Airbnb CEO: CEOs calling workers back to the office 'going away to the Hamptons’ | Hacker News Reader

Airbnb CEO: CEOs calling workers back to the office 'going away to the Hamptons’

businessinsider.com

93 pointsalex_young37 comments

The problem with RTO is a fundamental axiom, "If >1 person on a meeting needs zoom, everyone should stay home". Hear me out, that one person can be the CEO in the hamptons, Jenny who just had a kid and is easing back in after matleave, the sales prospect from another company, etc. All it takes is one and it makes everything a giant waste of time. Because for everyone in office, they had to commute, find a conference room, spend money on lunch (usually), then sit on a zoom call in the office. I've tried all the teleconference thingamagigies, cameras on whiteboards, all of it. If > 1 person has to be on zoom, then everyone might as well be at home individually on their laptops showing a powerpoint or using lucidchart(or similar) to whiteboard. Yes if everyone is at the office sharing a conference room, white boarding it out, that can be great. However, at any office of sufficient size that is a RARITY! My last company we had teams all over the world, so it was silly to sit in a special conference room and try to get zoom to show our whiteboard or whatever. End rant.

I don’t completely agree that it is a waste. Yes that one person might be less involved but thats the price. The goal is to move forward, have an interactive session etc. so coming together once a month for example is great. And if someone can’t make it, then so be it.

I'll try to give sort of another analogy. With everyone at home on an individual laptop there is essentially one channel of communication. A single audio and video channel showing the presentation, or someones face talking, or whatever. The entire group is focusing all attention and communication in the same place, sure some may be zoning out, but its consistent. Now take the example of a room of six people, a whiteboard, and two remote. We essentially have two or more communications channel for those in the room together, and a single channel for everyone on zoom. Sure they can see a birds eye of people sitting in chairs around a table, maybe the camera focuses to varying crap degrees on who's talking. The whiteboard may be a camera focused on it, or one of those magic board thingies (again just use lucidchart or something over zoom, its better). There are cross-conversations, or mannerisms, conversations are likely muffled or speaking over each other, its generally very poor for those not in the room.

I don't think we're actually disagreeing, I agree if you can get everyone in a room then cool, its likely better. However, in terms of RTO, if you are a large F500 company you should look at your employees day-to-day and calendars. If the bulk of them are zoom meetings with people in other locations (different buildings, floors, etc) where it is unlikely they will be able to all get in the same physical location, then the axiom holds and you should just let them take it from home.

Yes I think we are saying the same thing. However I thought you said that, „companies with hybrid setup do not work, so all should be on-site“.

I‘d love to find exactly this where people commit let’s say 1x-2x a month where we meet onsite for these discussions where we need physical presence. And the rest of the time is done via async communication, notion, written notes and adhoc meetings (few recurring ones).

I've had days where I come to the office, go on a bunch of zoom meetings, and leave. At that point why force in-person attendance??

I have had those. Worse is that everyone has different work from home days and on Thursdays I'm the only person on my team in the office - so I get up early, make the commute into the office, talk to no one face to face, attend meetings remotely (but have to book a meeting room for privacy), then commute back home. It's a giant waste of time.

Don’t complain about that or you will end up with forced telework days. Our office now requires everyone in office TWTh, where so preferred working MWF because of how my work products and some meetings are scheduled. Telework and flexibility are at risk here.

Our team has specific days we are all in the office (and we all get lunch together that day) which helps. The commute to an empty office does really suck. All the energy and value of being in-person around your peers is lost...

I get that...and honestly thats why I do still look forward to going into the office once a week, but thats only when I know I can have real interactions with great people :)

Pointing this out and complaining about it isn't going to make the office disappear its just going to make forced in office days appear.

I don't point it out at work. I sit quietly doing work with noise cancelling earbuds in and think about finding a job that doesn't make me come into the office 3 days a week.

RTO is never going to work with my team. More than half of my teammates are remote, and unlikely to move if asked. We’ve already lost one person that way. I used to have a private office, but when I came back they moved me to an open floorplan seating arrangement. I now don’t sit next to anyone I work with who are local, nor do I know what the people next to me even do. No conference rooms are ever available for meetings, and most of the people I collaborate with at this point aren’t in my office anyways and I know exclusively from webex and slack. I usually just take meetings from my car in the parking lot. And damnit, they “renovated” the office but it’s now just a collection of misshapen rooms and white walls.

I can’t believe I get paid as much as I do at such a reputable company and this is the current state of things. I feel like a dog being dragged on a leash by whatever god-emperor exec made this decision. Sorry for the ramble, but I’m sitting in bed procrastinating going to work when I could alternatively just pull out my laptop right now and get things done.

