From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
news.techworkerscoalition.org
From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
1–10 of 153 posts
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#2Corporations 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.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#3Am 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 awesome don’t get me wrong), surely at some point you begin to wonder if we are utilising this talent effectively.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#4Corporations 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.
It took me too long to realize this. Actually managers will respect you for having this attitude. There's a certain liberation in accepting it
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#5It is sad to see that folks put a company and its equity-holders first, before attending to their own lives outside of work. They put off their personal relationships and personal care activities (such as exercise, getting outside, various healthy activities away from a computer), and instead put that time into going above and beyond a 40 hour work week... and yet are barely (if at all) recognized for their efforts.
I am so glad to see people speak out about their experience, especially at companies which claim to uphold a certain set of values. Such as Amazon or Airbnb.
I recall at Twilio, I was emailed by an HR person ... from the email account of a Director of Engineering. An HR person impersonated a Director of Engineering in order to recruit and have a better chance of getting the attention of software engineers, to attempt to persuade those engineers to join their team.
Yet, one of Twilio's principles is/was "Transparency". Yet, there they were-- their HR people engaging in practices which are deceptive.
We must hold companies to their supposed principles, and to a reasonable expectation of professional ethics in general. \
Bravo, I say, to the author of this article.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#6Corporations 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.
It took me too long to realize this. Actually managers will respect you for having this attitude. There's a certain liberation in accepting it
Freelancer, Contractor, Permie, Consultancy? More the same than different.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#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 income ex. IPO costs and a $21M loss on the financially engineered/hacked "adjusted EBITDA". An unprofitable company is not in a position to be keeping jobs for the sake of it.
> These material conditions bled into work-life - while some of us took Ubers to work and shopped at Barney’s, others maxed out credit cards or could only afford to live in the East Bay
Oh no, customer support can only afford to live in the East Bay. This person needs to get a grip. A customer service agent is not making 200k+ in any world. That is a recipe for running a failed business. You know what does let people live where they want? Building more housing.
> a clearer non-product career ladder
There is no "ladder" to being a customer service agent. Experience doesn't scale your value to the company, so there's no reason for there to be a ladder. And with the advent of gig platforms there's no reason for there to be a manager either. Saying that customer service agents need a career ladder shows how delusional this person is with respect to running a business.
This person needs to realize that life is about working for yourself, never for the "Airfam". Loyalty means nothing. If they're burned out (it sounds like they are) then they can leave with their multi-million dollar stock options 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". Corporate won't care they left and they shouldn't feel bad about it either. Sometimes some people just aren't cut out to keep going hard day in and day out for 5+ years. And that's okay, because if you worked at Airbnb then you can easily get a cushy job somewhere else.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#8Am 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 features here and there to close that one whale of a client. Expanding into corporate accounts. Improving performance by 5% to take a big chunk out of the tens of millions of dollars infrastructure bill.
From a 10,000 foot view looking at the product, it always looks like it's 90% done in the first couple of years and then things just coast along lazily. But from a profit point of view, that last 10% can generate hugely outsized returns. It's the power of exponential growth, all those extra late nights and tiny improvements that move the needle just a little bit all compound over time.
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#9> 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…
Burnout is a pretty serious thing that can last for years, a lot of time getting a new job while burnt out is an absolute nightmare. People with money are aloud to have grievances and opinions
Re: From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb
#10“The CEO cried on a broadcast that we needed to say goodbye to some of our Airfam and called on us to support each other through this difficult time. “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers played at the end of the broadcast.”
Wow, incredible, and insulting.
I can't imagine getting played out by Bill Withers.