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 awesome don’t get me wrong), surely at some point you begin to wonder if we are utilising this talent effectively.
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.
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.
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.
“most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.”
That is probably true. But we shouldn’t forget that these people can do these things often because they are supported by a large number of people who do the mundane tasks that need to be done.
I’m a cynic but I wish that were true. In my past experience it has usually been the opposite, the bulk of engineers are making unnecessary tools, re-inventing wheels, and designing systems that shouldn’t exist and serve as roadblocks to the minority of engineers who are miraculously getting things done in spite of all that.
The biggest cost of bloat comes from people being nice, it is emotionally hard to replace/rewrite code when the author is still there and not disliked by the team. Basically it sucks to make people redundant, so we try not to, and that makes it look like people aren't redundant even when they are.
For example, lets say you give a project to a competent engineer, he writes a clean and maintainable solution quickly alone. But if you schedule it to him together with another engineer of similar status but much less competent, then the other engineer will take a part of the project and basically block it since the competent engineer is unlikely to to take that fight, and instead just lets the project stall.
You don't get promoted for pointing out incompetence, there is a reason managers hires consultants to do that for them. This made me wonder, are there software consultants who act like management consultants and mostly go in and fire a lot of people? I don't think management consultants would do a good job of firing the right software people, they would need to be engineers.
Yes, but it’s done on a project basis. Kill the project, move the good people to a new project, release the others. Later, resume/restart the project.
It’s really hard to be surgical about this because who wants to be the good engineer that has to pick up the barely functioning pieces of code left behind. Who wants to reward a solid engineer with a big refactor job on an already late/failing project? The optics aren’t great. I’m not saying it never works, but as a general rule, deferring the project is often a better option.
> 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".
The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.
A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.
(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)
I disagree for the following reason: without the proof of concept, the change in production would probably never come about. You can't really separate the impact of the proof of concept from that of the production change because they don't exist independently.
That seems consistent. If there's a 1% chance of a meaningful improvement, and 99 out of 100 changes do not meaningfully improve things, than the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be.
Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?
Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?
(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)
I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).
And on the other side of that coin, if one were to espouse the same opinion in the context of anything even tangentially safety related and the average HNer's head would explode and they would rage click the wrongthink button.
It's all a numbers game. The median member of your kernel team, the median fire extinguisher, the median link to a sales web page, the median joist in a floor, all will do nothing of note. But if you distribute the resources properly they will hopefully be where they are needed to generate a positive ROI that pays for the overall system. If you zoom in too much or too little it all looks silly.
You need a bench. Some of the brilliant folks who are great at pushing through problems are awful and maintenance and sustainment. I worked for a bit in a SWAT engineering team tasked with addressing crisis problems or emergency response. If you don’t have people you’re developing on the bench, you won’t be able to respond to those types of things and will get bogged down with tech debt.
I was a faux “10x” person because I had license to break the rules to get shit done - because the value of what we were doing was higher than the cost of cleaning up the mess. (Not because of any brilliance on my or the teams part) We did two years worth of work in a month, but it’s still being refactored 3 years later.
What extra steps? It's literally a Pareto-type rule. He's also probably right, but not because only a small fraction of a company's engineers are any good. It's more that a lot of engineering work is done for reasons that are more speculative than people realize.
> 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 business models. Shifting a box here and there, enlarging an icon just creates a generation of glorified engineers and PMs who are placing their attention entirely on the wrong thing. Yet the success reporting often rewards this behavior and eventually drown the business in fruitless 'noise' endeavors that favors short term gains over actual innovation.
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.
So a single data point? I didn't see it claimed that there is not a single small thing that can have a big effect. It's about large numbers. I think individual examples obfuscate more than they help us understand, when it is given in lieu of wider view instead of just as a support for one.
In this context, I would also like to see considerations of a larger picture. Sure, it helps any single company make more money. What about beyond that? Because money is a proximate goal, even if it's the ultimate one for a business, from a human society point of view that introduced this tool for a specific reason and not for its own sake.