I feel you. I did a somewhat controversial thing when I was in a similar situation (I had to attend an online meeting and actually present something but all meeting rooms were usually occupied by people who wanted to work in peace). So I made the effort to be anti-social and spoke quite loud in the open space to make sure everyone left, including the CEO heard me well. Nobody dared to approach me and discuss my behavior because, well, they understood the idiocy of the situation. I left the company a few months later anyway as nothing changed and they insisted on hybrid work with no private offices.

I'm sure you know the answer to your question is "because they can".

All the current layoffs and rollback of WFH are directly related to power gained by employees during the COVID emergency. These useless stuffed shirts want to return to the good ol' days, when they barked and we jumped. No more.

The jig is up fellas. The banks are broke, the workers are pissed, and this attempt at rolling back worker power will fail.

I had a job where I was the only person on my team in the office location, but I was expected to work in the office. All of my teammates were in other states.

I’m sorry I’m pretty pro WFH but AirBnB directly benefits from remote workers setting up seasonal offices from vacation destinations. Part of why their business dropped is they went from nearly seasonal residence rentals for digital nomads to mostly vacation bookings.

Have you got some references for that? The digital nomads seem like a small enough group to not matter in the grand scheme of things. I'd be extremely surprised if they impacted the Airbnb bottom line at all.

Pretty sure they don't have any references... can't even know that accurately from any public filings. However, I do think there might be some correlation on longer stays (maybe some % of those are digital nomads) from statements from Airbnb leadership where >1 in 5 stays are greater than 28 days [1]. That statement is from 2021, so I'm curious where it might land today.

[1] 2021 - https://news.yahoo.com/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-q1-earnings-b...

Hi literally talked about how before pandemic it was almost all short term rentals; now it’s 1/5 are 30 days or longer.

He talked about it on Prof G Podcast.

Well, I use term digital nomad loosely. End of the day if you are 100 or longer periods WFH, options to work from elsewhere which would boost ABNB

Different person here, I make no specific claims, but it seems obvious AirBNB is biased. Their model is helped by people with money being able to travel frequently. Of course they would say rooting workers with disposable income to one location is bad.

They were worth the trouble during the thick of the pandemic when people preferred homes with kitchens. There they could minimize their contact with other people. Now people are traveling differently.

And it could also be that people are realizing that AirBnBs are not worth their inconsistency, dark patterns around fees, and the hassle of dealing with a problematic stay or host.

I wouldn’t mind going to the office if everyone else was also in that same office.

I honestly don’t like working remote with people all around the world. Different time zones, people are always out for various holidays, and it’s impossibly hard to coordinate anything significant unless you make sacrifices in your personal life. And everyone is then in that same boat and it sucks equally for everyone involved.

I will translate: People are mostly incapable of splitting work and do proper communication in environments with high(er) latency.

The idea of just throwing stuff "over the fence" so to speak is going to bite you in the rear end in such scenarios, but people pretend there is no difference to having everyone in the same office and then run into a hard wall because reality is saying "hello!"

This really hits the nail on the head for me. My last two companies "globalized" parts of the team to the UK and India. Now the only time that works for everyone is 6 am PST.

And now we are still on zoom calls, just at the office instead of at home.

There's a massive difference between globally distributed and locally distributed.

My team is in 4 adjacent timezones (East Coast to Pacific, our home office operates on Central), and it works fine. When I worked in a company that had a Pakistani dev team it was awful (for a variety of reasons, but time zone was a huge one).

These are fine, but it definitely favors west coast people (I'm on west coast) when most people are on west coast.

My east coast colleagues are sometimes pulled into things that go until 6pm their time. Most west coasters start their day around 9am which is east coast lunch, so those folks are usually "fully available" for maybe a 2 hour window. Again, maybe this is fine if a team is just a support team or does something not that meaningful overall. If you're pushing the envelope building new products, ideating, or figuring things out AKA you need a lot of collaboration, you will suffer in personal life in the current model.

This is a non-issue if proper processes are in place. You mentioning issues with 'people are always out for various holidays' is a huge red flag. This is where strict processes and respect for other's time comes into place. It can be done. You just landed at a place that doesn't give a damn.

Saying the quiet part out loud. A breath of fresh air.

This whole time I thought my value was in the service and expertise I offer. Little did I know it was really my physical proximity to people I don’t even regularly interact with.

This was quite well know though. It’s called “face time”.

Whose side of the class war are you on, Mr. Chesky?!

It's funny - he had to say _something_ because Airbnb getting pummeled with the back to the office nonsense, but he's betraying his fellow rich.

How dare CEOs take vacations

They mean working from there

Looking at US vacation times allowed for workers, you can't go away for the summer without working remotely.

Jeez, all those tourists I'm seeing are just remote working?

Their point is that tourists can only do that for 1 or 2 weeks, not for the entire summer.

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