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From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

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Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#11

Post by milkshakes »

I worked at Airbnb for four years in a dysfunctional department that had been significantly under resourced for the first 7 years of the company’s existence then tried to turn everything important up to eleven when senior leadership finally figured out it was a critical blocker for going public. That went about as well as you would expect— It wasn’t pretty at first but things definitely improved over time. I think we were “lucky” because we owned a business critical, measurable outcome.

When I started, I didn’t even have a manager for a few months. I actually burned out within my first 3 months there, and my Director personally helped me navigate the leave process —- I wound up taking a 3 month fully paid leave (they topped the difference between what the STD insurance they provided me paid and my full salary). When I returned I had a great manager!

I worked with a lot of contractors too, but my department converted well over half of the ones I worked with, and eventually the others churned out until they hired people full time. Mostly we started with contractors because it was easier to hire them but very difficult to get headcount (we sure did try).

Anyway it was a pretty wild ride but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Things were definitely uneven though. One thing that really made me sad was when they replaced the food team who we all loved with contractors (who we also all loved). After I left they really screwed over the Portland office too. But it wasn’t all bad and I cherish the friends I made there.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#12

Post by p1necone »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #7

> I was sure that refraining from lavish lunches, canceling ski offsites, and raising $1 billion from emergency venture capital investments was enough to keep Airbnb afloat, so I grew skeptical that executives had considered everything in the budget when trying to save jobs How can this person even say this when they don't touch any financial data? A quick look at Q4 2020 results for Airbnb shows a $1B loss on net in…

> There is no "ladder" to being a customer service agent. Experience doesn't scale your value to the company.

What? It absolutely does. As a dev the more senior customer support people are often the first people I think of when trying to solve complex business logic related issues in legacy code. Also, customer support are sitting between clients and dev, and the more problems they can solve without passing along the chain the more time you save. There's a tonne of value in experience in that role.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#13

Post by wging »

cactus2093 wrote: post #8
mindwok wrote: post #3

Am I crazy to think there’s something wrong with the amount of engineering effort going into these startups? When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, I can’t help but feel that’s an enormous waste of energy and effort. Since I first used Airbnb 7 years ago, the only real change I can think of is when they added experiences (which is aw…

Spoiler alert: we mostly are. Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B. It's not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra feat…

https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ is a good take on this - the central example is for search, but it applies to many more products, as cactus2093's comment (and the article) both point out. (and for what it's worth, I've observed this personally too)

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#14

Post by whatshisface »

cactus2093 wrote: post #8
mindwok wrote: post #3

Am I crazy to think there’s something wrong with the amount of engineering effort going into these startups? When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, I can’t help but feel that’s an enormous waste of energy and effort. Since I first used Airbnb 7 years ago, the only real change I can think of is when they added experiences (which is aw…

Spoiler alert: we mostly are. Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B. It's not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra feat…

An alternate story:

In a big company belief that something is worthwhile is better than actual value because market forces, that care about actual value, cannot act on each sub-project out of thousands of projects in the same company independently; but managers, which by definition can only care about their beliefs (idealism rears its ugly head again) do very much act on teams independently. The engineering department will pay $500k+ to engineers who exist only to pervert insufficiently representative metrics just as readily as the market would stop that from happening if they weren't hiding in an autocratic structure hundreds of times larger than the limits of their own abilities to be wasteful.

Indeed, there is no reason to think that the market has a greater ability to eliminate waste within a company worth $100B than it has within a communist country (which exists as an entity in international markets) worth the same.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#15

Post by orobanche »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #9
ceeplusplus wrote: post #7

> I was sure that refraining from lavish lunches, canceling ski offsites, and raising $1 billion from emergency venture capital investments was enough to keep Airbnb afloat, so I grew skeptical that executives had considered everything in the budget when trying to save jobs How can this person even say this when they don't touch any financial data? A quick look at Q4 2020 results for Airbnb shows a $1B loss on net in…

Burnout is a pretty serious thing that can last for years, a lot of time getting a new job while burnt out is an absolute nightmare. People with money are aloud to have grievances and opinions

