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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

#141

Post by seoaeu »

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.

> the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be

If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#142

Post by AdrianB1 »

rexpop wrote: post #137
AdrianB1 wrote: post #78

Quoted post unavailable.

TWC is literally what it says on a thin: all workers, no backers, just being honest about our experiences. You can call us entitled, but insofar as we're propagandists, each individual is only pushing our own personal "narrative." "Building power" is _definitely_ political activism but, again, the way we build power is, primarily, by exposing ourselves to eachother's personal experiences in the tech industry. That kn…

Discussions about working conditions are welcome. Make it a cover for something else is not.

It would be nice to talk to the generations you mentioned. Not sure you did, but I did a lot. Workplace was a lot worse in the 50s, from working hours to safety. Still, people had liberties, could create friendships and gather and talk openly and free. These days the same people that you the words in the article are the ones killing free speech, forcing agendas and politics in people's lives, atomizing the society and creating friction between races, sexes, classes and everything. With one hand they complain, with the other they cause the situation: there is no honesty there.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#143

Post by swat535 »

ta3411 wrote: post #39

I am going to be voted down into oblivion but it's okay. This is my throwaway account anyway. Here are my 3 pragmatic takes regarding this situation: - If you are an engineer, your total comp is easily north of $200,000. At that pay scale compared to other careers, I expect (and I did) to burn through the night as needed. That's a lot of money for anyone to expect to have a comfortable work/life balance. I always com…

200k is really not a lot of money. Nearly half if it taxed and when you factor things like housing costs and living expenses, it's not that much.. Engineers need to stop short selling themselves, you never see Lawyers going around and saying "they are making too much money".. My friend is an attorney and he charges 1,000$ just to write a single letter.

SWE is a high paying profession and rightly so because companies get to make millions off our backs.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#144

Post by Apocryphon »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #142
rexpop wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TWC is literally what it says on a thin: all workers, no backers, just being honest about our experiences. You can call us entitled, but insofar as we're propagandists, each individual is only pushing our own personal "narrative." "Building power" is _definitely_ political activism but, again, the way we build power is, primarily, by exposing ourselves to eachother's personal experiences in the tech industry. That kn…

Discussions about working conditions are welcome. Make it a cover for something else is not. It would be nice to talk to the generations you mentioned. Not sure you did, but I did a lot. Workplace was a lot worse in the 50s, from working hours to safety. Still, people had liberties, could create friendships and gather and talk openly and free. These days the same people that you the words in the article are the ones…

As someone from a formerly communist country, it would be interesting to hear your take on the discussion up-thread that compares working in these huge monolithic megacorporations to the opaque goings-on in Eastern Bloc bureaucracies.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30928403

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#145

Post by Apocryphon »

tarsinge wrote: post #76
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…

I think there are two levels here. You answered from a financial perspective, and in that case yes they are utilizing talent effectively, in the sense the company is more profitable. But on a larger society perspective the question is still here, is society better (large topic I know) when Airbnb increase their profitability by 2%, is it the best use society can make of these engineers?

Does the profitability of the company necessarily correlate with how the talent is being used?

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#146

Post by Apocryphon »

fivea wrote: post #97
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why has the site become more annoying and less usable over time? This isn't just a personal opinion. I've heard it spontaneously from various friends and acquaintances. Granted we're mostly a similar demographic in a single market. But even so.

> Then why has the site become more annoying and less usable over time? I can't and won't speak on behalf of AirBnB, but you should keep in mind that in general: a) all software grows by accretion until a breaking point, b) paying off technical debt without solving any concrete problem or adding any tangible benefit is not considered a worthwhile investment, c) a site did not changed for the worse if the data shows i…

> c) a site did not changed for the worse if the data shows its conversion rate increased.

It's a business whose product transcends the site it's presented on, and exists in spite of the quality of its site.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#147

Post by mbrodersen »

oceanplexian wrote: post #126
spaetzleesser wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.” That is probably true. But we shouldn’t forget that these people can do these things often because they are supported by a large number of people who do the mundane tasks that need to be done.

I’m a cynic but I wish that were true. In my past experience it has usually been the opposite, the bulk of engineers are making unnecessary tools, re-inventing wheels, and designing systems that shouldn’t exist and serve as roadblocks to the minority of engineers who are miraculously getting things done in spite of all that.

You are not a cynic. What you describe is very much real. 10% of software developers do 90% of the work.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#148

Post by Vinnl »

seoaeu wrote: post #141
Vinnl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.

Yeah that's what I meant: 1% of engineers might be doing the most impactful work, but all of them have a claim to potentially being that engineer.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#149

Post by AdrianB1 »

whatshisface wrote: post #14
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…

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 departmen…

There is a lot of waste in companies and there is a lot of waste in communist regimes, but they have very different root cause. Markets cannot eliminate waste fast enough, big companies take forever to react - adjust or die - and countries similarly. Also in most cases waste is not eliminated as first measure, but start with stupid cost reduction in valuable areas, while the real waste will be the last to go. Why? Because most of that waste is on purpose for political reasons in both cases - the communist party member or the nephew of the VP that occupy positions that are not needed or they don't qualify for, that is on purpose.

Also $500k engineers should have as the only purpose in life to do engineering, working on projects that are found by management to be important, not to find themselves something to do. Most engineers are bad at business decisions and it would be a waste of time and skills for them to do it anyway. An engineer with business knowledge is no longer an engineer, is a product owner or a senior architect, etc.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#150

Post by nijave »

cactus2093 wrote: post #139
saiya-jin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 work…

This is the unintuitive thing about growth stage companies and just the scale that internet companies can achieve today. They might already have a million users who are happy with how it works and would rather that the UI didn't change. But they are on track to grow to 100 million users, and so if making things a little bit more flashy improves the new user activation rate by a small percentage for the next 99 millio…

Not only that, they don't care about user experience. Success is measured in profit, not user happiness.

Signups/purchase flows are meant to trap users and keep them from escaping--not create a smooth, easy to use experience

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