People have to eat. Maslow's hierarchy of needs and all that.
Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.
It's good to see that despite all of the astroturfed "Journalism" on the death of remote work the data appears to show otherwise. The engineer market dictates the terms of employment. It seems that, based on this, remote is here to stay. That's good news for myself and others that would otherwise have very little reason to stay in tech. For example, the area I've lived in for the last 25 years has a small tech community. Mostly curmudgeonly old companies with a "tech" wing that is chronically underpaid. Think $90k for a senior a position. Given how expensive my house has become in recent years there's no way that's even possible to choke down.
Rails being the most in-demand skill is relatively unsurprising. It's becoming the web's very own COBOL. Millions and millions of lines of RoR code from over a decade ago needs to be maintained and these people are in high demand. I've seen a lot of new shops spring up that use RoR too. The trend with these places seems to be foreign developers and juniors powering the company. RoR, while it has it's problems, is still the perfect tool to extract any real power a developer has. It's about as close to WYSIWYG as we can come without going to dreamweaver.
It is interesting Python didn't make it into the in-demand skill list. I suppose the language is relatively niche still. It just feels like an in-demand kill to me because I work in data engineering. It's similarly interesting Go scored so high in demanded skills. Even outside my field it's still very niche despite all the posts you see. It leaves me suspect of their data somewhat.
I don't know. Almost every back-end position I see requires Python (with a few exceptions that require Go or Rust). I filter for stuff that hires remotely and/or in France, so there is a bias.
If they banned IMSI catchers it just makes the job marginally harder. When I mean marginally I truly mean MARGINALLY. Right now a police officer can fire up some software, draw a selector box around a region, and pull everyone who was in that region inside some timeframe. They don't need an IMSI catcher for that. Cell phone data from advertisers is often enough. It's real minority report pre-crime level shit. This of course all ignoring the fact that IMSI leaking happens with EM emissions which can be argued are incidentally picked up anyway and therefore information that doesnt require a warrant. Like a license plate for your car.
We need much, much stronger privacy laws. But first we need to get people into congress that actually care.
This comment is gold. Another way to attack the problem is to educate end users.
How do we convince Bob down the road that giving private information to corporations is a cause of some of our own problems? Usually I get retorts of condescending looks with a “I’ve got nothing to hide” -type response.
We need to draw the whole problem space out for regular people somehow but it’s big and complex.
Well yeah, but the police will ignore the laws, do a parallell reconstruction, and do whatever they want.
We must take away the tools that make their illegal works possible. One of them are imsi catchers, the other is location access to apps on phones, especially when the app is closed, then better authentication schemes must be implemented (some of it is done with 5g, but eg 2g is completely broken), etc.
IMSI catchers are not passive listeners, but actively transmit and act as if they are a legit tower and let phones connect to them, identifying them only because phones send identifiers to them. Passively listening to signals doesn't do much on newer networks and even with older (eg. 2g) only works if you capture the first connect to the network (when IMSI is transmitter, after that a temporary TMSI is used).
Signal isn't overloaded. It's use here is the same as it's use elsewhere. It just requires contextual information to know what it means. A Qt programmer might think of signals and slots, a UNIX programmer might think of UNIX signals, etc. Jargon sure. Overloaded? I don't think so. Only thing here that bothers me is how vague the title is.
> Money aside, did you ever leave a job you were happy with to find one where you were even more happy? Did that work?
I understand you said money aside but money is genuinely all you should care about. You are trading decades of your waking life to the rat race. It should be your first, and in my opinion, most imperative concern. If you were truly a generous and austere person you'd be a volunteer.
Frequently. I've only recently maintained "tenure" in my later engineering years. Mostly because I don't want to fight with scrappy new grads for positions anymore. First piece of advice I can give you is ignore anything about "fun tech stack" or "culture". It's all bullshit. Of course, parrot the lines they want to hear about how these are the things you look for. Appear fun and excited to work in their "fun stack" in their "culture". Use this as cover for what you really want: money. At the end of the day money may not buy happiness but I have rarely met a happy person that can't afford to be comfortable. Beer coolers, pizza, ping pong, and "fun activities" don't buy you time with your family, friends, and neighbors. Money does.
Second piece of advice: never fall for the "find a job you love" trope. Remember this: if you do not own the company you will never love it. You may like it. Hell, you may enjoy it. But the specter of a layoff, getting fired due to a bad review, etc will always be just a few steps behind you. Always remember as a software engineer the pinheaded MBAs have you squarely under the "cost center" line in the balance sheet. And no, getting shares in a company does not imply ownership no matter how many times HR tells you so.
