Startups now spend more on Airbnb than on office rent
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Many people from my experience say that, given the option to work remotely or in office, they would prefer a flexible option that lets them come into the office maybe 2 or 3 days a week and otherwise work remotely. The idea seems to be that a lot of people like having human interaction and teambuilding, but not paying for that connection with 5 full commutes a week and 8 hours a day in a cubicle.
The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year seems like it could theoretically be an alternative, providing that human connection but not demanding an outdated office lifestyle.
In theory, anyways.
I'm interested to see if this kind of thing becomes a major perk/attraction of the next generation of startups, much like the attractive offices of today's tech giants were "revolutionary" in the aughts. Then we can look forward to the big guys trying to copy the model and creating a horrific corporatized version of it.
There's a reason I choose to work remotely. I don't mind working closely with others, but leaving the household for two weeks straight simply isn't feasible, and certainly not more than once a year.
I would personally be open to trying it once, but I have no idea if it would fit in my life as a regular occurrence or if it would be miserable and make me want to quit.
In fact, a 2 week trip to a cabin to focus on work and team building sounds fantastic... for me. My spouse, on the other hand, would not be having a great time. It certainly has a whiff of unintentional ageism.
A time honored silicon valley tradition!
That isn't my case, but I am also not going to assume the worst of someone for whom it isn't an issue and is simply not considerate.
Then again, I have also avoided working for any company that failed to commit to a healthy work-life balance.
Now, life is less flexible and I can't just run off for weeks at a time- some families can make it work, some cannot.
I've known several people who work for companies like this. It's always been scheduled months in advance such that by the time you go on one the next one is typically already locked in. And even the long ones have been 4-5 days, not "weeks." It just seems like you're intentionally making this into a strawman when "travel for work 4-5 days at a time, 1-3 times a year" is a perfectly reasonable job requirement. And even with all that being said, there's nothing wrong with just not wanting to do that.
> The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year
Note that "week or two" and "1-4 times a year". It isn't a strawman, it is literally the topic.
As for > Why are you acting like you're going to be told on Thursday that you have to get on a flight across the country Sunday night?
I don't believe I ever expressed that the trips are surprises. It isn't a matter of planning, it is a matter of the duration being a burden.
People make comments on either side because they feel they would enjoy X or Y, but they're not meaning to imply that we all hoover up the cool-aid and sacrifice all we have for it. Zdragnar doesn't come to the retreats because they would rather spend time with their family, most places would understand that or at least accept that it's your choice. If your boss doesn't get it, then maybe they'll do you the favour of firing you and you can find a team that does get it.
a factory worker in a european city in 1900 would not be working from home. (his home would probably be close to the factory yes, but not at home).
Also, raising children and making them spend time in education is only a relatively recent invention. Prior to ww1, child labour was common, especially as a farmer.
It's not a matter of "Good for family" or "Bad for family", it's a diverse world out there. Some people work away from home for a full 14 days and then have a full week at home of no work, for some people that's a great compromise. Some people have nothing else, so they like the interaction they get from work, for another example.
Thousands of workers don't have the enormous privilege of seeing their family every night. All those travel workers, remote health workers, and oil field workers manage to make it work.
Not all families are wonderful.
I’m now looking after the kids and have a full time job so there’s no option to take a flight or even go into the office.
It's not like there was no freedom to work elsewhere either. When I wanted to work somewhere else for a week or two I'd work it out with management, no problem.
Some people really want remote work, more power to them it looks like there will be plenty of that post-pandemic, but let's not pretend that many people won't be happy with the office being a regular part of their week.
Our team is fully remote (US and CA) and our industry has major conference events throughout the year around the world. So 3-4 times a year our whole team would go to a conference, then stay for an extra few days to do planning, an innovation sprint, or whatever else in person.
Many people would bring their families and stay an extra week to make it a vacation, especially in places like Paris, Vienna, US west coast in the winter, etc.
Oh god no, no, no, a million times NO.
I'm a mostly introverted person. I would MUCH rather go to the office 5 days a week for 8 hours each day than have to be stuck living with a group of coworkers for 2 weeks straight in a house in the woods.