For example, what does it mean to have some ultra-optimized large companies dominating their space? Would society really lose something without some micro-optimizations, even if they raise profit? The people who end up not making a purchase on a website because they are not as much caught in the optimized patterns, is it actually bad for them, or maybe they are actually better off and the optimizations tricked them into making an actually unfavorable (even if slightly) purchase? I think there is more to consider than just the view from the respective company or even the department. Are the means used to win actually good from a wider point of view that is not centered on that winner alone?
If someone does not make a purchase because something is slightly off, are they actually worse off, neutral or better in the end? It can't have been all that important to them to make that transaction, no?
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.
> The only fundamental way for a business to make more money is to invent actual, new feature and business models.
I’m not sure this is fair for services like Airbnb where what they sell is conveniences.
Their entire product existed before Airbnb. It even existed before the internet. What Airbnb did so successful was that they branded themselves with a good product that disrupted the market by being easier to use.
The thing about disrupting markets by selling easy of use, is that your competition is already well versed in the market you disrupted. Some of them may do the dinosaur but others will take your ideas and try to make them better. If you don’t continuously improve the ease or use of your product, then people are going to download eurobooking or whatever other options there are now instead.
You know this, because you’ve likely done it yourself a million times with various applications that do the same thing, but some find a way to be easier to use.
Obviously these companies are going to want to find (or invent) new products to get included. But that is typically more of a non-software quest that eventually leads to some of the engineers being tasked with building what the marketing/sales/business process people find.
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.
> Any number of small UI features can claim a small increase that are often just noise and curated data
The answer to this is better measurement and statistical analysis, not abandoning the effort entirely. It does take more than "haha, trend line go up" to prove a change had a positive impact, but it can be done.
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.
You raise a point companies should take seriously (making sure the improvements are substantial) and are wrong that the only way is new features.
From a company’s perspective, the PMs and devs good at optimizing existing features already exist. Why not hire them to work alongside and behind the devs and PMs good at developing new capabilities?
> 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).
it all looks nice and rosy and everybody patting their back about how impactful they are when scales come into play... and then you as a user are just wtf-ing given app because UI has been overhauled yet again, things that worked before are nowhere to be found, there is basically no migration guide.
The simple truth that most software engineers don't want to hear is - people are quite conservative in this. If it works once, most folks would be extremely happy to keep using it for next 20 years in exactly same way, as it is. Bug-less has higher priority than shiny (which is highly subjective) and constantly changing.
This is the unintuitive thing about growth stage companies and just the scale that internet companies can achieve today. They might already have a million users who are happy with how it works and would rather that the UI didn't change. But they are on track to grow to 100 million users, and so if making things a little bit more flashy improves the new user activation rate by a small percentage for the next 99 million users, that can dwarf the preferences of the existing users. Especially if the existing users grumble for a few days but then mostly continue using the product.
I believe most users see a tech product as a tool, "The thing that gets you to the thing". Whereas a majority in tech view those tools more as experiences. An experience puts more focus on the process itself, at the expense of the end result.
Unfortunately this tech oligopoly landscape doesn't leave users many ways to express this preference, but I often wonder if the culture will change at some point in the future as the industry matures.
An aging western population might have an influence here as well, in the long term. Older folks have less tolerance for having to relearn how to do the same thing they already knew how to do for the umpteenth time.
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?
In a big company belief that something is worthwhile is better than actual value because market forces, that care about actual value, cannot act on each sub-project out of thousands of projects in the same company independently; but managers, which by definition can only care about their beliefs (idealism rears its ugly head again) do very much act on teams independently. The engineering department will pay $500k+ to engineers who exist only to pervert insufficiently representative metrics just as readily as the market would stop that from happening if they weren't hiding in an autocratic structure hundreds of times larger than the limits of their own abilities to be wasteful.
Indeed, there is no reason to think that the market has a greater ability to eliminate waste within a company worth $100B than it has within a communist country (which exists as an entity in international markets) worth the same.
There is a lot of waste in companies and there is a lot of waste in communist regimes, but they have very different root cause. Markets cannot eliminate waste fast enough, big companies take forever to react - adjust or die - and countries similarly. Also in most cases waste is not eliminated as first measure, but start with stupid cost reduction in valuable areas, while the real waste will be the last to go. Why? Because most of that waste is on purpose for political reasons in both cases - the communist party member or the nephew of the VP that occupy positions that are not needed or they don't qualify for, that is on purpose.
