Airbnb morale
Thinking of applying to Airbnb. Any inside info why I should or shouldn’t join the company? Have heard that engineering culture is bit hacky? Employees are not happy due to IPO concerns.
Engineering culture is bottom-up and democratic. It means that anyone can propose things and it’s adopted with enough popularity. The drawback to that is that it’s difficult to move fast since everyone is arguing their way is the best, and duplicate ways of doing things happen. For example, Java vs Ruby. If a dictatorial decision to use only one of them, we’d move a lot faster in my opinion, but also lots of capable engineers who are a strong fan of the other would quit at the same time. Frontend tech is really rad though on web, iOS and Android. They are also democratic, but they seem to resolve debates and move faster than any backend projects. Unhappy people are unhappy for various reasons, and there’s no one thing. Some people feel their managers are bad, some people feel they’re not growing enough, some people feel they are underpaid. I am fortunately none of these.
To answer the topic, my personal morale is high, and my immediate team’s morale is high to medium. There are some other teams that seem dejected though.
How is morale at FB?