After 8 hours of work the last thing I need is being forced to spend the rest of the 16 hours in the day with the same group of people.
If you're going to do a meet-up for a fully remote company, please do it in a location with several hotels and let every employee arrange their own accommodation reimbursed. Keep mandatory activities to no more than 6-8 hours a day, don't pressure people to spend their evenings and weekends drinking with the company. Outside of meeting hours, let people enjoy the place however they like -- adults are more than capable of figuring out recreational activities on their own, and you don't need to provide structure 24/7. If you pick Las Vegas I'm sure a whole bunch of employees will self-organize themselves and go gambling and drinking, but I have no interest in that stuff and you'll probably find me in some national park during the weekend.
Sure if you work in an industry where you're competing among a very small pool of highly-skilled specialists, you can't afford to miss out on key talent. But if we're talking about web devs for a start-up, why not?
Introverts are VERY GOOD at getting shit done. Introverts aren't opposed to teamwork and collaboration, it just means that when we get off work, we usually chill alone or occasionally with 1-2 close friends, instead of partying.
This ^ sounds incredible.
This is how Automattic did it before the pandemic[1]. It works because they're clear during the hiring process that this sort of travel will be expected. I've always found it very valuable for getting everyone on the same page and for team morale/cohesion.
The hybrid model builds routine and trust, lets you respond to unexpected snags and complications quickly (~1-2 days latency), and allows for in-office creativity and then going home to execute on those ideas rapidly. It also fits reasonably well into existing family & daycare routines.
The retreat model could work for more established businesses in industries that don't change a lot, but that's not a startup. The biggest problem I see is that it encourages a high-latency, "go off for a quarter and work on this problem as your manager has defined it and then we'll all get together for show & tell and plan the next quarter" model. Since you know you'll see folks at the next retreat but it's a pain to schedule time with them beforehand, it incentivizes you to work within your silo and solve problems yourself and then have something to show at the retreat. We know this is a poor model for software development, from a few decades of experience. You lose the adaptability and low-latency communication of being in-person with your teammates on a weekly basis.
The big disadvantage of the hybrid model is that it doesn't do anything about the concentration of startups in a small number of hyper-dense metro areas, nor the exorbitant cost of rent in those areas. Arguably if that is the #1 problem facing the world these days (and it may be) the industry you want to go into is real estate, not startups, though.
You still need to rent spaces because you need a place to meet, and the existing meeting room places are rather anodyne. We'd rent out a winery or similar.
Interviewer: We offer one-month paid vacation with your co-workers at an exotic location of our choosing. Oh, and we decide when you take those vacations
CEO to shareholders: It's a tax deductible 3-day meeting and team building exercise!
CEO to spouse: Hey, jet skiing in Thailand was on your bucket list, right?
This is sort-of normal elsewhere, actually. Even in Europe, employer has sway over vacations. Not a dictatorial power, but No will often be No for a certain period. It makes sense in many industries; you can't have a power plant running with too few qualified people present.
Edit: downvoted for a perfectly neutral response. Yes, looking at my own country's labor code, vacations are determined by the employer. They will likely meet you halfway and approve vacations for July and August (slow season) without too much hassle, but they do not have to. As said above, it makes sense; certain skeleton crews must be maintained at all times in many industries.
Another example of the situation above are factory workers, ie in Germany there are millions of cars moving south every summer during specific weeks valid for their part of the country, when +-whole factory goes out.
You need a more diverse workforce. Where I am, the Persian guy will work every Jan 1 as long as we guarantee him the first day of spring off. The Muslim lady will do Dec 24/25 as long as she gets some other specific day off.
The hard days to schedule are “family day” and other non-cultural holidays.
This is only a solution some of the time. I worked through Christmas / New Year's at eBay the year I joined, because I hadn't accrued enough vacation for it to make sense to take vacation.
But there was no work to do, because... everyone else was on vacation. Having me in the office benefited no one.
Though I’ve often try to work the non-holiday days around Christmas because it lets me clean everything up without anyone asking for much. But we always keep a skeleton team around in case (critical operation).
