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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

#291

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

supernova87a wrote: post #249

If Airbnb is willing to pay 14 weeks (3.25 months) of severance, they must believe this is going to go on significantly longer than that. Or they're using this as an opportunity to cut underperformers at the same time. Because if they believed things would start to recover by fall, wouldn't you just pay the people as normal and make a judgement call around then? You're spending the payroll money either way -- 14 week…

Underperformance is always relative to some degree. They most likely decided that much of the stuff that 25% is working on - the article mentions "experimental and costly endeavours" - won't be feasible even after the crisis is over and people book short-term rentals again.

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

#292

Post by vmception »

Aw and you went to coding school to learn Ruby of Rails for the IPO and are now stuck with an irrelevant skillset.

AirBnB is the only reason the bay area uses Ruby. All those startups stuck maintaining old code bases can only find talent because of attrition or rejects from AirBnB.

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

#293

Post by duxup »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #285
duxup wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if any employees were relying on that paper wealth... that's the problem. IMO People need to understand what that really is (usually not much) rather than blame the company.

The point is that in this case there was real wealth that could have been released had they done an IPO

If not for COVID-19?

When should they have IPOed?

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

#295

Post by empath75 »

supernova87a wrote: post #249

If Airbnb is willing to pay 14 weeks (3.25 months) of severance, they must believe this is going to go on significantly longer than that. Or they're using this as an opportunity to cut underperformers at the same time. Because if they believed things would start to recover by fall, wouldn't you just pay the people as normal and make a judgement call around then? You're spending the payroll money either way -- 14 week…

It's going to be years before the travel industry recovers

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

#296

Post by lostmsu »

chadlavi wrote: post #187
keiferski wrote: post #10

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…

At first I misread this as 14 days and was wondering why everyone is calling this such a "lavish" severance. Now I get it.

I first misread it as "14 months" (as usually you count in months), but it was way out of bounds.

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

#297

Post by filoleg »

tempsy wrote: post #73
actuator wrote: post #19

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...? Airbnb is a simple CRUD app...it’s hardly a shining example of hard deeply technical engineering problems that are fun and interesting to work on.

If you think they don't have a good engineering culture, you should check out their open-sourced tools[0].

I had an opportunity to work with some of their open-sourced tools (Airflow was one of them) about 5 years ago at my old workplace, and the quality of their product and documentation is nothing but superb.

At my current workplace, I use Enzyme all the time when dealing with unit tests, and it seems to be pretty much the industry standard for React UI unit-testing.

0. https://airbnb.io/projects/

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

#299

Post by andy_ppp »

keiferski wrote: post #205
chadlavi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I misread this as 14 days and was wondering why everyone is calling this such a "lavish" severance. Now I get it.

Somehow 14 weeks also seems less than 3 1/3 months, even though they’re the same.

And slight more that a quarter of a year seems more to me again...

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

#300

Post by filoleg »

three_seagrass wrote: post #290
gaukes wrote: 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.

Don't be fooled by the Q1 results that only cover a few weeks of the shutdown - FANGs are hurting too. 30 M unemployed and growing means no disposable income for consumer businesses, which in turn are shutting down and shrinking their spending on B2B services. The latter is delayed and won't be fully visible until Q3.

>which in turn are shutting down and shrinking their spending on B2B services

You are assuming the scenario where consumer division was making a lot of money. For a lot of very successful B2B businesses, their consumer division exists mostly to make small gains, while acting primarily as a getaway or advertisement for their B2B offerings.

You would be surprised to find out how much more revenue (and profits) a company like Microsoft makes on their B2B offerings compared to the consumer ones.

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