Burnout #1 2015 Burnout #2 2016 Psychiatry 2017-2018

Starting looking for a job doing manual labour. Working with a computer no longer an option. Had 2 engineering degrees: electronics & embedded.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#16

Post by lnxg33k1 »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #7

> I was sure that refraining from lavish lunches, canceling ski offsites, and raising $1 billion from emergency venture capital investments was enough to keep Airbnb afloat, so I grew skeptical that executives had considered everything in the budget when trying to save jobs How can this person even say this when they don't touch any financial data? A quick look at Q4 2020 results for Airbnb shows a $1B loss on net in…

I practically agree with you while ideally not, everything you say is true, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim to change it in order to make people not longer a commodity where the value they add to a company is based on the amount of work they do, and not by how many people they can be replaced with, people need to be able to live a life of dignity while working, and work shouldn't be elitist like in modern society while there are individuals that work their ass off for a company but since their job is not cool enough they can't afford to live, we need work that works for people, not shareholders

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#17

Post by Aperocky »

cactus2093 wrote: post #8
mindwok wrote: post #3

Am I crazy to think there’s something wrong with the amount of engineering effort going into these startups? When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, I can’t help but feel that’s an enormous waste of energy and effort. Since I first used Airbnb 7 years ago, the only real change I can think of is when they added experiences (which is aw…

Spoiler alert: we mostly are. Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B. It's not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra feat…

> Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there.

I've always felt that there is a dilemma in this space. Any number of small UI features can claim a small increase that are often just noise and curated data (assuming no malicious baking), the cumulative increase isn't even close what the claims stacks up to.

The only fundamental way for a business to make more money is to invent actual, new feature and business models. Shifting a box here and there, enlarging an icon just creates a generation of glorified engineers and PMs who are placing their attention entirely on the wrong thing. Yet the success reporting often rewards this behavior and eventually drown the business in fruitless 'noise' endeavors that favors short term gains over actual innovation.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#18

Post by milkshakes »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #7

> I was sure that refraining from lavish lunches, canceling ski offsites, and raising $1 billion from emergency venture capital investments was enough to keep Airbnb afloat, so I grew skeptical that executives had considered everything in the budget when trying to save jobs How can this person even say this when they don't touch any financial data? A quick look at Q4 2020 results for Airbnb shows a $1B loss on net in…

One of the programs they used to have for new employees was a voluntary CX shadowing rotation. I met some great friends doing these! Some grew to be support leaders as these roles were scaled globally through partners. Most did not. Many of them eventually gave up on customer support but were able to navigate to other parts of the business like business travel or experiences or research.

One of my friends was on the food team. She was an amazing musician and won our talent show. She wound up transitioning to work on music partnerships until the pandemic hit.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#19

Post by greatpostman »

Aperocky wrote: post #17
cactus2093 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alert: we mostly are. Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B. It's not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra feat…

> Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. I've always felt that there is a dilemma in this space. Any number of small UI features can claim a small increase that are often just noise and curated data (assuming no malicious baking), the cumulative increase isn't even close what the claims stacks up to. The only fundamental way for a business to make more money is to invent actual, new feature and busin…

Maybe. Without outing myself, I have work on a choke point widget on the front page of a top 10 USA website. We had 30 engineers running these tests all day long. Was common to get 10 million+ increases to the bottom line on very minor changes. This was over a sample size of 100 million page views.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#20

Post by wging »

Aperocky wrote: post #17
cactus2093 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alert: we mostly are. Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B. It's not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra feat…

> Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. I've always felt that there is a dilemma in this space. Any number of small UI features can claim a small increase that are often just noise and curated data (assuming no malicious baking), the cumulative increase isn't even close what the claims stacks up to. The only fundamental way for a business to make more money is to invent actual, new feature and busin…

> Any number of small UI features can claim a small increase that are often just noise and curated data

The answer to this is better measurement and statistical analysis, not abandoning the effort entirely. It does take more than "haha, trend line go up" to prove a change had a positive impact, but it can be done.

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