Airbnb Culture
I’ve got an interview coming up and curious if anyone can share any insights. I work for a smaller compnany now and I’m curious how much faster the pace is at Airbnb or other big companies. The team I’m interviewing for is also in the Seattle office so any specifics there would be helpful. #culture #officelife #workplace
No hiring freeze?
Role is Senior SWE on support for self serve tooling and no hiring freeze because it’s a backfill position.
I’m ex FAANG with many years of experience. Long story short it’s super slow and a lot of bureaucracy. It’s more about how you present your work rather than what you do. I’m not super happy. The pay is good and wlb was good before pandemic.
Thanks for the perspective. I’m actually trying to prioritize wlb in my case. Are things so slow that you feel like you can’t do your best work? Or is it just more hoops to jump through to get things accomplished?
I can’t do my best, but it usually helps with wlb
We’re hiring?
I was a little surprised too but heard it was a backfill position. Should I be worried that current employee didn’t know about open positions 🤔
I think SUP is still backfilling for the engineers from Portland who refused to go to Seattle
You should avoid. Too much backstabbing.
Interesting, is that because of the layoffs or this specific office/teams culture? I know sometimes it depends on what team you land.
I’ve personally never experienced this in ~2 years. Maybe you have to be a manager or staff engineer to be affected by it?
We have the politics and bureaucracy of a much larger company. We are not a tech company... we are much more focused on design and brand. Decisions are not always data driven. But the TC is great, people are generally nice, our “belonging” culture creates a low stress working environment and it’s definitely not as cut throat as some of the other larger companies I’ve worked for.
Just fake being a SJW and talk about how you love traveling and community and connecting with people from around the world. Look at the core values it should be pretty straight forward in what you need to say The real culture depends on the team, my team is really fun and awesome, but irritating. If you don’t pretend that you care about their life and feelings or political/social cause of the week they are trying to push you will be outcasted
Airbnb is not generally that fast paced. Maybe if you work on China, otherwise not so much.
Great coworkers, horrible leadership, horrible product sense. Just design and brand at the expensive of fixing real customer problems
I do get the sense that design is leading things. Is there much collaboration or just design pushing mocks to engineers to build?
Depends on the area. If Brian is involved is getting puahed. If not then there is usually some healthy collaboration
What role is it?