Fact of the matter is for the first two decades of your career you should honestly be looking to move on from any company in <= 5 years. So, a minimum of 4 companies in 20 years. You'll want to reduce that to a move-on-rate of every 3 or so years if you're in start up land. Loyalty is not awarded. Not here, and not anywhere else. That ship sailed 50 years ago.
The reason? More money and more responsibility. You have a chance to redefine yourself at every new job. These redefinitions can bring you more money and more power. More money and more power is very "sticky" and you'll find people who "fail up" execute this strategy brilliantly. You are more likely to see a significant raise via quitting than by staying around. This advice is universal. It applies equally to tech as it does to landscaping.
Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. Don't leave a company that values you and gives you good raises every so often. Evaluate carefully the opportunity cost. One example from my career: I had a job where I made $X where $X was a little below average. I liked the company and the people. I interviewed around after I got my second or third "money is tight" in a review (despite others seemingly getting rank and pay). I found a company that I could tolerate willing to pay me 1.3x $X. That is a slam dunk. Without question I put my two weeks in and GTFO. Especially when you are young this is very important. If your raise is 10% and a competitor offers you 15% you may want to weigh other facts. But when you're talking multiples of your potential raise...just leave. You are not married to the company and they are CERTAINLY not married to you. If you like your coworkers that much get their phone numbers and meet them at a bar. Despite the himming and hawing from your boss they're probably doing the same thing as you.
I don’t think this is great advice. I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical take that does not apply so well to the kinds of jobs that many people have at HN. I think the main way that money (above a point) matters a lot is that it tends to correlate with other good qualities like not being stressed or overworked, being respected by your colleagues / bosses, etc. So I think it mostly isn’t like you choose between company A and company B where they are equivalent except company A pays less to have beer and ping pong, but rather that they aren’t equivalent and company A probably has beer and ping pong and pays more. Indeed, I think one should be wary of abnormally high pay (compared to competitors) as the high pay may be required to compensate for poor conditions. Given the amount of one’s life spent working, I think it’s good to find a job you like. Certainly, I wouldn’t knowingly trade a $100k raise for e.g. being yelled at every day or working 6 days a week, but I think this isn’t a commonly offered trade for the reasons above.
There do exist companies that value tenure more than others. An easy example to describe is that Amazon backloads their stock awards so if they say they will give you $X over 4 years when they hire you, you might get (made up numbers) 30% in the first two years and 70% in the next two. One explanation is that this is to make it cheaper to hire people because many will hate the job and quit after two years, but another is that it expresses that the company values long-tenured employees. One can survey salary reports online and get an impression of whether the company more values people with a lot of experience at the company or people who were recently hired.
> I think this is an overly certain and overly cynical
Like most engineers I didn't start out that way so perhaps you are right and a few grains of salt would make it better. However, I do not think the average HNer represents a weird aberration of happiness on the scale. I think most companies that hire on this site likely chronically underpay people. Not their fault most likely. HN caters to early stage startups.
However, I think my overarching message is clear. Happiness is entirely relative. At any rate, you should never prioritize happiness over financial security because you should be well compensated, first and foremost, for the time in your life you will never get back. Your compensation should be even better for dealing with a bad company. You might argue that spending those hours of your life in a relative happy state is healthier. I'd agree. But to me, that eventuality comes about after establishing good pay. I don't plan on retiring extremely wealthy but I think I'll be okay looking back at the sacrifices I've made sitting on the veranda with fewer financial worries. Perhaps this is a uniquely American perspective. I don't know.
Certainly, trading $100k and a good job for $150k and a job that gets you yelled at all the time is not a very good trade. Analyze the opportunity cost. The big point here is two things I think and I think you'd agree:
1. Analysis of opportunity cost is important. That means, to me, quantifying "happiness" with some dollar value. Is happiness worth $10k to you? $30k? I guess it depends. I'd actually quite enjoy a research position, for example, but I cannot take the make-ends-meet-and-no-retirement pay that most academic positions give.
2. People are often afraid to leap into a new position. To me, this is because they fail to quantify happiness with some dollar value. People often use qualitative metrics. Those are useful but only in the context of the quantitative reality.
