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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

#41

Post by MarkSweep »

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…

One way to measure whether a team’s cumulative effect is positive is to have a long term holdout of users who never see their experiments. You can check for a statically significant difference between this holdout group and the group of users who see the features the team shipped.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#42

Post by vkou »

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…

The problem is not 'bottom line' versus 'family', the problem is when the company is bullshitting you. When it expects you to treat them like 'family', but treat you as 'bottom line'.

If Netflix wants to fire half their engineering team every year, that's fine, as long as everyone walks into the arrangement with the mindset of a contractor, or a mercenary who's only there for the paycheque.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#43

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

greatpostman wrote: post #19
Aperocky wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did you ever test doing nothing? I assume it's been studied, but I can imagine ways for 10% to actually be noise or seasonal/weekly/whatever variations.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#44

Post by kqr »

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…

That said, whose life is really improved by those outsized returns from the last few percent?

Sure, the major shareholders might see their wealth increase noticeably, but anyone else (even small shareholders through option programmes) will generally not see a big effect.

Now, is that additional shareholder wealth really worth the years of engineer effort going into that?

Don't get me wrong: airbnb is an amazing service that has improved the lives of myself and other regular people.

I'm just arguing that maybe most of the benefit from society happened within the first couple of years plus maintenance and critical innovation as needed, and the rest is suboptimising for the benefit of the few.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#45

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

Bay Area living costs ain’t cheap.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#46

Post by mypalmike »

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…

This is a great explanation and reflects my experience working at this kind of large, one product tech company. It's all about searching for growth of all kinds and cutting costs.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#47

Post by Apocryphon »

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…

> and free up a job for the rest of us who would gladly get paid half a million dollars a year to complain about "inequities"

Okay, but only if you promise to write a similar essay after you yourself are burned out by the company, for the edification of the public.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#48

Post by 121789 »

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 too low in the US to overwork as a SWE. If you doubled that number I think you would be closer

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#49

Post by refurb »

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.

Hard lesson to learn, but very true.

I had great managers who, if up to them entirely, would have my interests at heart (as demonstrated by decisions fully under their control), but hey, they don't call the shots in the end.

You're a cog in a machine and you may be the golden child while they need you, but once they don't, you're out. And all the talk of "family" is just that, talk. It's why the fake "we care" stuff gets under my skin - it's a lie - they care about "you" in the theoretical employee sense, but they don't care about you as an individual. Individual relationships do matter, but "the corp" in the end is an emotionless machine.

And it doesn't matter whether you're a desk analyst or a CEO, I've seen both go from "calling the shots" to "not aligned to where the company wants to do" really damn quick.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#50

Post by LilBytes »

dymk wrote: post #24
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?

It nearly always is.
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