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Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

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Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#41

Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the res…

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Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#42

What isn’t commonly known is that Airbnb has one of the most biased engineering hiring practices in the industry. Chinese individuals at the company regularly share interview questions through wechat groups. Preferring to hire their own. Extremely dishonest hiring culture is pervasive through engineering. Don’t believe me? Look at their engineers on LinkedIn

Please don't post messages like these, it doesn't really help with the discussion.

Also, just because maybe they have more folks from one ethnicity than most companies have on average, doesn't prove this argument.

Lastly, sites like Leetcode exist where people share questions too, I doubt that it is restricted to just one ethnicity.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#43
post #31
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acquisition target IMO. While AirBnb bleeds, the FANGs continue to pile up cash. Google, Facebook, and Apple all have enough cash to buy several AirBnbs rn.

Yes, but instead of buying several AirBnBs, they could instead buy dozens of smaller startups that are not operating in the hospitality industry - which is going to recover much slower than most forms of B2B or B2C.

Those industries would also be hurting less which means a smaller discount.

Meanwhile, long-term prospects for AirBnb have not changed. Disease existed before COVID and will exist after COVID.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#44

Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the res…

That's why when a yet another aspiring startup wants to hire me, I ask for a high sign on bonus as an insurance, monthly vesting cycle, at least 200k in base pay and high severance upon termination. Never been given that, but I don't regret: looking back, all those "just 1 year till IPO" companies are underwater.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#45
post #7

I can only imagine how much it sucks to be laid off and what a difficult decision it must be for Airbnb executives. To me, the severance and exit benefits do seem to strike an employee friendly tone. Kudos to the leadership to striking a good balance on keeping the business alive and doing right by their people.

These are abnormal circumstances. I wonder if it is possible to delay the layoffs by cutting salaries - maybe instead of firing 5 out of 10 equally paid people, they can cut the salaries of all 10 people by half (or something like that).

Any which way these are hard decisions :(

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#46

It feels bad that this happened to one of the companies with a very good engineering culture. The stuff they have put out in the open either on GitHub or through their blogs is a testament to that. I think any company will be lucky to have these folks.

Good engineering culture, bad company, user hostile.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#47
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of tech is getting hit, it seems like Airbnb is more in the spotlight

Why do people consider AirBnB tech? They are a services company with a website connecting external parties. This isn't hard tech, this is marketing. Edit: It seems people are under the impression that because you have lots of technology that is required to run your company you are a technology company. I don't believe that to be true in this day and age, tire distributors probably have more technology requirements th…

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Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#49
post #27

Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the res…

I’m surprised they were still handing out options - don’t most later stage startups switch to RSUs? I’d hate to have to decide whether to exercise today, cliff or no cliff.

They are RSUs, at least in the US.

Re: Citing revenue declines, Airbnb cuts 25% of workforce

#50

Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the res…

I found COBRA to be extremely expensive. I instead enrolled in obamacare via job loss exception.
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