Also $500k engineers should have as the only purpose in life to do engineering, working on projects that are found by management to be important, not to find themselves something to do. Most engineers are bad at business decisions and it would be a waste of time and skills for them to do it anyway. An engineer with business knowledge is no longer an engineer, is a product owner or a senior architect, etc.
https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ is a good take on this - the central example is for search, but it applies to many more products, as cactus2093's comment (and the article) both point out. (and for what it's worth, I've observed this personally too)
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?
The idea that these little experiment wins bring user satisfaction and/or revenue increase is a pure assumption.
Employees get so aligned with these experiment systems that obvious faults in statistical approaches go unnoticed. At the end of the day it becomes just a way to put something on your promotion case.
In most cases, core product stays the same over the years without significant innovation.
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.
Cancer research is hard work where smart people burn themselves out to fight for scraps. Optimizing metrics for bigtech at least easily pays for retirement. I don't know, maybe it's dumb to choose to optimize ads and get paid 500k and still be able to act like the company owes you. The alternative is to save lives, and in return live a life where you constantly have to beg for the next grant, and the people you save are only grateful to the MDs, say PhDs aren't real doctors, and vote for people who either want to cut science budgets or remove meritocracy to destroy your career.
Before you complain how people waste their talent, maybe ask yourself what you did to help them. Or broadly how to truly make society reward people who do God's work. Society cares about getting likes, don't want to pay even a little for quality work, so smart people give them a platform to earn likes and show them ads. Everyone is complicit, the worst among them put all blame on "smart people".
well most of us even the ones that get through the merit filters to work at "tech" companies are not that smart. it will take some kind of breakthrough in human cognition to make an impact on the emergent economies that result from our current neural hard-wiring.
right now these fake tech companies are literally the best we can do to keep everything moving forward on an economic basis.
Just as we tricked each other into bidding up crypto tokens, we could self-hypnotize to bid up biotech patents or something similar, but we have not yet decided to do that.
You would also see such 1% or 2% significant improvement in the AdTech being quite crucial. I worked at a local AdTech company where we were able to see real money coming in, not just metrics like CTR etc increasing.
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.
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.
>Now, is that additional shareholder wealth really worth the years of engineer effort going into that?
Where the engineers are partially compensated in stock, RSUs or options? Absolutely. Its not like they're focusing on optimisations at the expenses of other, more dramatic changes.
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.
I get a eyelid twitch from that type of engineering. Open source teaches us one thing above all - adapt yourself a little and you gain a lot. Only develop an app to fit the specs, and the users will do the rest. It should be fine to be a little tough around the edges - consumers ought to grow slightly thicker skin.
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.
As systems grow, it becomes exponentially harder to do anything. What to you may sound extremely simple and easy on a small SaaS app, at Airbnb scale (after several years of development) it really requires several highly talented engineers to deliver without blowing everything up.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.
However, just because you're oblivious or unfamiliar to these requirements, they don't mean they aren't requirements.
Think about it for a second. If it's necessary to target a service to specific geographical markets to comply with legal and/or business requirents, and given it's considerably more profitable to target a shop to a customer based on their personal interests, why would you ignore that and naively presume that the hypothetical "blinking cursor" is straight-forward to implement? And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.
There is a widespread problem in software development which is this this tendency to be very opinionated over all problems in spite of being totally ignorant and oblivious to the underlying problem domain. Everyone is an idiot except themselves, who always hold the answer in spite of not even knowingwhat the problem is, let alone understanding it.
>These basic everyday requirements are oblivious to those who have zero first-hand contact or experience with professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements.
Could you paint me a realistic scenario for such multifaceted complexity revolving around this blinking cursor in a particular field?
I can see how this might depend on a language/writing system but kind of get lost beyond that.
I do have experience with such "professional user-facing problems imposed by business requirements" btw but they tend to be more related to desktop and factory software each used by hundreds which is probably a few zeroes less than what we're talking about here.
>And I'm not even touching hard technical probs which most developers aren't experienced or competent in, such as security and reliability.
