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

http://brokeassstuart.com/blog/2017/05/25/airbnb-employees-speak-out-about-company-bullying-tactics/

by rblion • 9 years ago

178 129 9 years ago

ubikretail3• 9 years ago

It makes sense, if you compare it to the conditions of the hosts. I got people for a year and this is remarkable:

— Not host, nor guests are legally related to AirBnB. Hence, none of the parties is really protected, even if ABnB talks about "insurance".

— Not even the help desk is AirBnB. As they call them, they are "community helpers", and their help is not legally linked to AirBnB.

— They changed the conditions just because, and they place them as you go in for you to accept them. If you disagree, you have to remove yourself from the platform via email.

— They promise a plan of prizes for good hosts. It seems that most of your ratings should be high. It turns statistically impossible once your go into the real conditions: must be evaluated by +80% of your hosts, and +80% of your score must be five stars (or similar).

— They don't pay your social security, welcoming time, help, and after all anything we call "added value".

— Nevertheless, they added surreptitious-yet-public evaluation for things nobody is paying for, like being the tourist guide of someone who is getting a room for 10€/night.

— They do not care about hosts opinions, in spite they are the ones putting the real value on the platform, paying taxes for it, doing the face-to-face with the end client, etc. If your guests arrive 8 hours early and they complain you didn't received them, the bad scoring is on you (happened). If your hosts leave a mess behind, AirBnB evaluates if they should cover it for the shake of their public image, or if they rather claim that according to the rules that is not covered.

Everybody is free to do whatever, but after my experience I trust hotels more than anything.

saghm2• 9 years ago

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.

ubikretail3• 9 years ago

My apologies. I'm not a native speaker and switched the words as I spoke. You are right:

[You] must be evaluated by +80% of your GUESTS."
If your GUESTS leave a mess behind, AirBnB evaluates if they should cover it for the shake of their public image.

gaius2• 9 years ago

Whether its illegal sublets or unlicensed minicabs, you can't operate a business designed to evade regulation without that attitude eventually permeating its entire corporate culture. Welcome to "disruption".

patrickaljord2• 9 years ago

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...

dilemma• 9 years ago

You're talking about housing which is a business Airbnb is not in.

pille5• 9 years ago

Airbnb is a profit-seeking corporation, not a public interest group. They're not out to fight the good fight against "arbitrary regulation" any more than hotels are being evil by supporting it.

If you don't like the law, you can vote, run for office, volunteer, donate to a candidate or nonprofit, or bother your elected officials. I'm no fan of lobbying ("corruption in anything but name"—sweetheart gigs for sympathetic representatives once they get out of office), but it's legal for AirBnb to do this too.

rfrey• 9 years ago

Which regulations are you thinking of in your first sentence? In my view the limitation on use of residential units as hotel units simply recognizes the externalities involved - externalities that Airbnb hosts are now throwing into the commons and profiting from.

Other regulations, like more stringent fire codes for hotels, signage to fire escapes, sprinkler systems etc. are paid for with blood, not lobbyists.

You may have other regulations in mind though, that I don't know about.

jancsika• 9 years ago

I'm confused-- in which scope does the descriptor "artificially" operate?

1. The set of all arbitrary regulations which aim to limit supply.

2. The set of all arbitrary regulations which have the consequence of limiting supply.

3. The set of all arbitrary regulations which could conceivably have the consequence of limiting supply at any time in the future.

4. The set of all regulations which aim to limit supply.

5. The set of all regulations which have the consequence of limiting supply.

6. The set of all regulations which could conceivably have the consequence of limiting supply at any time in the future.

7. The set of all regulations.

If it's #1 and only ever #1, I'm with you.

mowenz3• 9 years ago

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

pooper4• 9 years ago

People often mistakes law and ethics. Although with Airbnb, I'm not sure if I would give them the benefit of the doubt.

While I agree that not all things illegal is toxic or terrible, knowing what we know about "disruptive" companies and the persona behind them, I think it is a safe bet in this case.

wareis• 9 years ago

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..

Malwarethrow• 9 years ago

Throwaway for obvious reasons. My first "job" was building a "crypter" and exploit pack with a team of very talented re/xdev folks. It was a great time.

oh_sigh• 9 years ago

Perhaps being downright illegal is different from 'evading regulation'

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

I think it's a matter of scale, as well.

Small criminal groups can be fine, because the small size tends towards better working habits. Large criminal groups have a reputation for brutality.

Very different effects come in to play once you have layers of middle management.

dominotw• 9 years ago

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

rl35• 9 years ago

I've often heard that it's extremely difficult to maintain any real culture or ethos beyond the amount of employees the CEO can personally manage, and that number is around 40-50. AirBnB is far beyond that, so it's no wonder.

The larger the company, the more it's going to decay and suck. The degree to which it does is a function of management style and org structure.

Of course, Kool-Aid doesn't help matters—especially at scale where it rings hollow.

qq66• 9 years ago

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

rl35• 9 years ago

I'd argue each of those qualify as overall bad, however I can't really think of a single example of good corporate culture at that scale regardless.

