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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

#111

Post by throwaway0a5e »

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.

And on the other side of that coin, if one were to espouse the same opinion in the context of anything even tangentially safety related and the average HNer's head would explode and they would rage click the wrongthink button.

It's all a numbers game. The median member of your kernel team, the median fire extinguisher, the median link to a sales web page, the median joist in a floor, all will do nothing of note. But if you distribute the resources properly they will hopefully be where they are needed to generate a positive ROI that pays for the overall system. If you zoom in too much or too little it all looks silly.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#112

Post by Vinnl »

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.

That seems consistent. If there's a 1% chance of a meaningful improvement, and 99 out of 100 changes do not meaningfully improve things, than the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#113

Post by agd »

I read these kind of blog posts, but honestly, it’s hard to have too much sympathy. This guy presumably earned millions out of working at AirBnB, is staggeringly rich compared to most people, and he could have left at any time for another job.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#114

Post by Spooky23 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #111
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.

And on the other side of that coin, if one were to espouse the same opinion in the context of anything even tangentially safety related and the average HNer's head would explode and they would rage click the wrongthink button. It's all a numbers game. The median member of your kernel team, the median fire extinguisher, the median link to a sales web page, the median joist in a floor, all will do nothing of note. But…

Everyone on HN is 10x. Lol

You need a bench. Some of the brilliant folks who are great at pushing through problems are awful and maintenance and sustainment. I worked for a bit in a SWAT engineering team tasked with addressing crisis problems or emergency response. If you don’t have people you’re developing on the bench, you won’t be able to respond to those types of things and will get bogged down with tech debt.

I was a faux “10x” person because I had license to break the rules to get shit done - because the value of what we were doing was higher than the cost of cleaning up the mess. (Not because of any brilliance on my or the teams part) We did two years worth of work in a month, but it’s still being refactored 3 years later.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#115

Post by AndrewThrowaway »

> 7,000-plus workforce

It is sometimes just too hard to wrap your head around this. How what is basically a website requires such a workforce? I get that it is much more than a website, there are various aspects of platform and etc. I understand that my comment might seem off. However 7000 is really a lot people.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#116

Post by gruez »

AndrewThrowaway wrote: post #115

> 7,000-plus workforce It is sometimes just too hard to wrap your head around this. How what is basically a website requires such a workforce? I get that it is much more than a website, there are various aspects of platform and etc. I understand that my comment might seem off. However 7000 is really a lot people.

customer service/sales/compliance?

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#117

Post by amelius »

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…

> But from a profit point of view, that last 10% can generate hugely outsized returns.

That's because capitalism is a winner-takes-all game.

Spending 1000000 manhours to get 0.001% improvement in quality pays off, for exactly this shitty reason.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#118

Post by saiya-jin »

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…

it all looks nice and rosy and everybody patting their back about how impactful they are when scales come into play... and then you as a user are just wtf-ing given app because UI has been overhauled yet again, things that worked before are nowhere to be found, there is basically no migration guide.

The simple truth that most software engineers don't want to hear is - people are quite conservative in this. If it works once, most folks would be extremely happy to keep using it for next 20 years in exactly same way, as it is. Bug-less has higher priority than shiny (which is highly subjective) and constantly changing.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#119

Post by exikyut »

Vinnl wrote: post #112
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.

That seems consistent. If there's a 1% chance of a meaningful improvement, and 99 out of 100 changes do not meaningfully improve things, than the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be.

Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?

Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?

(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)

I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#120

Post by strikelaserclaw »

isuckatcoding wrote: post #67

> while some of us took Ubers to work and shopped at Barney’s, others maxed out credit cards or could only afford to live in the East Bay Hey now what’s wrong with being in the East Bay?

Maybe he is talking about people having a long commute to live in affordable areas.
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