That solves the problem considered from my perspective, but it's less good from eBay's perspective. What the company really wants is to make the vacation at that time compulsory. If I have nothing better to do, under the system I experienced, I can still come into the office and eBay has to pay me despite the fact that they have nothing for me to do.
The other tactic I saw was block out vacation, but don’t actually take it so you actually have time to catch up on work. Every leaves you alone (because they think you’re off).
In general management prefers team members sort things out among themselves. E.g. one goes on leave during the first week of the school holiday the other on the second week.
I'm actually a bit surprised that you haven't come across it before because I've always been under the impression that these winter and summer shutdowns are pretty common.
I left a company due to that! Being forced to take holiday during the peak super-expensive period :/
But a society of my clones would probably fall apart.
The government also cut back on their professional development days (probably because it created a problem for parents to arrange childcare), but I heard these days became useless anyway as the budget for them got eliminated.
Working during the peak holiday seasons usually isn't too bad because vacations are more expensive, so going outside of season is better. (but not possible if you have school aged kids).
Also, tons of downtime to get errands fixed that have been left all year.
So has this become a terrible horrible no-good dealbreaker in the last few years, and the place I'm currently at that still does this[1] is a weird, out-of-step mutant? I see all the "this can't be expected of people who have families, that's utter madness!" comments, and, I mean, these are basically business trips, aren't they? I can't imagine the idea of "business trip" is a dealbreaker, at least for most people.
I kind of wonder if what's causing the "hell, no" reaction isn't the "let's spend a week together every quarter" part, it's the "let's spend a week together at a vacation home as if we're all college buddies every quarter" part. Which, again, I get: as a relative introvert, that sounds dread-inducing in a way that the week in the extended stay hotel does not. But if the company has no physical office space and you do want to have in-person meetings occasionally, you're going to have to figure out something that involves actual sleeping arrangements and collaborative space.
[1] I'm not sure any of those remote workers are left at this point, but that's not related to their remote status, AFAIK.
- Some people don't want any business trips at all. Ever.
- Some people are ok with a short trip 1x-2x/year. But the traditional business trip, you stay in your own hotel room and attend business events during something close to normal business hours. You can general dine on your own.
- This Airbnb retreat is not a normal business trip. It's a shared house, shared dining area, and I only assume the expectation is long hours of collaboration and/or socialization.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at in my last paragraph -- it's the 24/7 nature that's the most off-putting. For a company that doesn't actually have a physical office, I'm not sure what the best solution here is, but it's possible "renting meeting space in a city we've all agreed on and giving everybody a hotel stipend" is a better approach. (Or if everyone's amenable and it's cheaper, rooms at the same hotel, but still, you know, separate rooms.)
> Some people don't want any business trips at all. Ever.
Well, that's probably something they're going to have to talk about during the interview process. I have been in many jobs where I haven't taken business trips, but I haven't been in any job where the idea of a business trip was completely off the table.
I think in the case of "you're working remotely but you're expected to meet us all a few times a year for a week," that's something that should be made clear by the employer during the interview process. If it's a dealbreaker for the interviewee, so be it.
I personally prefer the traditional hybrid- work 2-3 days/wk in office, remote the rest.
Agree completely. As I've progressed up the corporate ladder, my travel went from zero (as a plain-old developer) to 2-3x/year for 3-5 days per trip (as an architect and now SDM). It's been a mix of conferences as a vendor, conferences as a consumer, and client site visits. Refusing those would be a sure-fire way to never land an interesting project in the future.
It really is chaotic for some workers with families to expect 5+ days being away from the home. From taking the kids to school to picking them up, getting groceries, managing after-school activities, helping with home-work, etc. and putting the pressure of 24/7 care on an already strained parent for an entire week is not always easy. Some parents also do coaching for the school sports teams. Ordinarily you're working 8 hours a day and available for the remainder of the day. On a "business trip" you're gone the full 24 hours; the impact becomes even more amplified with that.
But a house in the woods, where I am sharing the bathroom/kitchen, sorry, I don't want that level of closeness. I don't want to be cooped up 24/7 with people I work.
