From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb • Hacker News Board

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#21

Post by mindwok » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

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…

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.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#22

Post by quanticle » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

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…

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 team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes.

If removing a blinking cursor has a 1% chance to increase the booking rate by even 0.1%, , then it's worth it for AirBNB to pay an engineer to implement the change.

[1] https://danluu.com/in-house/

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#23

Post by farseer » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:41 AM UTC

Honestly this doesn't sound too bad. You seem to have volunteered for a lot of assignments and it seems you were fairly well compensated. Once AirBnb becomes even bigger, the midnight code runs will end just like they have mostly ended in the likes of Microsoft and Google. Remember folks taking care of your mental health and avoiding burnout is your own responsibility. In this case, taking on less responsibility was an option.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#24

Post by dymk » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:42 AM UTC

milkshakes wrote: post #11

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…

> dysfunctional department that had been significantly under resourced

Was it infra?

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#25

Post by kelseyfrog » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:44 AM UTC

beckingz wrote: post #2

Corporations will never love you. No matter how much they say they do, they never will. Individuals within the company will intend to do good, but they will be required to do more than just good things. Take care of yourself.

So hard to finally accept this. I would tell myself "Maybe this company is different", "Maybe this department is different", or "Maybe my team is different." Every time it was a fantasy. Sometimes it can happen for a month or a year, but the hourglass always runs out. The belt tightens, and dollars are squeezed from somewhere. Eventually the squeeze finds you and it's time to jump ship or quickly learn how to set boundaries.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#26

Post by ceeplusplus » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:45 AM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #12

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…

I think you're referring to a B2B customer support role (e.g. a CSM), which is very different from what customer service at Airbnb is. There's no clients at Airbnb with bespoke issues. It's more like customer service at a hotel.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#27

Post by weq » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 4:52 AM UTC

mindwok wrote: post #21

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…

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 instead of just pumping and dumping.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#28

Post by langsoul-com » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 5:03 AM UTC

Never treat a company as family or believe in any of that bullshit. Businesses are a business.

At the end of the day, you have to prioritise your own well being.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#29

Post by abledon » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 5:06 AM UTC

> As burnt out as I was, I worked even more, clinging to this promise of acceptance, hoping that I could somehow work myself into being enough.

The perfect worker for them oh god lol.

The term "airfam" is such a weird thing, people saying 'Thanks fam!" these days... I am not your family, I will not lend you 20,000$ if you in a rough spot, I will not take care of your kids if you die. Maybe I just take the word 'family' too literally hah, maybe a bad habit from expecting variable names to do what they are called

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#30

Post by square_usual » Wed, Apr 06, 2022, 5:09 AM UTC

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…

You shouldn't be downvoted for this - you're not entirely wrong. In my workplace, this kind of "bps gaming" has been a real thing the leadership has has had to take a stance on and fix with better processes and tech to measure cumulative impact.

On your second point, though, if all you focus on is building new features, you are losing out on tons of unrealised gains you could've had by making an old feature work better. At the scale a bigco works in, small percentages add up to quite a bit.