Perhaps good culture at that scale is simply the absence of culture—beyond simple items like accountability that largely boil down to "have a spine". If Kool-Aid doesn't work at scale, then better to not push it at all.

rgbrenner4• 9 years ago

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.

argonaut• 9 years ago

You really can't compare companies in different industries. Most Google employees are "knowledge" workers with some barrier to replacement. Most Walmart employees are performing mundane service work that is largely replaceable with any other person.

rl35• 9 years ago

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

Yeah, because they'd probably be saying things like this:

Culture creation/management is taught in business school... the culture the management creates is there to serve the purpose of the organization.

Distilling culture creation into a taught subject is antithetical to the genuine nature required by the act itself.

big_spammer• 9 years ago

Culture creation/management is taught in business school

Creation/management and being taught aren't exactly the same. I think you mean "there are ways to manage well".

specialist3• 9 years ago

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.

abhinai• 9 years ago

Heard similar stuff from a friend who used to work at AirBnb. He was an ex-Facebook engineer who quit AirBnB even before his stocks vested because we was so unhappy at this company.

I am really surprised. Things are going well for them as a company. Why do they want to screw it up for themselves?

exBarrelSpoiler5• 9 years ago

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.

ralfd• 9 years ago

I only hear bad stuff about Amazon, they churn through fresh graduates. Apple has this whole secrecy stick, but people stay long term there, even when (especiall when?) working for Jobs. I dont recall any negative stuff about Facebook. Google would frighten me personally, because everyone is smarter than me and I would sink as a rock. Microsofts stack ranking seemed like institutional crippling.

moomin• 9 years ago

I've said this before: toxic cultures are value-destroying stains on a company's resources. A strong host can survive a bad disease, a weak one dies.

So yeah, there's plenty of finance firms, VC backed unicorns and Fortune 500 behemoths with lousy cultures. But I'll bet that the cultures weren't that toxic _for the initial employees_.

NB People are different. What's toxic for one person isn't for another. However, in large firms the law of large numbers means that toxic looks much the same. So you can start a firm with founders and initial employees who are shouty abusive a-holes and it's not a problem. Scale to a thousand employees and it most definitely is.

z1c2• 9 years ago

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.

chx• 9 years ago

One data point does not make a whole lot but let me point this out: https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464 this here is a shit road side motel. I cancelled it when I realized and I reported it but it's still there more than a year later. It's trivial to check what it is: there are no houses at the junction. https://goo.gl/maps/WsPwXxa22ho

If you check the hosts' reviews it turns out he is airbnb'ing out the hotel rooms of his father all over Israel. This is blatantly visible and yet Airbnb lets it. Samples: "The staff at the hotel" "The place is more like a cheap hotel or a hostel (not a "home" like other Airbnb places I've rented in the past). "

My trip was awesome nonetheless, brief report http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/25981843-post8.html here.

bigbugbag2• 9 years ago

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...

ubikretail3• 9 years ago

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.

ig1• 9 years ago

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).

MichaelBurge• 9 years ago

Large companies have enough disgruntled employees that even the laziest journalists can find a few to generate some outrage, which drives views/clicks to their site. Since AirBNB is a well-known name, people on HN will tend to upvote it and commenters will self-select for people who want to rant about AirBNB.

That's 3 selection biases here: Visibility on HN(selects for an "interesting" story, not truth), disgruntled employees, comments will want to rant about AirBNB. It's almost certainly a mistake to judge them negatively based on this story.

In 2015, Glassdoor ranked the company as the #1 place to work, in 2017 that ranking dropped to 35th, and many employees are speaking out.

35th "best place to work" and "people are treated like cattle"? Somebody's giving you misleading statistics: Either it's Glassdoor.com, or the managing editor of "broke-ass stuart".

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

exBarrelSpoiler5• 9 years ago

#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.

lostlogin• 9 years ago

Good point. Ranking it by company is rather meaningless when they are multinational. How else could it be done though? By country? State/province?

hn_throwaway_99• 9 years ago

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.

eru2• 9 years ago

Definitely! At Google I saw some first-hand evidence of those principles.

Outsourcing the uncritical would-be employees makes that kind of differentiated treatment even easier to pull off for our monkey brain without losing any sleep over moral qualms at night.

But that's probably a good thing: at least the outsourced eg cleaners have a better chance of being the profit centres of the cleaning company than they ever would at eg a bank or Google.

Ultimately, if anyone has a moral burden to help lower income people, it's society as a whole (and that means mostly its richest members who bear the brunt of taxation) instead of just eg Walmart (and Walmart's mostly poor customers): we can't afford to penalize companies whose business model hinges on employing low-skilled people. Otherwise we'll get even less opportunities for people low on opportunities already.

vosper• 9 years ago

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.

dieterrams2• 9 years ago

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.

whitemale• 9 years ago

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

Remarkable claims require remarkable evidence, claims that are made without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

If a handful of people complain out of thousands and there is no hard evidence, then I see no reason not to just dismiss it.

bogomipz• 9 years ago

"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

FT_intern• 9 years ago

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.

abronan• 9 years ago

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.

nikanj• 9 years ago

Are our standards for "toxic" and "terrible management" too low, when the only company without these is Etsy? Is their level of pampering the only acceptable environment now?

exBarrelSpoiler5• 9 years ago

Stripe is renowned for having a good corporate culture.

blerpozut• 9 years ago

Stripe is a lot smaller than Airbnb (by headcount, but also financials probably). But it's growing quickly, and things have already started to degrade.