They are colleagues not friends, and you want that professional barrier. As much as startups espouse the "we are a family BS" , I've worked long enough to understand that it is a transaction at the end of the day.
As an employee in this situation I preferred staying in the AirBnB to the hotel, since I prefer that style of living, having access to a kitchen, and the more "homey" feel, additionally it's nice being in a more residential area vs being in a more commercial area, especially in Europe where cities tend to be relatively walkable with good public transport. Also because AirBnBs were less expensive, it was easier to negotiate private accommodations vs sharing with a coworker.
Generally I found these sorts of trips to be really high value and pretty much essential in a fully-remote company, to create the sorts of positive relationships with coworkers and camaraderie that help get through difficulties inherent to the work. Large-scale planning exercises also helped significantly with communicating alignment throughout the organization and training customer-facing functions on deeper intricacies of the product that they may not be exposed to daily.
Maybe true in expensive cities that aren't family-friendly (Bay Area, I'm looking at you), but once you leave those bubbles it's actually really common for people in tech to have children.
This isn't really a tech thing. It's more of an age thing. Some tech bubbles, especially startup bubbles in places like the Bay Area, end up selecting for young, childless people. Once you age out of the bubble or your company grows up and starts collecting employees from a broader range of ages and locations, you'll be surrounded by parents.
On my prior team... - 2 empty nests - 3 w/ young kids - 1 w/ older kids - 3 w/ no kids at all
Away on business for a few days, would you prefer to cook healthy meals in your own kitchen and relax, or do you want yet another calorific restaurant meal?
Cooking yourself is way cheaper.
Sure, if money is not a problem, have someone else cook so you spend more time on improving the product/relaxing.
I cook 90+% of our dinners at home as it is. Getting a chance to go to a restaurant is easily the best part of business trips.
I drove from Adelaide to Sydney via the Great Ocean Road a couple of years ago and basically none of the motels/hotels we stayed at had kitchen areas.
I just did an AirBnb with a group of families for just under a week. We almost exclusively at in and the logistics around food was a lot of work. It was probably exacerbated because it was about 20 people with a huge range of ages (many with particular preferences), but not many dietary restrictions. We were concerned upfront about extra food or waste at the end of the trip. Every lunch was "leftovers or sandwiches," the last few meals were also leftovers, and we still threw out an embarrassing amount of food (and had at least 2-3 trips to the grocery store to restock). Want ketchup, salad dressing, or need paprika? Odds are you'll buy a bottle and toss the rest. Decide you want to eat out? You probably have a meals worth of food at home you won't need. We also spent time upfront figuring out if the kitchen had what we needed; like a toaster or a grill.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of cooking at these places. Their knives often suck, the layout isn't usually great, and they'll have cheap cutting boards or the dishwasher won't work.
If it works for people, great. I imagine what works in practice is a few small things to cook at the AirBnB (like eggs or sandwiches) and mix that with takeout. And be ok with the waste and cost (traveling is usually pretty wasteful, anyway).
It's low stress, great conversation starter, gets the crowd together, and in some cases an opportunity for teamwork.
With hotels, I never had any problems. At Hilton, my invoice waited upon arrival. In smaller Italian hotels, they would issue it at the last moment. But it was there. With B&Bs, I had to depend on my luck. They usually said they would issue the invoice, but sometimes they wouldn't. And it's hard to pressure someone living a few countries away.
And that's just to get reimbursed, for tax purposes we have an extra set of requirements. Of course.
- price is often better
- more control over location / amenities
- transparent discounts for longer stays. I don't need housekeeping every day, I do need to able to afford a month of lodging sometimes though
- Having a kitchen is really nice. Even if you don't want to cook, it's nice to be able to make coffee, drinks, microwave something
Also, I've found wifi connectivity so much less reliable at hotels than at Airbnbs, but I'm excited about the "host wifi check" tool mentioned in this article
For multiday stays being able to just have a normal sized fridge and a kitchen worktop can mean breakfasts and lunches can be done for very cheap... meaning modest sustenance budgets cover evening meals more comfortably.
