AirBnB’s mission isn’t “create a world where anyone can belong anywhere” it’s “get people to pay money to stay in each other’s properties”. Perhaps there would be slightly less misalignment of expectations and values if we were a bit more honest with ourselves?
From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
81–90 of 153 posts
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#82Earlier 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.
> 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.
The keyword "impactful engineering" needs some clarification though.
It does not mean there's a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.
A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company's flagship product. That's impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of "impactful".
I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, "this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews".
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#83Great expression of the dark, hollow corporate experience disguised as a fulfilling, productive career. It saddens me that the author (and many others) drink the corporate kool-aid to the point of considering self-harm. I learned a similar lesson early in my career: noone can single-handedly satiate the enormous appetite of a large corporate enterprise. It will literally consume you alive.
Perhaps, the contractors had a better gig? At least they might have felt less pressure to please the corporate ethos, and they were hopefully paid hourly overtime during the silly death marches.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#84Am 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’m skeptical this will lead to more savings over time. I’ve been pretty much living in Airbnbs for almost three years, and the site becomes slightly more annoying over time.
Leaving a review has become a huge bloated mess. The sight is slow as heck. And driving prices up just makes me more likely to look at alternatives. It’s still good, but it feels increasingly less fast and cheap.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#85Am 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…
Imagining boatloads of complexity involved with the blinking cursors according to markets, profiles and geographic locations and whatever else really doesn't make it sound any better at all.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#86Am 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…
> 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 venture capital) that are betting on huge profits in the future.
In reality, these engineers are being paid due to labor market forces and extremely focused recruiting policies (eg only hiring those with degrees from top engineering schools or poaching workers from other companies that have similar policies).
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#87I 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?
My guess would be something related to financial / accounting / reporting, if it was a critical blocker for IPO.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#88Earlier 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…
The one guy's thesis that we're wasting effort is probably correct, given the valuation is due to low interest rates. What's the Keynes quote about paying people to dig holes?
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#89I 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…
> 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. How are other careers relevant? You take the best offer you can get in the (SWE) market, and if avoiding burnout is a choice criterion for you, you avoid the corresponding companies. Many of them are willing to pay the same compensation or more w…
>benefit of a free market
The US is mixed, and frankly leaning heavily to command-by-committee, same thing that caused the commies to fail. Our committee is the FOMC. Low rates increase valuations on anyone who promises 'the future'. High tech salaries are almost certainly a distortion of their meaningful value.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#90Am 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…
Honestly I find the Spanish stance on this to be extremely refreshing and the only scaleable one:
- 'Good' is good enough, no need for perfect
- Doing it tomorrow is just as good as today
If you think about it, both are true. If you don't think these are true, you are far too caught up in a hamsterwheel to notice.