<story><title>From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb</title><url>https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/05/issue-5/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thundergolfer</author><text>Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.</text></item><item><author>quanticle</author><text>From Dan Luu&amp;#x27;s excellent blog post on the value of in-house expertise [1]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Another reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the generic argument that large companies should be larger than most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If removing a blinking cursor has a 1% chance to increase the booking rate by even 0.1%, , then it&amp;#x27;s worth it for AirBNB to pay an engineer to implement the change.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;in-house&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;in-house&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Spoiler alert: we mostly are.&lt;p&gt;Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra features here and there to close that one whale of a client. Expanding into corporate accounts. Improving performance by 5% to take a big chunk out of the tens of millions of dollars infrastructure bill.&lt;p&gt;From a 10,000 foot view looking at the product, it always looks like it&amp;#x27;s 90% done in the first couple of years and then things just coast along lazily. But from a profit point of view, that last 10% can generate hugely outsized returns. It&amp;#x27;s the power of exponential growth, all those extra late nights and tiny improvements that move the needle just a little bit all compound over time.</text></item><item><author>mindwok</author><text>Am I crazy to think there’s something wrong with the amount of engineering effort going into these startups? When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, I can’t help but feel that’s an enormous waste of energy and effort.&lt;p&gt;Since I first used Airbnb 7 years ago, the only real change I can think of is when they added experiences (which is awesome don’t get me wrong), surely at some point you begin to wonder if we are utilising this talent effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spaetzleesser</author><text>“most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.”&lt;p&gt;That is probably true. But we shouldn’t forget that these people can do these things often because they are supported by a large number of people who do the mundane tasks that need to be done.</text></comment>
<story><title>From Belonging to Burnout, Five Years at Airbnb</title><url>https://news.techworkerscoalition.org/2022/04/05/issue-5/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thundergolfer</author><text>Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.</text></item><item><author>quanticle</author><text>From Dan Luu&amp;#x27;s excellent blog post on the value of in-house expertise [1]:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Another reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the generic argument that large companies should be larger than most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If removing a blinking cursor has a 1% chance to increase the booking rate by even 0.1%, , then it&amp;#x27;s worth it for AirBNB to pay an engineer to implement the change.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;in-house&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;in-house&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Spoiler alert: we mostly are.&lt;p&gt;Engineers with 5 YOE are making $500k+ a year at these companies because they are generating much more than that in revenues and profits for the companies. Airbnb is worth $110B.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not all blinking cursors, there are thousands of little experiments going on all the time. Increasing the number of bookings by 2% here, 3% there. Increasing the average price of bookings. Random extra features here and there to close that one whale of a client. Expanding into corporate accounts. Improving performance by 5% to take a big chunk out of the tens of millions of dollars infrastructure bill.&lt;p&gt;From a 10,000 foot view looking at the product, it always looks like it&amp;#x27;s 90% done in the first couple of years and then things just coast along lazily. But from a profit point of view, that last 10% can generate hugely outsized returns. It&amp;#x27;s the power of exponential growth, all those extra late nights and tiny improvements that move the needle just a little bit all compound over time.</text></item><item><author>mindwok</author><text>Am I crazy to think there’s something wrong with the amount of engineering effort going into these startups? When you have engineers working into the wee hours of the morning because you don’t want a cursor to blink on a text field, I can’t help but feel that’s an enormous waste of energy and effort.&lt;p&gt;Since I first used Airbnb 7 years ago, the only real change I can think of is when they added experiences (which is awesome don’t get me wrong), surely at some point you begin to wonder if we are utilising this talent effectively.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fivea</author><text>&amp;gt; Dan Luu also elsewhere makes the argument that most of the impactful engineering work done in large companies is performed by a small percentage of the engineering group.&lt;p&gt;The keyword &amp;quot;impactful engineering&amp;quot; needs some clarification though.&lt;p&gt;It does not mean there&amp;#x27;s a 100x guy walking around the office while everyone is slacking off.&lt;p&gt;A specific proof of concept hacked together by a guy in a week might eventually become the company&amp;#x27;s flagship product. That&amp;#x27;s impact. However, the thing needs to be rewritten from scratch to become production ready or even deployable, and that takes far more work that does not fit the definition of &amp;quot;impactful&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I personally know a principal engineer of a FANG which single-handedly wrote the proof of concepts of more than a few projects that thousands of users use every single day. From his own words following one of his recent presentations, &amp;quot;this needs to be rewritten from scratch as this would get me rejected from our job interviews&amp;quot;.</text></comment>