For stays that straddle weekends the locations of apartments can lead to happier employee weekends than them waking up in the business district due to zoning placing the hotels there (which in a lot of American cities felt like it translated into the eateries being closed at the weekend and only the homeless roaming around as most people live in suburbs that have all the life). Bear in mind most travellers will not have rental vehicles, and public transport can prove indecipherable and confusing, so a lot of people travelling for business are on foot and if they're in a nicer suburb their non-working time can be very comfortable.
I was initially skeptical but am a complete convert to the 3-day, 2-night minimum, stay in a house, grocery shop together and cook every meal in format. (Practical exception as needed, such as for 4/3 trips where the first evening is a late arrival and a dinner out works better.)
The number of topics that got addressed/finalized while chopping vegetables or around a fire pit in the evening is likely at least equal to what we did discussing in structured setting in the living room.
(And yes, it’s a way to make 40 hours of “work” fit into 3 days, while being cheaper than 3 days times 7 people in hotels and restaurants. They can be exhausting and if you don’t like your team in the office, it’s probably not going to get better as ersatz flat mates.)
Love my job, will go the extra mile if necessary and have had many many positive interactions and experiences with coworkers but I do not want cohabitate with any of them ever for any period of time.
Get me a fucking hotel room and ill be happy as a clam between 9am and 7pm for work stuff. Take me out for dinner and drinks if you want some informal team building. Dont torture me though by making me hang out, cook with and sleep near my coworkers for the other 10-12hrs of the day.
Sure, cooking for a group might be less expensive, but I have serious doubts that's a primary reason for using a rental home vs hotel/conference space.
And as an aside, as somebody with dietary restrictions, being forced into dining with people who don't share my diet is very off-putting. Add in my co-workers who are vegetarian, vegan, or completely boring (bland, beige American food is all they'll eat) and it's a nightmare. No thanks.
I know a few homeowners and early stage startups who let or rent homes via AirBnB as "offices" for early stage companies who are willing to pay, sometimes, a bit of a premium for the flexibility they provide.
Even if you allocated a $200/day ($6K/month) hotel room for a salesperson for 365 days, you're likely not even halfway to the annual office expense.
Most startups don't have 2 salespeople at that level.
You should also know that the "Airbnb harms rental affordability" narrative is one that was deliberately spread by the Hotel lobby via its astoturfing campaign:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...
As long as the free market persists, then even if all property owners would benefit from fewer new developments, they have no practical way to enforce a pact to not build new developments, so their situation is a prisoner's dilemna where the best option is to build.
The same principle applies to price cutting. If all companies could enforce a pact to not cut prices, then they could extract economic rent via above-market prices and inflated profit margins, but absent government enforced price floors, the best strategy for any given company is to reduce prices to gain market share, to the extent that their production costs allow.
The issue here is that we've enacted heavy government action (generally at the state/local level) to regulate development/redevelopment of housing and subdivision of lots, but we haven't had corresponding heavy government action to maintain an ample supply of housing. We can't have it both ways.
One solution to the housing crisis is to have government build hundreds of thousands of units of housing, flood the market with cheap housing units, and drive housing costs down (and ideally also provide for the poor at the same time).
Another is to systematically remove barriers to subdivision and development and let the free market go wild.
Finally, we can do nothing except blame companies like Airbnb and hopefully by banning those short term rentals we can keep our rent price increases to 10% this year instead of 20%.
Removing barriers to subdivision and construction can work though. That's the approach that Houston takes, and it succeeds at keeping home prices low, even if you do get occasional negative consequences like homes built inside a flood reservoir.
Sure, but evidence of incompetently developed infrastructure doesn't mean it's impossible to develop infrastructure competently (although we americans do tend to assume our government will build infrastructure with maximal incompetence, and our government in turn often does). Anyways, it is an option even if it's not the best one.
> Removing barriers to subdivision and construction can work though. That's the approach that Houston takes, and it succeeds at keeping home prices low, even if you do get occasional negative consequences like homes built inside a flood reservoir.
yep. I don't like the car-centric development style that Houston is built as, but you can't argue with results (meaning, affordability).