Slashdot Mirror
Airbnb Dethrones Google As the Best Tech Company To Work For In the US
An anonymous reader writes: Career website Glassdoor today released its eighth annual Employees' Choice Awards, a list of the 50 best companies to work for in the coming year. Airbnb was picked as the number one tech company to work for in 2016, displacing Google. Airbnb didn't even make the list last year. Google, meanwhile, placed sixth in 2013 and 2014, and first in 2015. As with Google last year, it's worth noting that Airbnb hasn't just taken the top tech company spot: It is the top company overall.
Uhh, yea it is. Whats more, is airbnb has quite a few cool pieces of tech that they've released as open source.
http://nerds.airbnb.com/open-source/
I tried to rent a place through Airbnb. The process went like so:
Me: I'm looking for a room for next tuesday.
Airbnb: What's your Facebook login?
Me: Do I look like an idiot?
Airbnb: How about your G+ account?
Me: I must look like an idiot.
So that was that. I haven't given them a second chance.
They are all only pimps. They manage other people's resources end get their cut. They are not just a middlemen, they decide your part of the business and filter your clients.
I'm not so sure about this. I see your argument that technology is not the core product, but the fact is that their entire business would not be possible without their technology. It's not the same as a grocery store that can run their business just fine if their website goes down.
My test is thus: how freaked out does the management get went when the network has an outage at 3:00 in the morning. If they are full on incontinent then you have a tech company.
Perhaps this puts a lot of companies under that umbrella, but in 2015 is it even possible to treat technology of secondary importance to your business? Such companies are now few and far between.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
I do I.T. support for a company that's heavily involved with the hotel and travel industry, and just got back from the annual company meeting. One of the discussion topics given to a panel of experts there was the impact of AirBnB. The consensus was that it ranges from "not a concern at all" to "relatively helpful to business".
While admitting that the details depend a lot on which city you're talking about, there was definitely the opinion that in many good markets for the hotel industry, they have no problems achieving maximum (or near maximum) occupancy whenever corporate events come to town, or it's "tourist season" in the area. That's really what these guys live for. (It's not such a big deal if your big corporate hotel is relatively empty sometimes, if it rakes in big bucks for 3 months each summer, plus every 3-5 days or so in a row that some big convention is in town, and a few other key times of year like New Years' Eve or the Thanksgiving holiday.)
The smaller hotels/motels that are really worried about Johnny Q. Public who wants the cheapest room deal possible, and would happily go the AirBnB route to save a few more bucks are in a completely different category. In other words, AirBnB competes with the seedy family-owned motels more than the big corporate chains like Marriott.