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.
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.
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.
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.
#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.
It also really depends on your interests. Much of my dissatisfaction with Microsoft was due to its heavy integration with a suburban lifestyle (Bellevue and Redmond), but some people are into that. A vague metric like happiness isn't really something that will be universal.
Work environment toxicity isn't really related to where you live. Many Microsofties commute from Seattle, and they have Connect/Kinect buses to support that (like Googlers who commute in from the city, only that Seattle is much closer to Redmond than SF is to MV).
I mean, if you are going to ding Microsoft for that, you might as well ding Google and Facebook as well. Heck, only Amazon and some smaller companies have true urban campuses.
Good for you, simplifying your life is useful (I work in LA but live two blocks from my job in Westwood).
It depends on when you want to commute, if you want to fight it out 7-9:30/4:30-6:30 with rush hour traffic, then ya, it might take 90 minutes (wait, no, it would never actually take 90 minutes unless you were commuting from north or south of Seattle....or maybe West Seattle, I guess you are exaggerating a bit here). If you travel off peak, its like 20 minutes between OTC and downtown by bus.
That being said, if I had to choose between a toxic work environment with a great location and a great work environment with a crappy location, I would probably pick the latter for my own sanity (best to have both, though).
There were a lot of challenges, I had things I wanted to do in the city at particular times and could not get to them. Ended up doing everything at Microsoft, kind of like a continuation of living on campus in college. Not a toxic culture, just not for me.
Regarding the ninety minute commute it was frequently Thursdays to where I lived in Belltown that would consistently be 70-90 minutes. I ended up staying late at work to avoid it, which didn't help my enjoyment much.
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.
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.
I fully agree about the insinuation of posting in bad faith but suspect poster didn't really mean "at all costs" but rather something more along the lines of "in spite of this evidence".
(which I wouldn't agree with anyway for reasons others mention above).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If you get in to the right department at Google, everyone is smart enough to not work too hard. Finding these departments can be difficult as they're also smart enough to appear hardworking
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.
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.
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.
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.
Walmart Labs is likely a subculture within what you describe.
If I had to guess, unlike their masters they probably find adorning their office walls in the stuffed trophies of union-organizing retail employees to simply be poor taste.
lets assume that's true.. executives are employees, and they report to the board. Are you saying the board can't hire executives that genuinely reflect the culture the organization wants to build/maintain?
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.
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.
But how strict is your accountability? I'll go back to my walmart vs google example.. in google, there is more leeway and understanding about risks.. in walmart, you deviate from procedures and you have a problem.
How strict the rules are is part of the culture.
You're just redefining everything as vague as possible (by changing strictness of accountability to a "simple item" with no details) to say the culture doesnt exist.
>You're just redefining everything as vague as possible (by changing strictness of accountability to a "simple item" with no details) to say the culture doesnt exist.
The operative word was no culture beyond items like accountability. That is to say, accountability certainly does constitutes an aspect of culture.
I did not go into detail because the minitutae of accountability as it relates to culture didn't seem relevant.
The gist of the comment was that you can't really pervade a large organization's culture with a high amount of genuine motivation, and if you can it's extremely hard.
Even space agencies suffer from shitty culture at times, and exploring the universe is arguably one of the purest forms of Kool-Aid in existence.
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). "
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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..
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.
There might actually be more to it, if you generalize slightly:
Banks have big moats of enormous regulation that any would-be upstart competitor would have abide by. Hence they are more 'legal' just counted by number of regulations they comply with. Banks ain't great places to work for.
(But I don't think you can build a good rule out of that. I think what determines a great culture more is how high the opportunity cost is for employees to just go and get a new job that at least as good. Googlers can just walk away, and get a decent job anywhere else: so Google has to treat them nicely. Retail assistants in depressed East Germany in the 90s had almost no other options, especially since legislation basically forced companies to pay above market clearing rate; you can imagine what bosses got away with on such a captive labour supply.)
That sounds reasonable. Knowing what you are versus trying to rationalize away the behavior might very well foster different environments. Interesting thought.
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.
Although with Airbnb, I'm not sure if I would give them the benefit of the doubt.
What makes you say that?
What instances of conduct from Airbnb's founders or senior management can you cite that indicate a propensity for unethical or immoral behaviour?
And perhaps more pertinently: given that the ubiquity of the internet made it inevitable that a major marketplace would emerge that made it easier for people to conduct short-term property rentals online, and that this would inevitably clash with pre-internet regulatory frameworks, can you describe how Airbnb should have conducted themselves more ethically?
My perspective: through my involvement in YC, I know the Airbnb founders well enough to know what well-intentioned and good-natured (i.e., friendly, supportive and nice) people they are, whilst not being personally close enough to them to have any loyalties that would prevent me from being critical where it is warranted.
From that point of view, I can say there have been instances where Airbnb have made missteps or taken things a step too far in their pursuit of growth and success, but there is no consistent pattern of pathological or deeply unethical behaviour.
My take is that they've built something thats super valuable and useful to society, the fact that it pushes the boundaries of current legality does not automatically make the place toxic, it just pushes the world to be slightly different in the future which is a good thing.
I've waited almost 24 hours to reply to this, to see if anyone else had other examples to cite. Looks like there's nothing other than the link you posted. To which I say, if the worst anyone has ever come up with is an uncorroborated allegation of morally/legally questionable business practices when one was an adolescent in need of extra funds to help get through college, then I think they're doing just fine.
Well, on the basis of solid evidence provided in this subthread, it really does seem like they are. An actual case of illegal or immoral behaviour from any of the founders, from some time during the past 15 years and/or during their adulthood, with corroborated evidence, might be able to disprove this. But none has been forthcoming.
