Airbnb Employees Speak Out About Bullying and ‘Toxic’ Work Environment

#36 is Apple and #37 is Microsoft. I suspect that once you get to that level those happiness ratings spiral into meaninglessness. Especially when the companies involved are huge.

I think you're also likely to see widely differing points of view based on the department in question. In general, departments that are essentially "cost centers" with lower skilled workers will feel more pressure to operate more efficiently (i.e. more work for same or less pay), while the opposite can actually happen for higher skilled, differentiated workers: critical employees will be lavished with pay and benefits as their skills and importance to the company increase.

Also, IMO, the media love any story that makes tech upstarts look bad (or maybe everyone does, and they know what gets the clicks). I doubt that the same story about General Mills or John Deere would get the same attention, or would even be written.

> It's almost certainly a mistake to judge them negatively based on this story.

Logically speaking, it would also be a mistake to dismiss every report of poor employee treatment where those selection biases apply.

>"I don't think there's a single company above 10,000 employees that you couldn't force a similar framing on"

Do you have a citation for AirBnB having greater than 10K employees?

Their Linkedin page specifies 1001-5000 employees:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbnb

I am very skeptical of these types of stories about tech companies. The outrage is generally misplaced.

People see one bad incident and think that there is an issue with the entire company.

The fact is that there will always be bad incidents at any company with > 2000 people.

It isn't reasonable to be outraged at one incident.

It is reasonable to be outraged if the incidents occur more frequently at a particular company or in tech than at other companies or fields.

I believe that these types of incidents occur far less in tech than in other fields (with the exception of tiny, scrappy start ups). Reporters just don't bother reporting the issues in other fields.

There is also the issue that almost every one of these 'outrage' articles are deceptive and written by a journalists who have no context about working in tech.

Just talking about glassdoor, and their rankings are to take with a big grain of salt, especially for early stage startups and medium sized companies.

I worked for a company that had some issues with management and saw its glassdoor ranking plummet after several low scores were given by past employees with mention of harassment. They didn't claim the profile on glassdoor at the time. Unsurprisingly, after a few really negative reviews, they most likely encouraged current employees to post positive reviews to counter-balance for the purpose of claiming the profile. It was obvious because positive reviews were for most of them on the same date or very close to each other and came in bulk while reviews were spaced by weeks or months before (most of them rather negative).

The gist of it is that while negative reviews may not reflect the current state and culture of a company (disgruntled employees happen), positive reviews could also be misleading. And I'm not even accounting for people that have an interest for putting up positive reviews regardless of the working environment because they have big stakes into the company.

Best thing to do is to chat with several employees in different departments and ask for their honest opinion and share their experience. Generally people are open about the pros and cons of their own working environment if you talk to them behind closed doors.

> They promise a plan of prizes for good hosts....[You] must be evaluated by +80% of your hosts.

> If your hosts leave a mess behind, AirBnB evaluates if they should cover it for the shake of their public image

It seems like the word "host" is being used for both "host" and "guest" in a few places, and I'm having trouble parsing a lot of trouble fully understanding this comment because of it.

Created an account just for this:

I work at Airbnb (as an engineer). Fact is, most of the negativity seems to be coming from non-engineers since Airbnb has been trying to scale out its customer support and facilities staff by bringing people on as contractors. This is all pretty new and it's really not surprising there are growing pains. But in the past, they've been really good about addressing issues so I'd be really surprised if this doesn't get better in a year.

As for engineering, it's still fantastic place to work. Right now, it's very much in a transitional phase but the good news is they've kept the hiring bar high and are bringing on plenty of talented people (lots of experienced ex-FB, ex-Twitter, and ex-Googlers hopping ship to join us). Yeah, the internal tooling needs work. Yeah, it's still kinda chaotic. But given the kind of growth we've seen, I'd be surprised if there weren't issues.

Do you feel the same way about Uber?

Did he say why he was unhappy?

Just look at the Frightful Five. At least two of them are renowned for having brutal, sometimes abusive, corporate cultures. Three if you include stack ranking-era Microsoft. Having an awful culture doesn't preclude business success.

Most of the people I work with here absolutely love it (in engineering). However, I will admit that some of the teams have crappy managers. Good thing is they've started bringing on new managers over the past 6 months that are much more experienced (without outing myself, my new manager had run the data team at a fortune 100 company for several years).

I think there was just this notion that you can promote from within to get your leaders... but this only works in some cases. Those directors at "stuffy" corporations like Oracle/Cisco/Microsoft? Fact is, they know how to manage teams at scale and you need some of them in your organization as it gets bigger. Even if the environment gets a little more bureaucratic.

Lots of large companies have strong corporate cultures, good and bad. Southwest Airlines, Uber, UPS, Apple...

I dont know where you heard that from.. certainly not anyone with a background in management.

There are companies that have wildly different cultures.. Google vs Walmart for example.