I know more than most that software can behave in weird ways but don't you think if there's a reasonable worry that altering this blinking cursor affects security that something is off?
If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial, because most of the process should be automated. Even in multiple territories and/or different user demos.
Unless you're reinventing the wheel for each modification.
> If you have the infrastructure to manage multiple versions and collect and analyse related information, adding/removing a blinking cursor or any other UI change and analysing the results should be trivial (...)
What leads you to believe in that? I mean, you have zero insight or understanding how things work or were designed. You have zero idea of where that blinking cursor comes from, let alone who owns that particular bit of code.
Let's think things through for a moment. Let's imagine you're talking about a blinking cursor in a random page from Google or Amazon. These are organizations where you have teams owning small widgets that show off only in specific pages, and that the page that you see in your browser come from a lengthy page engine pipeline that has all sorts of tests and failsafes, not to mention regional and localized deployments managed by whatever deployment policy.
This doesn't even take into account the whole workflow from product managers, who often demand data on the impact of touching a button.
You don't just edit a HTML file and hit save, don't you?
It wasn't my intention to dismiss the engineering challenges, I'm aware of how difficult something like this can be at a scale like Airbnb. I was more venting about the fact that all the engineering effort is directed at such a seemingly minor thing to begin with.
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.
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.
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. The "we are a family" mantra would be fine if it was coupled with a healthy separation of work and life; with the biggest indicator being that healthy working hours (around regular 8 to 9 work hours only) is maintained.
In contrast, something like Netflix culture which is "we are a team and not a family" seems like to be more of a healthier alternative. On a last point, the "we are a family" (i.e. we care about our employees as persons instead of just means or cogs) mantra is fine but it usually turns into "we are a toxic family" (i.e. give your all to the company) instead of it being a "we are a healthy family" (i.e. our company values each employee).
One simple protip for the newly starters : don’t believe the hype. Don’t EVER buy into overwork “to take one for the team”. A small crunch at the end of a deadline : fine. A perpetual overwork culture is not something a family would do to you.
Also look at what a company does instead of what it says.
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 what rhetoric the company uses.
> Netflix emphasizes "team" over "family" to explicitly promote an environment where getting fired is easy. Is that really a better alternative?
Considering the same labour laws apply to Airbnb and Netflix, yes it's a far more honest approach. Not admirable, not right or fair, but a lot less manipulative.
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.
In my ideal world, firing employees would be easy, common, and not catastrophic for the employee. Of course, this requires a strong social safety net to make sure people can go a few months between jobs without losing their home, healthcare, etc.
Netflix pays well, has a generous severance package, and is honest about its culture. I think there is nothing wrong with them making it easy to fire.
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.
Much like romantic relationships, professional relationships are a learning experience and every new one, you'll hopefully learn to value yourself more, and approach the relationship with your employer more pragmatically. Unlike romantic relationships, at the end of the day you'll probably realize a professional relationship is almost strictly transactional.
I guess a lot of people in tech have gone through the experience of getting a job straight out of college, working yourself to death trying to prove something (whether that's to yourself or your employer) and getting burnt out to some degree, or not seeing any dividends for it. These companies do a very good job at blurring the lines between expectations and what's realistic through the "perks" of the job and whatever flavor of culture reigns.
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.
Took me ages to found a diamond amongst the coal. This boss payed himself after everyone else was paid. A boss who is perfect with planning. Great projects.
It’s a masterclass in running and leading a company.
For all other companies always reciprocate their loyalty. If there is none from their side, don’t invest in the company.
When you are just starting out fresh from study you still believe in the “we can do this team if only we work a bit harder.” , but that’s usually a myth.
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.
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.
Ultimately employees want to be seduced, they want to believe they are doing more than helping a company's owners' capital accrue + gain value in how it's implemented. They don't want to just punch the clock, they want to be part of a larger mission (and get rich doing it). A lot of this is because the traditional ways people have found value in their time on earth: religion, family, and friends are disappearing and being replaced with careerism.
This guy's story is not a rare one, and it points to a larger spiritual crisis in modern life I think.
