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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

#101

Post by nthj »

fivea wrote: post #82
thundergolfer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group. The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though. It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off. A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually beco…

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.

A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.

(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#102

Post by TheGigaChad »

cudgy wrote: post #86
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…

> 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 lost billions of dollars last year, and it has rarely made positive quarterly earnings. Based on your example, the engineers are highly overpaid as there efforts rarely generate a profit. They are being paid by funds from speculators (stockholders and ven…

No post body was provided.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#103

Post by code51 »

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…

The idea that these little experiment wins bring user satisfaction and/or revenue increase is a pure assumption.

Employees get so aligned with these experiment systems that obvious faults in statistical approaches go unnoticed. At the end of the day it becomes just a way to put something on your promotion case.

In most cases, core product stays the same over the years without significant innovation.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#104

Post by dchftcs »

weq wrote: post #27
mindwok wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the perspective, I've never worked in this kind of company so I'm glad to hear you feel your talents aren't going to waste.

Talents been bought and sold to the highest bidder. its sickens me how dumb smart people can be because money. study hard, work on your talent all your life, so a large corperation can have you micro-optimise its addiction-tech to extract every last dollar for shareholders using VC captial to undercut your competitiors til they crumble and make it look like your talented engineers are doing something for society inst…

Cancer research is hard work where smart people burn themselves out to fight for scraps. Optimizing metrics for bigtech at least easily pays for retirement. I don't know, maybe it's dumb to choose to optimize ads and get paid 500k and still be able to act like the company owes you. The alternative is to save lives, and in return live a life where you constantly have to beg for the next grant, and the people you save are only grateful to the MDs, say PhDs aren't real doctors, and vote for people who either want to cut science budgets or remove meritocracy to destroy your career.

Before you complain how people waste their talent, maybe ask yourself what you did to help them. Or broadly how to truly make society reward people who do God's work. Society cares about getting likes, don't want to pay even a little for quality work, so smart people give them a platform to earn likes and show them ads. Everyone is complicit, the worst among them put all blame on "smart people".

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#105

Post by valenaut »

billllll wrote: post #38
anon2020dot00 wrote: post #32

Excellent article. The biggest thing that I got is that AirBNB doesn't have a healthy culture. It seems like AirBNB is trying to foster a family-like environment where-in there is no division between work and life and that work is life. Basically a common tactic of corporations is to espouse "we are a family" but it is just a manipulation tactic for employees to work long-hours and to give their all to the company. T…

Netflix emphasizes "team" over "family" to explicitly promote an environment where getting fired is easy. Is that really a better alternative? Whether it is a "family" or a "team," you can be assured that the company will be looking out for itself first and foremost, potentially to the detriment of the employees. I don't think that's necessarily bad, but you as an individual need to watch out for yourself no matter w…

In my ideal world, firing employees would be easy, common, and not catastrophic for the employee. Of course, this requires a strong social safety net to make sure people can go a few months between jobs without losing their home, healthcare, etc.

Netflix pays well, has a generous severance package, and is honest about its culture. I think there is nothing wrong with them making it easy to fire.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#106

Post by eunos »

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…

Likely many improvements are non customer facing e.g. internal tools, interface for property owner, payment services, etc.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#107

Post by zikduruqe »

thundergolfer wrote: post #74
quanticle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Dan Luu's excellent blog post on the value of in-house expertise [1]: Another reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the generic argument that large companies should be larger than most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel t…

Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

Sounds like the 80/20 rule with extra steps.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#108

Post by eunos »

valenaut wrote: post #105
billllll wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix emphasizes "team" over "family" to explicitly promote an environment where getting fired is easy. Is that really a better alternative? Whether it is a "family" or a "team," you can be assured that the company will be looking out for itself first and foremost, potentially to the detriment of the employees. I don't think that's necessarily bad, but you as an individual need to watch out for yourself no matter w…

In my ideal world, firing employees would be easy, common, and not catastrophic for the employee. Of course, this requires a strong social safety net to make sure people can go a few months between jobs without losing their home, healthcare, etc. Netflix pays well, has a generous severance package, and is honest about its culture. I think there is nothing wrong with them making it easy to fire.

Bad for visa holders

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#109

Post by actually_a_dog »

zikduruqe wrote: post #107
thundergolfer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.

Sounds like the 80/20 rule with extra steps.

What extra steps? It's literally a Pareto-type rule. He's also probably right, but not because only a small fraction of a company's engineers are any good. It's more that a lot of engineering work is done for reasons that are more speculative than people realize.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#110

Post by actually_a_dog »

nthj wrote: post #101
fivea wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group. The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though. It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off. A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually beco…

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient. A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relative…

I disagree for the following reason: without the proof of concept, the change in production would probably never come about. You can't really separate the impact of the proof of concept from that of the production change because they don't exist independently.
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