Culture creation/management is taught in business school... the culture the management creates is there to serve the purpose of the organization. In other words, Google tries to create a culture that encourages innovation.. versus Walmart's culture of ringing every last penny of costs out (which is done through strict adherence to rules and procedures). It is not possible to operate Walmart with Google's culture. The company would be bankrupt tomorrow.

There's a post a bit higher up with "you can't operate a business designed to evade regulation without that attitude eventually permeating its entire corporate culture"... and that is absolutely true. It's impossible for management to hire and encourage people to break rules, and then say their own rules are sacrosanct.

As a minion, I've experienced this. The founder of our hyper growth company was sincerely love, unicorns, team, culture, kittens. Whereas the VPs thru Directors were toxic corporate climbers.

I had to enter mgmt myself, to see just how hard it is to deflect the needle, to accept, reconcile the disconnect.

AirBnB is known for having illegal listings and keeping them because profit, while also quietly removing them right before legal trouble or to sanitize their books before showing them.

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-deleted-rentals-before...

I quit AirBnB as they pushed me to accept the new terms or either chase them on the email to cancel my property offer.

It happened that some people came by saying they had just reserved, and I told them I had nothing to offer. It's been +2 months and my room is still there. I am talking about foreign people finding they have no place to sleep.

AirBnB doesn't care, as long as they have stock to bait.

As far as I know AirBnB isn't restricted to private homes other than in specific cites which have legal restrictions, non-residential premises are allowed (on the listing you link to in question it's marked as a B&B rather than a private house).

> i found that the worst employees was the first one to complain for everything

This sounds like a great way to dismiss any complaint you don't want to hear.

Clearly, people want the IPO. I suspect economists would argue that the potential for an outsized reward that makes people reluctant to leave, reduces the management incentive to "invest" in keeping employees happy.

> If you are good at your job and you are treated as trash then its simple: move elsewhere.

I think that's good advice, and easy to see from the outside, but when you're involved personally it can sometimes be hard to see what's best in the long run.

you sound like a great manager

What about arbitrary regulations that were designed to artificially limit supply and increase prices on customers and the fact that these regulations won't go away because too few people know about them and there's a lobby giving millions to law makers to make sure they won't go away? How is that not corruption in anything but in name? How can Airbnb and others fight against these corrupt regulations when they were design to keep new comers and innovators out and incumbents in? It's a dirty game and if you want to play, or change things, you have to get dirty too. I'm glad they're doing it. Same as when you prohibit drug or alcool, it's still going to happen but way more dirty. Who's to blame though? Willing adults who want to partake peacefully in their preferred activities or regulators armed with guns trying to prevent from doing these peaceful things? Hm...

You are making a leap from "illegal" to "toxic" or to "terrible," while those are not the same.

This is total bullshit. Many many years ago I was working in for-profit warez group, and this job after twenty years remains absolutely the best I ever had. Basically the reason that I, after several trials to land a normal IT or startup job, became nauseaus and went away from any office to freelancing..

every comment like this on HN is followed by 'then stay in a hotel' followed by same regulation bad/good back and forth. Welcome to HN

Yes. After the things I've had to do and the people I've had to put up during working career it's hard not to think "self entitled whiner!" when seeing these types of headlines.

Which might not be the case in this instance, but it's definitely the first thought that comes to mind.

Stripe is renowned for having a good corporate culture.

Probably some selection bias in the stories. It's not as much fun to read about a pretty good place to work.

respecting your engineers is not pampering

Or perhaps, alternatively, current common corporate structures tend to breed toxic environments and terrible management practices.

Those are huge companies which employ plenty of marketing & PR people. Why should anyone else spin on their behalf without getting paid?

Similarly, while not everything the government does is perfect or the best way to accomplish a particular goal but it's really important to remember that there's a huge industry pushing outrageous stories to get public support for gutting regulations which really matter. We've seen this with e.g. Steven Milloy (the junkscience.com operator) who got his start shilling for the tobacco companies and is a reliable anti-science voice anywhere a large company is trying to halt or reverse regulations. He was one of the leading voices in a quixotic-seeming DDT crusade which turned out to be an attempt to discredit the WHO in Africa when their anti-smoking campaign was cutting into profits[1].

Any time you read one of these outrageous law stories, the first thing you want to check is what it actually says, followed very closely by asking who benefits from you getting outraged by that story or becoming primed to overreact to the concept in general.

Going with that BI story, note that the only source for the first claim is a right-wing activist group. The actual statute very clearly shows that they're misrepresenting the law because it actually applies only to forensics work collecting evidence for a court:

http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/billtext/html/HB028...

Since that story was based on the Institute for Justice's claims and that's full of lawyers, it seems quite unlikely that this is an innocent mistake caused by ignorance of the law rather than a blatant propaganda effort relying on the fact that most people hit forward without checking the sources.

1. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rehabilitatingcar...