"God is Dead" wasn't an aspirational statement by Nietzsche, it was an observational one. Jung further called the move on to "spirituality" in light of the "death" of god as people move on to politics or new age religions to find meaning. This is natural evolution of that.
> 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
I don't think you're taking it too literally, you're absolutely right. Always keep your professional boundaries and recognize the transaction of money-for-time for what it is: a transaction.
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 compare myself with doctors residency, accountants, or labor jobs, who would do a lot more work for a lot less. Tech pay, benefit, and work/life balance are outrageously good in my opinion.
- I have worked at AirBnB, Stripe, and Robinhood. And between the 3, AirBnB actually has the chillest work culture. It's known to be "too much democratic debate vs work output". But your experience may be different.
- Most importantly: Just as much as you can quit the company whenever you like, companies can also lay you off whenever they want. My main takeaway is to take care of yourself. Don't buy into Airfam or company family. You do what's right for you and company does what's right for them. (I can't comment on the specifics if Airbnb layoff was the right business move).
> 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 with a reasonable work-life balance, especially once they realize that they also benefit from it one way or another.
One benefit of a free market is to help optimize resource allocations, and telling yourself "it could be worse" rather than asking "could it be better?" is counterproductive.
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.
For me, it is less about the money and more about sort of an implied contract that exists at some companies and less so at others. That is, I'm willing to work extra hours to finish something or deal with a production emergency, with the understanding that:
- I get flexibility at other times to make up for it.
- It isn't super frequent or for very long.
- It is for a good reason.
I don't think even 300k or 400k (or whatever the going rate is for 20 YoE) would be enough for me to deal with regular death marches to help someone meet their OKRs for that quarter. I've happily worked until 3 AM a bunch of nights in a row on something that was important, but I've also busted my ass for things that could have been delivered later or not at all and it wouldn't have really mattered, and those ones are a real punch in the gut.
That's a lot of money ($200k) for anyone to expect to have a comfortable work/life balance.
This isn't true at all. In my last job (not tech) a "brutal" week might be 50 hrs and people were making double that, albeit in more senior roles (10+ years of experience).
200k is really not a lot of money. Nearly half if it taxed and when you factor things like housing costs and living expenses, it's not that much..
Engineers need to stop short selling themselves, you never see Lawyers going around and saying "they are making too much money".. My friend is an attorney and he charges 1,000$ just to write a single letter.
SWE is a high paying profession and rightly so because companies get to make millions off our backs.
You can't buy a home near work on $200k and send your kids to good schools in many places. Plenty of people make more than $200k and don't break their backs doing it, either.
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.
It seems like this is a large part of the issue. He mentioned a few times he was promoted and well compensated. In order to get promoted you have to "exceed" expectations for your current level, which by definition means he went above and beyond what would have been normally been expected of him. Looking at his LinkedIn he got promoted from Mid level to Senior, to Staff engineer. Very few people at big tech companies achieve Staff engineer level.
His LinkedIn also says he joined Airbnb in 2016 which means his stock is worth multiple millions since IPO.
No, that's not fair or reasonable. A decent (I mean that in both the moral and competence senses) manager understands that it's part of their job to protect naive and emotionally vulnerable junior employees from exploiting themselves
Yeah I had the impression the guy has underlying issues regardless of Airbnb, and I've met many who put themselves on a pedestal thinking that others will worship them because they can work until 9 pm and then complaining that they're tired.. the world is such a weird place
Great 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.
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?
"the founders announced that they had no choice but to lay off all 500ish contractors and around 1,900 employees. 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"
“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.
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 were “lucky” because we owned a business critical, measurable outcome.
When I started, I didn’t even have a manager for a few months. I actually burned out within my first 3 months there, and my Director personally helped me navigate the leave process —- I wound up taking a 3 month fully paid leave (they topped the difference between what the STD insurance they provided me paid and my full salary). When I returned I had a great manager!
I worked with a lot of contractors too, but my department converted well over half of the ones I worked with, and eventually the others churned out until they hired people full time. Mostly we started with contractors because it was easier to hire them but very difficult to get headcount (we sure did try).
