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.
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.
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.