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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

#71

Post by habosa »

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…

I do think it would be healthy for more companies / teams to ask: how would we run this if we could never hire another engineer? Or even what if we had to slowly shrink our engineering team?

I don't think engineers at AirBnb are overpaid or wasting their time but I do think most engineering leadership doesn't understand the idea of _true_ reliability where a service can run itself for long stretches of time.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#72

Post by paganel »

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…

> Airfam or company family.

Regarding that, there was an excellent business editorial in a recent Economist issue that wrote on that exact topic: "Company or cult?" [1]

[1] https://archive.ph/Uk9zC

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#73

Post by sshine »

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…

Working at a startup now, it seems exactly like the thing I'd want to fix in the wee hours, because it doesn't seem important enough to put ahead of all other mission-critical tasks, yet when your brain goes into low-power mode, the healthy thing would be to step back and assess your work-life balance, and the ambitious thing is to fix another thing that requires less mental effort.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#74

Post by thundergolfer »

quanticle wrote: post #22
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…

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.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#75

Post by watwut »

sshine wrote: post #73
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…

Working at a startup now, it seems exactly like the thing I'd want to fix in the wee hours, because it doesn't seem important enough to put ahead of all other mission-critical tasks, yet when your brain goes into low-power mode, the healthy thing would be to step back and assess your work-life balance, and the ambitious thing is to fix another thing that requires less mental effort.

I am 100% convinced that this does not just kills work life balance, but is also utterly ineffective.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#76

Post by tarsinge »

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…

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?

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#77

Post by AdrianB1 »

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.

I found the opposite to be true: the key individuals within the company are the ones who break it, not the faceless corporation. In all cases where I found bad environments it was created and exacerbated by middle management taking directions from clueless higher management and implementing in the most distructive interpretations. It is generally accepted that the number 1 reason for people leaving companies to be the direct manager, but the environment in an entire department or area is a bit above, in the middle management (strict definition of mm is debatable, the idea remains).

In my job I deal a lot with low and middle management in lots of companies. Unfortunately I did not find any exception to the general observation that today's low and middle management is a bunch of incompetent impostors with their career as the only concern, occupation and reason in life. That includes technology companies that I cannot name, but known by various acronyms. And I am saying this as a lower level manager myself.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#79

Post by tonyedgecombe »

habosa wrote: post #71
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…

I do think it would be healthy for more companies / teams to ask: how would we run this if we could never hire another engineer? Or even what if we had to slowly shrink our engineering team? I don't think engineers at AirBnb are overpaid or wasting their time but I do think most engineering leadership doesn't understand the idea of _true_ reliability where a service can run itself for long stretches of time.

I don't think we will see that until we have a serious downturn. There just don't seem to be any competitive pressures that would do it.

Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb

#80

Post by fivea »

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…

> 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, (...)

You're grossly misrepresenting the problems being faced and what forces engineers to work into the wee hours of the morning.

Just because stuff seems done to you or you notice no change, that does not mean nothing is being worked on.

Let's take basic A/B testing. To you, it's a blinking cursor. For the company, it's a bunch of business metrics being reported from N different components feeding into a data lake, with different versions of the same feature being deployed simultaneously to specific subsets of all customers based on their profile. But the cursor blinks differently depending on the market, and needs to comply with accessibility guidelines, on all X supported browsers regardless of their quirks. Some markets might not even have a cursor at all. Perhaps your cursor is only expected to show in a specific geographical location.

But you see a blinking cursor, and as you are oblivious to everything then you think it's just a tag somewhere. To you that's just a line of HTML, right? How hard could that be?

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