Airbnb Employee Reviews about "work life balance"

Pros

Culture, benefits, Work life balance, wonderful people, and a mission that lines up well with my personal values.

Cons

Our CEO has amazing ideas and moves very quickly, however our technical infrastructure, and the rest of the company seems to move like dinosaurs

Advice to Management

Fill out the executive staff which is missing so many people, And please follow through on rebuilding the site infrastructure to give us the agility we need to be successful

Pros

All of the usual tech company perks, plus a quarterly travel credit.

Cons

*Young, inexperienced mid and senior level management, who leadership believes are "great." These young managers are catty, entitled, don't understand people who aren't 25, and don't have a baseline understanding of what they can and cannot legally say and do. *Lacking diversity when it comes to age + race or ethnicity *Top down leadership style *Work/life balance is lacking for many areas *If research doesn't... say what design and PMs want, then it doesn't count. If you are a researcher, RUN, and run FAST.

Advice to Management

Get managers who have LIFE experience, not just work experience straight out of college. It doesn't matter if they've been in tech for ten years, from internships to management; if they have not lived life, they probably have not developed the life skills necessary to lead a strong and diverse team. Life experience goes a long way, and managers in this company lack it. Additionally, looking at mid-senior level... leadership, they tend to be 30-40ish will similar backgrounds, and similar work experience, which leads to lack of diversity in the teams they build. This is the straightest line to encouraging a culture in which only certain types of people can feel good.

Pros

Commitment, dedication and innovation is incredible at Airbnb. Everyone works together to build a trusted community and sees any mistakes along the way as an opportunity to grow and learn. Such an enriching work environment!

Cons

Often decision makers are lacking and work/life balance can be challenging.

Advice to Management

Take more specific action on employee feedback. Often survey results are similar year by year.

Pros

Summary: I'm really happy here and it's the best job I've ever had. That said, details: 1. People: The people here are really smart, really nice, and really accommodating of healthy work/life balance which is CRAZY important for longevity and long-term happiness. The people are a pleasure to work with, they're helpful, knowledgeable, and REALLY passionate about the company. I have an amazing Manager who advocates... for me and it's been such a great experience. 2. Projects: The projects here are those you can't find elsewhere simply because Airbnb is a one-of-a-kind company. A lot of the operational problems we're building and fixing haven't been navigated before. You have a chance to create new processes, projects, and impact in this industry. 3. Culture: This place is serious about its culture or "Core Values": do the right thing, advance the mission, don't backstab, don't throw people under the bus, and stand up for the underdog. To give you an idea of the kind of people we want: one of our people raised $20 million for immigrant kids separated from their parents on Facebook-- the largest fundraiser in Facebook's history. 4. Benefits + Compensation: They'll comp you properly, trust me. Airbnb gives a generous total compensation package with lots of stock, fully covered health care/dental/vision for you, $500 in Airbnb credits per quarter, free food (breakfast/lunch/dinner), and all the cool Silicon Valley perks. 5. Flexibility: Work from home, work remotely, take PTO-- just make sure your projects get done. A+++ on this.

Cons

1. Disorganization: Hyper growth mode has created some disorganization and issues with accountability. It can be difficult to get things done with random PTOs and a softer culture when it comes to communication. 2. Career advancement: Upward mobility/ career advancement expectations can be slow or unclear because of the disorganization. You have to advocate for yourself and develop a great relationship with your... manager. 3. Liquidity: Airbnb isn't a public company so those looking to sell their stocks need to wait for a liquidity event or for the company to IPO. As much as stocks are great, they can't pay the bills so giving employees more opportunity to cash out is important for those of us who aren't billionaires. FYI leadership listened to this complaint and they recently gave us a new way to cash out some of our stock + comp which is a great start.

Advice to Management

1. Create and communicate clear paths for career growth and advancement. This is the best way to retain your highest performers who are hungry for more responsibility and impact. 2. Preserve the culture here. It's an amazing and unique strength of the company. You became successful with the current culture; protect it whether or not you decide to go public.

Pros

Good business. Beautiful office. Good work-life balance. Competitive compensation. Some 401k match. Overall nice people.

Cons

Rather political environment - it seems to me that making "friends" and pleasing your manager is more important than doing solid work. Fake and hypocritical. I feel they don't practice what they preach. Another complaint I have is on the engineering side. There are many talented engineers hired from top schools and FB/GOOG/AMZN/LNKD/MSFT, but miraculously the quality of Airbnb's engineering is not that good, as... you can tell from how slow the website and the app are even today. Again, this probably is related to the culture of the company.

Advice to Management

Get rid of those senior managers who only care about their own "career" and how to make their managers happy. Foster more transparent, real merit-based incentives and culture.

Pros

- great benefits and work life balance - good hiring bar - friendly co-workers - relatively little office politics

Cons

They love promoting their work culture and thinks it's absolutely amazing. It's great if you fall very much to the left of the political spectrum like the rest of the company (and SF). But if you happen to have a couple right-wing sympathies like me such as expressing your admiration for Ben Carson in a team lunch, you will be met with frowns and disdain. I overheard an argument where a co-worker said he opposed... universal income and everyone around him started to argue with him. I'm pretty sure if you said you liked Trump in any way, you'd be out of the building with all your possessions in a box. Also the co-founders are infallible and worshipped by everyone on the team. Their "Is Mankind" campaign was a terrible "Emperor's New Clothes"-esque flop but no one dared to correct them.

Advice to Management

Please include "free speech" as a company value

Pros

Love love love. There is so much love amongst people here. Culture fit interviews to weed about people who can't get along with others and does not have team belongingness. Food is not great but good, love micro kitchens. Good work life balance. People are very understanding. Say if you need to work from home for month or few because of some family emergency. Holiday shutdown. Everyone gets off from Dec 20th... till Jan 1st. That's amazing. Very competitive pay. Similar to Google, Fb, Uber, Lyft, Stripe etc. Business outlook is very strong. Where other tech unicorns like uber are burning cash, we are profitable and increasing that yoy. Great product with no real competitor.

Cons

Tech is not that strong. Need some good tech leadership and guidance on the path. Food can be better.

Advice to Management

Keep up the good work. Take your time to go ipo but do it correctly and only when it makes sense. No firing to clean books for ipo. Bring some tech leadership.

Pros

Smart and talented colleagues Good mission Interesting product and problem to work on

Cons

Culture is hypocritical- the founders might not mean to have the culture become what it is today but reality is that people only being a host to manage up. The outside image and recruiting brand definitely looks much better than the reality inside. They recently cut the food team while taking about the brand of AIRFAM when recruiting - no family is disposable for financial reasons, if you cannot stand for your... culture then do not say or brand it. Broken operation - I have been working for several tech companies big and small, the management at Airbnb is definitely on the chaotic side. Teams step on each others’ toes, nonsense frequent reorganization, people get promoted by taking others’ credit. Mid management focus on growing their own career here rather than helping team or their reports be successful. Setting up your authority in the organization or being an early employee is more important than doing actual impactful work. Many managers promoted within the company from early days do not know how to manage and often meddle with employee’s work. Lack of innovation - most of middle management here, as a result of trying to promote their own career, do not take bold innovative approach to the business. The result is a lack of innovation to make impact but rather fine tuning to make their performance review looks good or please their upper management. No work life balance - you are expected to work A LOT sometimes 70-80 hours when you are on certain teams.

Advice to Management

Fix your middle management, find out those who are setting up authority and prevent innovation. Stand up for what you are saying about the culture or not saying it.