I mostly assume people here are above the threshold you describe but maybe that’s just wrong? I think the uniquely American perspective is software developers getting paid very well at plenty of big tech companies. That’s the kind of compensation that people who go into biglaw or investment banking would get without the poor working conditions or high barriers to entry. That sort of compensation is much less common in Europe, even from the same American tech companies. A thing people often say is that this compensates for high cost of living but plenty of European cities are expensive and cost of living adjustments for these companies in the US often aren’t so large relative to the compensation, presumably because people could threaten to move to a high-CoL area. Maybe this will stop being the case (software developers might get paid less in the US) at some point. And maybe that is already happening (stock prices no longer massively increasing making stock grants magically worth more) to a lesser extent.
Personally, I think most people don’t quit because of a lack of quantitative approaches but rather because they are afraid about losing what they have, ending somewhere else that’s worse, making big, irreversible-seeming decisions, etc.
The reason for that is there are only a tiny number of crimes that qualify as RICO predicates. We need to expand RICO to include more types of criminal activity.
The main driver of RICO, however, wasn't to stop racketeering. It provided the provisions for the FBI to pursue mob bosses for hits they ordered. Prior to RICO it was very difficult to throw a mob boss in jail for such things.
All we need to do is extract that portion of the bill. However, I suspect the answer is like usual. Congress does not represent the people and their corporate owners would not be pleased. Larry Fink would probably have a millenia worth of consecutive life sentences alone. We might spur innovation in healthcare technology just making him serve the time he owes.
Yeah, I don't think I want a job that asks such questions. I've done the webscale BS. I've done actual architecture that exists in reality. At this stage in my career there's nothing an interviewer can do but insult me.
You might say that this is hubris about my own skill but it has nothing to do with how good I am. My resume has a LOOONG track record of consistent work in the industry. Call my references, do some actual DD on me, then ask me real questions related to actual things.
If leetcode and all these other service went straight to hell tomorrow the world would be a better place. This entire "interview" industry is propped up by a bunch of leeches capitalizing on a recently extremely popular field. Then, injecting their BS to make the process harder thereby earning them dollars. The linked article is a perfect example. It's actually an advertisement if you look close enough designed by these exact leeches. This is just a reimagining of the bloodsuckers who run SAT/GRE/GMAT prep services and "ex-ivy-league recruiter consultant" bullshit. They are the same people and the only place they belong is all the way at the back of the breadline. That may be too generous for them anyway. There are better people that deserve the bread.
There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer. They "level the playing field" by asking me these stupid things. That is why it is insulting. I almost want to leave the industry entirely than have to do the process one more time. I don't need a 7 phase 360 interview with everyone including the CEO's cousin to insure I am a "culture fit". It was never like this before. It needs to stop.
Companies already look at resumes, and the interview is a good way to double check things in a pass/fail manner. It's not like the SAT where you take a single test that sorta determines where you go, but even that is useful as a broad measure. Like if I'm in a top school's admissions and see 1800/2400 (idk the new scoring), there'd better be an explanation. If Amazon saw my resume and I couldn't explain to them generally how I'd architect the backend for their lockers, something would be wrong. And sometimes something is wrong; I interview someone who clearly doesn't know how to code and must've lied on the resume. I don't know how else you're supposed to do it.
At the higher levels, they're also testing for humility.
These interviews are not gutchecks. They are shibboleth checks.
I can design you a nice document, do the research, put the pieces together, etc with the big picture. I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents.
What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense. That's the purpose of the bloodsuckers I mentioned above. If you can train someone with little architecture experience to pass a senior level interview by just saying the right things and knowing the right hype tech then you're not hiring architects you're hiring grifters.
It's a problem that is endemic in this industry. You can't "gut check" 30 years of architectural experience unless you're legitimately asking the core questions of architecture. Every interview I've been in has had me studying stupid buzzwords from cloud technology and every interview I am asked how to use these technologies. As an example, I was once turned down because I didn't use Kafka. I knew what the underlying technology was and suggested using it but the fact I didn't say kafka eliminated me. The reason? I can only guess, but it's likely because the interviewer doesnt know much and was looking for a way to get into a debate over kafka vs protobuf vs whatever instead of discussing actual planning of a system. These debates are resolved after I take the problem back to my desk and think about it for a week. Not in an hour. In an hour the best I can give you is a block diagram with maybe some very rough fleshed out detail.
The humility check should be bi-directional. It has been my experience that interviewers tend to be the least humble people at a company. The power dynamic is obvious and it's not in the character at most startups where a "senior" engineer high on hopium can settle themselves into their rightful place.
> I may not know a ton about AWS or another cloud provider but I can put the document together that describes how it will be looking when it's done. That is architecture. Somewhere between UML and word documents.