So, it's coming. On the other hand, they are very savvy about branding and comms, so they should be able to defy reality for a while ;)

Seriously, they don't get credit for how good they are at this. And they probably wouldn't want that credit if they got it!

(You know that piece about FB's "far-reaching tentacles" from the other day? I wonder why we haven't seen anything similar about Stripe yet. Hmmmm...)

pille5• 9 years ago

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

exBarrelSpoiler5• 9 years ago

Maybe the positive stories are from those who have experienced survivor bias

caoilte• 9 years ago

respecting your engineers is not pampering

vertex-four2• 9 years ago

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

Dowwie2• 9 years ago

Take caution with this kind of hyperbole.

AirBnB has grown enough that it is now an organization of organizations. Top-down culture is subordinated by the culture of the immediate group. It's entirely possible that these negative experiences happen within some but not all of the groups in the company. So, it's incorrect to draw an assumption that the entire company consists of toxic practices.

z1c2• 9 years ago

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.

employee8000• 9 years ago

Do you feel the same way about Uber?

Dowwie2• 9 years ago

This article is about AirBnB, right? Stick to the subject. This isn't Reddit.

perseusprime11• 9 years ago

I see this as a recurring problem with companies that publish a culture deck. It seems like the companies with culture problems are the ones that arr emphasizing culture with these so called decks on freedom, autonomy and bean bags.

jorgec• 9 years ago

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

As a former project in chief, i found that the worst employees was the first one to complain for everything. However, i never fired somebody, i just let them go ;-) (a fancy way to say the same)

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

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.

EpicEng• 9 years ago

Not at all. The parent was talking about a pattern of behavior, not an isolated incident. I've had the same experience; some people just want to make a problem out of everything instead of chosing their battles wisely and finding workable solution.

ljw10012• 9 years ago

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.

cjrp• 9 years ago

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.

sngz• 9 years ago

you sound like a great manager

noway4212• 9 years ago

Can't wait to see Brian Chesky arguing with a troubled landlord at one's property.

zxcvvcxz• 9 years ago

I keep hearing the phrase "evade regulations" with regards to Airbnb, Uber, et al.

Why not "increase efficiency", "increase consumer choice", "reduce prices", or something more positive? As a user of both services (on both sides for Airbnb) I've been quite happy.

"Evade regulations" - let's have some context here people. Think about all the ridiculous things that used to be illegal due to regulations. And all the things that currently are, and are hampering small businesses [0].

We should aim to reduce regulations on transactions between private parties, especially when these transactions leave both parties better off.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ridiculous-regulations-big-go...

acdha2• 9 years ago

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...

acdha2• 9 years ago

… and for anyone who isn't familiar with IJ, they're a Koch- funded institution with corporate libertarian bent:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Justice

The author of that blog post, well, look at that page and ask how reliable a source he is: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

macspoofing• 9 years ago

So is this the beginning of the next internet mob to take take down another Silicon Valley darling?

kartan• 9 years ago

* Headcount: 2368 people* * Hired in 2015: 1160 people https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-does-Airbnb-have-1

I worked in a company with similar growing speed. And things went from good to bad.

Everything starts with the size of the company. Upper management stops being related with what most of their employees do. So they start to take bad decisions promoting the wrong people. That didn't happen when the company was 500 people, as upper management knew most of them and knew personally the people that they were promoting. That is lost way before getting to the 2000 employees mark.

First-time managers promoted ad-hoc to fill the ranks are not able to deal with the company complexity.

So now you have employees used to voice their concerns, to be pro-active, and demanding explanations from management decisions. But management is now mediocre and is not able to attend the needs of high performing employees. The company tries to play cool, but the people that believed in that way of working is long gone.

Silos start to pop up everywhere. Departments try to protect themselves from the chaos.

The first to leave is the leaders of the company. Those people were the ones-to-go when you had a problem, they maybe never became managers and just wanted to mind their business. For them is easy to find new jobs and they are tired of fighting the new bureaucracy.

I don't know what happens next. The company I left is at this stage. Maybe things get better, maybe they just fail. But I guess that this "best company to work" just becomes a normal big company, and that's all.

bpatel576• 9 years ago

I'm going to be honest here and tell you guys that I didn't read most of the article. The more I come across these headlines the more I start to feel maybe these people that are complaining are feeling a little bit to entitled. I wonder how they would feel if they were working at a small publicly owned company out in Indiana. Fix the contrast bias and maybe you wouldn't feel so bad about where you work.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

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.

dennisgorelik• 9 years ago

All complaints that this article quoted are too generic. For example, what specifically, does "people are treated like cattle" mean?

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

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