Pros
Great product Beautiful workspace Respected brand Solid compensation
Cons
Despite Airbnb being one of my top choices when I was switching jobs, I realized that Airbnb looked better from the outside than it actually is. The CEO/co-founder is a designer. Many of the biggest projects have been major design overhauls, resulting in product teams endlessly iterating on how various pages look visually, when there are far more pressing and critical problems that Airbnb can work on. For instance, I have heard that for a project that the CEO was excited about, he sat with the designers at their desks for several hours a week and fixed things pixel by pixel. That is not a CEO's job. That is a designer's job and Airbnb has brilliant designers. This kind of leadership creates a product development cycle where disproportionate amount of time and attention is spent on design, leaving little time for writing, QA, analysis, research, experimentation and eng implementation. This probably explains why Airbnb has had significant churn among product managers. It may also explain why there is a reputation among engineers in the Silicon Valley that at Airbnb, you will be busy, but that you may not work on professionally or intellectually challenging projects. Airbnb 's product development process is a hot mess. It has missed out on important, strategic opportunities to stay competitive amidst growing pressures from nimble and localized home-sharing startups around the world. As an employee, I did not feel empowered to do my best work here.