> What these interviews are checking, and the one you are describing, is whether or not I can parrot the correct code-words. Lambda, elastic cache, all this other nonsense.
Maybe we've just had very different architecture interviews. All the ones I've given or received were the way you'd want. I've never specified a cloud product in these. At most might say "let's use something like Postgres." Amazon for instance didn't care that I couldn't name any of their products.
Kafka example sounds awful. I'm sorry, but on the other hand, sounds like you dodged a bullet.
> There's a good chance at my career phase I have more experience than the interviewer.
This happens a lot.
I was once in the process for google and was asked a time series systems design problem. I said, “lets throw this in a time series db”. The interviewer had no idea what a time series’s db was. Mind you this was an interview for Google Cloud and the person worked on SPANNER. They also has been at the company for 2 years (by their own admission).
How can someone less experienced that you gauge your competency for a position that requires more experience than they have?
That’s before wondering why they’re asking a question to gauge my competency when they don’t even understand the nuance of the question themselves.
An interviewer working on google’s enterprise nosql db but not knowing about (at least on a surface level) the breadth of nosql dbs doesn’t seem crazy to you?
The tech interview circuit has really become a bunch of people asking questions that they couldn’t really answer themselves without a rubric in front of them (whether leetcode or system design).
To be crude, it’s a bunch of nerds hazing for jobs.
If my house had a pest problem, I would need to hire an expert in pest-control. I need to do that without being an expert myself. How should anyone be able to hire someone with more experience than themselves, in your view? I've sometimes had to 'hire my own boss'.
Maybe the criteria for the problem was less "did they check these boxes" and more "could they be a collaborative mentor willing to work with even the junior members on the team" in the context of designing a system.
> If my house had a pest problem, I would need to hire an expert in pest-control.
The result from the expert is that you as the layman can look around and see no pests (which anyone with their naked eye can do)… you’re not judging them on their knowledge of pesticides.
> Maybe the criteria for the problem was less "did they check these boxes" and more "could they be a collaborative mentor willing to work with even the junior members on the team" in the context of designing a system.
This is a fantastical maybe. The interview was system design.
why not design it ? Anyone can say to throw in a time series db but what about it's internals ? How do people judge if you can build or add a feature without asking you to design something ?
If you can't be in a room with a more junior engineer and explain your ideas in simple language by drawing a few boxes on a whiteboard, then yeah you are probably not a good fit for these positions.
If you want to explain what a timeseries db is to someone who has no clue in a 45 minute (already time constrained) systems design interview (where you’re supposed to be actually showing how you would design a system), be my guest.
The issue could be time management and every database has same set of features but different implementations.
One of my teammate keeps talking and sometimes loses the context. We usually step and get on track. He has improved a lot in past few months. You might be in similar boat.
I know how to give concise descriptions of complex problems. The issue was that the interviewer didn’t understand the proposed tool.
Every db definitely does not have the same set of features. The read and write characteristics of dbs vary widely, the underlying storage and indexes vary as well.
There’s a huge difference in usecases between postgres (relational), redis (in memory cache), and influxdb (timeseriese)
You are supposed to structure it. I know their internals on a high level but I work with internals of a oss engine. I know how their read / write paths vary, data structures for storage, for locking, for request scheduling, checkpointing algorithms, scheduler, etc.
The point is you've to structure your knowledge in a way the other person can understand. There is no value for any company, if you can't share whatever knowledge / experience you've in a structured format.
Not everyone is familiar with internals of commonly used tools but the underlying patterns or concepts remain the same.
If you can't explain that, then you are lacking in communication skill or maybe no one ever gave you feedback. It's just a matter of time.
Well said. I’m nearing 30 years industrial experience. The last interview I had was 6 engineers and the HR chick all in the room grilling me. Next time I’ll get up and leave.
You might be able to handwave some things in politics. They're either too old, too lazy, etc. They're just politicians trying to find a nice box to put everything into because otherwise you can't make laws. It's the fundamental problem with legislators that take a salary and are not volunteers for a short period. When you need people to justify their pay they start finding heuristics, no matter how awful, to create more laws.
The problem is the precedent, globally, of killing encryption is well documented. There is no good solution that doesn't harm everyone. Here in the states, the Clipper Chip [0] was the textbook example of politicians trying to legislate mathematics. You wouldn't even be able to do something like "give us a copy of your private keys" because then you'd go down the path of playing wackamole with every distribution, every slightly recompiled GnuPG, etc. It's an intractable problem. We, in the US, would've gone a long way by stripping Dorothy Denning's CS PhD from her [1] after her outspoken support of such measures. Instead she has received many awards for her "work" in the field of rights erosion.
