported the share was higher among remote workers. The figures went viral, but the research hadn’t been peer reviewed, and others questioned how productivity was measured. Measuring an engineer by the code they commit misses work like design, reviews and mentoring, so the number is best read as a conversation starter, not a verdict.

What It Means for Employers

Rest and vest is rarely anyone’s plan. It usually comes from a mix of sensible decisions: pay people in stock so they stay, hire ahead of need, protect rare skills, and avoid messy exits. Each choice makes sense alone, but together they can leave capable people with nothing to do.

For companies of any size, the useful questions are simple. Does everyone have work that matters? Are you keeping people because you need them, or because you don’t want a competitor to have them? And if someone is waiting out their stock, is that a deliberate choice or something nobody has noticed? A team that can answer those honestly is less likely to be paying for empty desks, and less likely to waste the careers of good people sitting at them.