> And perhaps more pertinently: given that the ubiquity of the internet made it inevitable that a major marketplace would emerge that made it easier for people to conduct short-term property rentals online, and that this would inevitably clash with pre-internet regulatory frameworks, can you describe how Airbnb should have conducted themselves more ethically?
I for one wish people were more honest. Stop saying we're trying to make the world a better place when you're not. For example, it is ok to push instant booking on everyone but please stop astroturfing about how you're doing it to prevent racism. There's always the real reason why you do something and there's the marketing reason why you do something. People are not that stupid. Just look at the CEO's face and tell me you think he is sincere about anything. Even Travis is a better actor.
Honesty and openness - that's all I ask.
I don't know if it is even possible though. Those who are honest and open will get their lunch money stolen by the "elites".
> it is ok to push instant booking on everyone but please stop astroturfing about how you're doing it to prevent racism.
I had no idea the instant book feature was so controversial.
That said, as a traveller, it works well for me: I'm currently staying in an Airbnb property that I booked late last night, less than 15 hours before checkin. I only booked this place because I was able to get instant confirmation. It worked well for the host too; she got a 3-night booking she otherwise wouldn't have. So, both of us have benefited from this change.
At the same time, it really was the case that Airbnb started getting a heap of criticism 6-12 months ago for the propensity for hosts to reject bookings from people of different races. So there is absolutely substance to that justification.
> There's always the real reason why you do something and there's the marketing reason why you do something.
You seem to be committing the rhetorical fallacy of looking through all the possible motives somebody can have for an act, identifying the lowest one and asserting that that must be the real one.
> Just look at the CEO's face and tell me you think he is sincere about anything.
You should provide an example of him being or seeming to be insincere.
My own experience, having known him personally, is that he is as sincere and strong in his convictions as anyone I've met. In fact, in the YC batch we participated in together, Airbnb was voted (on two separate occasions, by a big margin) as the company most likely to succeed, because the founders were so energetic, hard-working, sincere in their mission, and good natured in the way they thought about/behaved towards their customers, their YC batch-mates, and everyone they interacted with.
Looking back, I'm comfortable conceding that it was these positive qualities in them that weren't present in me, that caused them to be so successful and for me to not be.
> Honesty and openness - that's all I ask.
You've provided no evidence that they are anything other than this.
> I don't know if it is even possible though. Those who are honest and open will get their lunch money stolen by the "elites".
I know it's easy to look at a company achieving huge success, seeing all the reports of them operating with questionable ethics, and thinking that the only way to be successful to is be unethical.
But there's a difference between operating consistently unethically/immorally, and pushing the boundaries to their limit (with occasional, inevitable, overstepping the mark).
In the past I've often made the same mistake, but over time I've learned this was due to my own resentment and unwillingness to concede that maybe others were succeeding because they were just doing a better job than I was.
AirBnB seems to have largely avoided high-profile examples of blatant abuse, like Uber's controversies. The only case of tech company dickery-for-the-sake-of-dickery (or maybe just social insensitivity) I can think of is the bizarre passive-aggressive ad campaign after S.F. passed the tax on them:
I agree the campaign over SF taxes was a bad misstep. But it was just a bad PR move, probably conceived by an agency or staff member (though of course management is ultimately responsible). But it wasn't a criminal act, and nobody got hurt. They accepted the criticism, withdrew the campaign, and haven't done anything like it in the 18+ months since.
To me it's more notable that they've had so few scandals or skeletons dragged out of the founders' closets, given how much of a tall poppy they've become and how much of an appetite there is to cut them down.
>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
Well whether or not it is a safe bet (and I dont necessarily disagree), what I didagree with is the illogical reasoning I mentioned above, and also that you are making the bet on the stereotype of a persona.
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...
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.
I suppose DDOSing a law you disagree with is one approach. Seems pretty high-risk vs. the usual way of buying off the flyover congressmen for a couple grand a pop.
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.
In reality, you can do two things about it;
1. Like it
2. Absolutely nothing
This myth that an honest individual with good intentions can somehow influence the system is harmful and needs to die. If you're not a huge corporation or lobby group, your chances of getting a law changed is for all intents and purposes zero.
I personally stopped my government from spending $15m on an unneeded ballot tracking system (it added voter ids to ballots, eliminating the secret ballot).
I have friends that made the DREAM Act happen. Ditto my state's legalization of weed and gay marriage.
But if apathy and despair is your thing, I'll stop here and let you get back to it.
An individual can most definitely influence the system, but it involves doing unappealing things like participating in open comment periods, political organizing, labor organizing, attending meetings, making phone calls, interacting with bureaucracies, pouring your life into standards bodies, running for local office, and persevering in the face of indifference and tedium.
It's a high bar to clear (I certainly haven't cleared it), but to pretend it's impossible is the definition of cynisicm.
There are 242,000,000 adults in the US. Getting one law changed every 5 years sounds like an absurd amount of leverage to gain from basic civic engagement.
Sure, let's talk about my city. The mayor is on the board of the company that manages our toll roads, so we'll never get good public transportation. At a zoning board meeting the head chair literally said out loud, in response to complaints, that she was impervious against any campaign against her because alphabetically she showed up first on the ballot. Oh yeah, our governor's wife is on the board of some medical group... I forget the details but they bilked millions out of our senior citizens... and got re-elected.
Aside response: I don't watch South Park, so I don't know what you're even referring to.
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.
If anything, Airbnb is in the business of converting housing to hotel space. Many units are hosted by people who buy them to rent to tourists, reducing the housing stock.
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.
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.
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?
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...)
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.
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:
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.
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.