Anyway it was a pretty wild ride but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Things were definitely uneven though. One thing that really made me sad was when they replaced the food team who we all loved with contractors (who we also all loved). After I left they really screwed over the Portland office too. But it wasn’t all bad and I cherish the friends I made there.
Just reading the title hits me as I never thought I'd get to a place where I wouldnt like where I work. It's been four years (longest IT job I've held in ten year career) but suddenly starting in 2022 I havent been paid by the same date I've always been and when asked the owner he said thats just how it is for contractors. Yet it's never been like that and I even noted to him paying me a week or two later then all other times/years causes stress I definitely don't need. He didnt seem to care cause I was paid even later in March and then i was offered a raise in Feb. which was to start March 1st per our conversation over Slack. In the beginning of this month (April) he said "oh sorry your raise is not effective to April 1st, I'm sorry." That was my first raise in four years as for me i'm not driven by money (he offered me a raise in 2020 I said that's ok im just happy to return/be brought back after 6 months away) rather a show of respect and that I am a value to you/your company. His actions to me say he does not value my contribution/work, so...
It is sometimes just too hard to wrap your head around this.
How what is basically a website requires such a workforce?
I get that it is much more than a website, there are various aspects of platform and etc. I understand that my comment might seem off. However 7000 is really a lot people.
"I could have left Airbnb before things got so bad. But despite all that I observed and experienced, I truly loved my job."
If I love a job, I hesitate to quit just because some of the management is terrible. As a point of reference, many people on Hacker News have read my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps":
If you go read the reviews on that book, one of the most common sentiments is "Lawrence should have left that job much earlier than he did." And yet, I really loved the work and I had a lot of fun, in many ways. Maybe I didn't emphasize how much fun we had along the way, but I think, getting to work on great tech while being well paid is a relatively rare gift to an engineer, so I don't think many of us really want to walk away from a job too soon. I do understand why an engineer might stick with a place like AirBnB, even if the burden is heavy.
I read these kind of blog posts, but honestly, it’s hard to have too much sympathy. This guy presumably earned millions out of working at AirBnB, is staggeringly rich compared to most people, and he could have left at any time for another job.
> 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.
> 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 chain the more time you save. There's a tonne of value in experience in that role.
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.
One of the programs they used to have for new employees was a voluntary CX shadowing rotation. I met some great friends doing these! Some grew to be support leaders as these roles were scaled globally through partners. Most did not. Many of them eventually gave up on customer support but were able to navigate to other parts of the business like business travel or experiences or research.
One of my friends was on the food team. She was an amazing musician and won our talent show. She wound up transitioning to work on music partnerships until the pandemic hit.
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
>Starting looking for a job doing manual labour. Working with a computer no longer an option.
Can relate, but the career advancement prospects in software-unrelated fields are seemingly non-existent and employers are increasingly exploitative (e.g. CP Rail). Seems you have to start your own company to get anywhere or you're just spinning your wheels for the rest of your working life.
I practically agree with you while ideally not, everything you say is true, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't aim to change it in order to make people not longer a commodity where the value they add to a company is based on the amount of work they do, and not by how many people they can be replaced with, people need to be able to live a life of dignity while working, and work shouldn't be elitist like in modern society while there are individuals that work their ass off for a company but since their job is not cool enough they can't afford to live, we need work that works for people, not shareholders
> There is no "ladder" to being a customer service agent. Experience doesn't scale your value to the company.
Yeah, this is wrong. I have a good friend who developed his understanding of the customer in that role, and leveraged it to become, gradually, a director. He was good, and he was recognized, and he was promoted.
It 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. \
Everything is political activism, by that metric. Inviting tech workers to openly talk about their experiences and your warning tech workers not to openly talk about their experiences are both political positions. Congrats on not backing the workers, I guess?
I'm sorry you had a bad experience in your country, "people writing about burnout leads to Gulags" isn't the lesson we should learn from it.
TWC is literally what it says on a thin: all workers, no backers, just being honest about our experiences.
You can call us entitled, but insofar as we're propagandists, each individual is only pushing our own personal "narrative."
"Building power" is _definitely_ political activism but, again, the way we build power is, primarily, by exposing ourselves to eachother's personal experiences in the tech industry. That knowledge is power.
