Airbnb brands itself as creating community and fostering belonging. Today, former Airbnb software engineer Sahil describes how “Airfam” ignores internal inequities among different workers and shuts down those who question its culture of overwork. Despite it all, Sahil and coworkers built a genuine community based on transparency and mutual respect.

The Worker’s Perspective

By Sahil S.

Finding a Home

I’ve yearned to belong my entire life. Growing up, I was excluded from communities that I saw others accepted in: my family was fragmented, I was bullied away from Indian culture, and I struggled to perform masculinity. Despite having many relationships on paper, I erased myself to fit in. I never felt accepted.

I felt most like my authentic self when I was building things. Work, I had been told by both Indian and American society, was core to my existence, and my joy for computing turned out to be highly employable. If I was useful to my employer, I would earn the money, prestige, and purpose that certified my acceptance. I internalized that if I was useful, I could belong.

In 2016, two years into my career, I joined Airbnb. The company’s mission was, and still is, to “create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.” To achieve this mission, Airbnb championed the power of community, created by millions of hosts around the world “opening their homes.” Silicon Valley treated the founders as visionaries for pursuing such a humane – and lucrative – idea. Their vision seeped into the employee culture. Just as the founders considered each host a stakeholder belonging to the Airbnb community, the executives regarded each employee as a stakeholder belonging to the “Airfam,” empowered to make contributions and shape the culture. I initially gagged at the brand-colored Kool-Aid, but I couldn’t ignore the optimism of the office, its international decor and bright skylight inspiring us to forget limits and imagine only possibilities.

This attitude was especially true for engineers. Our performance ratings were based on, above all else, our ability to “own our impact” to the business. No problem was too big, no goal too ambitious, and we produced, produced, produced. The engineering community was dedicated to the craft and welcomed me. I found mentors and role models overjoyed to build tech that kept business booming and practices that kept the culture great. Being part of this community was more than just work – through small ways like social channels and happy hours, big ways like fine dining and offsites at wineries, and the biggest ways like friendships that shaped my mid-twenties in San Francisco. Here, I could thrive. If what I produced could be accepted by this community, then maybe it would accept me, too.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

One lofty manifestation of Airbnb’s ambitions was its tradition of launches, where we all sprinted towards a big press announcement. Three months into the job, I was put through my first launch. The BBC was planning to publish an article investigating our rising user account fraud rates. To preempt this article, our executives gathered my fiftyish person org into a “war room” and mandated a plan of action to “protect the Airbnb community.” I was eager to be of service. For days, we worked late until 2 or 3 AM, sometimes pulling all-nighters. We patched ancient holes, built new defenses, and polished the user experience. We delivered tons of new features, lowered fraud rates, and enabled a successful announcement to refute the BBC article. I had held my own in the trenches, and as we clinked glasses of vodka, I felt accepted, even proud.

After the launch, org leadership hosted