Think of it as a qualitative extension of passing around the salary spreadsheet. Sometimes, we formalize the exchanges through a speed-dating-like "worker's inquiry" where techies pair off and ask eachother basic questions like:
1. How is our work evaluated?
2. How are decisions made in our workplaces?
3. How do our respective bosses motivate us?
4. How does our work fit into the larger economic picture?
5. How is conflict handled at our workplaces?
These answers aren't collected, except when they're published in articles like this. It's just... good to know what's going on with eachother.
In previous generations, we'd have eachother over for dinner, for poker night, or whatever. We'd join bowling leagues, or the Sierra Club, and people working in the same industry would likely be living in the same towns, and joining the same bowling leagues. These formal, albeit recreational institutions offered workers the opportunity to casually learn about one-another's working and living conditions.
Those activities have largely evaporated since the 1950s (in America, at least), atomizing our society, and making us all supremely ignorant of one another (outside the carefully curated social media profiles, and the highly dramatized "reality TV".)
I don't really know why a literate person would object to casual, even semi-formal discussion of working conditions. (Of course the TWC self-selects people who are dissatisfied with our conditions, but it's a common truism that work sucks, no.)
Discussions about working conditions are welcome. Make it a cover for something else is not.
It would be nice to talk to the generations you mentioned. Not sure you did, but I did a lot. Workplace was a lot worse in the 50s, from working hours to safety. Still, people had liberties, could create friendships and gather and talk openly and free. These days the same people that you the words in the article are the ones killing free speech, forcing agendas and politics in people's lives, atomizing the society and creating friction between races, sexes, classes and everything. With one hand they complain, with the other they cause the situation: there is no honesty there.
As someone from a formerly communist country, it would be interesting to hear your take on the discussion up-thread that compares working in these huge monolithic megacorporations to the opaque goings-on in Eastern Bloc bureaucracies.
What are you accusing me of? I am literally just a technology professional who likes to compare notes about important aspects of my career with other professionals. It's not a cover for anything else. I am just one individual trying to stay informed and so are the people I have met through these channels. I can't imagine for what "something else" an autobiographical blog post might cover.
>It would be nice to talk to the generations you mentioned. Not sure you did
I am a third generation software developer, as it happens, so I have more-than-average familiar with the history of the information technology industry (to say nothing of the history I've read). Of course, there is a LOT of ground I haven't covered, and of which I remain ignorant. This is one of the many reasons I like articles such as these, autobiographical works and conversations with other technology workers.
> Workplace was a lot worse in the 50s, from working hours to safety
Not in every way and while, yes, we've seen improvements—so what? Are we done? There's still much unnecessary suffering. I don't think we're done. Ours is an industry of innovation, of development. Why should employee relations stagnate? Why should working conditions stagnate? And, in some cases, get worse?
> Still, people had liberties, could create friendships and gather and talk openly and free. These days
These days, we alter our language to evade censorship algorithms from private for-profit corporations who've enclosed the public forum. We create mere token "friendships" in undemocratic virtual reality, or undemocratic workplaces — where a friendship is terminated when employment is terminated: at the whim of a boss. It's the legalistic corralling of human behavior by undemocratic software media that's "killing free speech," and "forcing agendas" written in code. Read some Kafka, for crying out loud. To go online is to "stand before the law" as much as in any analog bureaucracy of which I've read an account — including Solzhenitsyn's!
The "atomizing [of] society" comes from a hollowing out of our social institutions by television, by the commercialization of public space and of free time. Read Putnam's "Bowling Alone" for the details.
"Friction between races, sexes, classes and everything" has always been here, but now that the internet's letting us peer into one-another's lives, we're noticing it. And we're going to have to resolve it. We can't sweep it under the rug for another generation.
> With one hand they complain, with the other they cause the situation
Famously: we didn't start the fire. ;)
> there is no honesty there
I don't know who you're talking about, but probably not the author of this post, and probably not me. Again, I am just a 3rd generation software engineer trying to make it in the industry just like my parents and grandparents, except conditions have changed and what worked for them isn't working any more.
Thanks for the opportunity to exchange perspectives.
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.