The US seems to have settled on making attempts at Clipper 2.0 every decade or so. In the meantime encryption is considered a weapon legally which is how the DAs get their fill. Germany appears to have flat out opposed it...but it's only a matter of time. The EU will force them to bend the knee because historically they always have. It's a fantastic effort. Unfortunately, done by one of the biggest pushovers in Europe.
There's no hope for the technical among us. The people with power who do understand, the technocrats, are behind these efforts. The people that don't understand are behind these efforts. It's only the intractability of the problem that makes legislating it dangerous. Once someone clever enough makes it tractable there won't be encryption anymore. Pre-crime is the way the world has worked since 9/11 and encryption is #0 on the list of things to legislate to death. In the US, there are likely hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars being spent to store every last bit of communication in Utah for this eventuality.The EU has a similar program. Those tax dollars have to be justified somehow. So when you ask "who would support this"... just follow the money.
I find it unlikely that taking away someone's Ph.D. would accomplish anything positive.
How do you envision this would work in general - an angry Twitter mob demands that academic degrees are revoked, and when the mob gets sufficiently large and angry, the university who awarded the degree buckles under the pressure?
If not a Twitter mob, then who makes these decisions? The Central Committee of the Party? The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice?
I'd imagine it would be similar to how the (former) doctor who kicked off the anti-vaccine thing had his Ph.D. revoked, which involved a whole board of his peers reviewing his claims and actions and determining that he caused irredeemable harm. The problem in this case is how CS is such a new field that we don't really have boards and such that will scrutinize to that extent in an academic context, at least as far as I know.
The ACM has a strict code of conduct. If an engineer commits an atrocious error their PE will be stripped. Violating the computing rights of literally the entire planet should be similarly egregious.
It is not twitter mobs. Its about holding people to a standard and not allowing them to corrupt the meaning of computing for financial, or tyrannical, gain. In recent history we have done almost nothing to hold anyone accountable for their actions. Academia being the most impervious to such punishments.
The ACM and ABET would make the decision. The same people who issue the certifications to the schools who award the degrees. Yes, these organizations are generally spineless cowards, but in a perfect world it would be them. Iron-fisted responses to tyrants is the only way you can insure the purity of a field and freedom from their destruction. I assume you will take this to it's natural conclusion and say any CS degree holder working for the NSA/Military/FBI/etc should also be similarly stripped of their title. To that I say, yes, if they are violating the computing rights of others willfully we as a society cannot allow such people to hold the credential. Otherwise a code of conduct is simply a list of suggestions. In which case it should not exist at all.
I cannot find information on Wikipedia about Denning's PhD being stripped away from her. She's listed at Purdue as having one. Where can I read about this alleged stripping of her PhD?
I am generally happy and successful. However, my childhood was filled to the gills with trauma. So much so I visited a therapist and they immediately identified it.
It emerges as rampant pessimism and distrust of anyone and everyone. It's highly beneficial in the corporate world but has irreparably damaged my ability to bond with people. Which leaves me at a impasse as to whether to solve it. Given my age it's not worth it as I am well beyond my years of socializing freely.
Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.
The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.
Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.
Hotels have support. You can actually walk into the hotel and speak to the manager if it comes to that.
AirBNB is a faceless website. If you're banned your recourse seems to be a support line or chat. Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
Meh, good luck going to the manager of your local instance of Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt and getting a corporate-level ban lifted. They're going to tell you that it's above their pay grade, and to contact HQ. HQ will ignore your attempts to contact them unless they come on the letterhead of a law firm. Maybe you can get a ban lifted if it was imposed by the instance, but even then, they're probably just going to tell you to go to HQ.
It doesn't matter if it's SPG or AirBNB: when you're fighting with a large company that (you believe) has made a mistake, the best/only path forward is to get a lawyer involved.
Difference being there are many hotels to choose from, and quite honestly, I've never heard of someone getting banned from a hotel chain (though I assume it has happened).
> Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
Funny enough, Twitter was the best way to get CA DMV support during the pandemic. They'd DM you unlisted phone numbers to call and get things done that the regular website can't. This is the only reason I have a Twitter account.
In a hotel the decisions would be made by a reasonably competent human, and can be appealed to a human if there's a problem.
In Airbnb, the decision would be made by a black-box algorithm, and appeals would be directed to an outsourced monkey who is neither given the training, nor the information, nor paid enough to give a shit, if not stonewalled directly with a canned response.
The reasonably competent human at the hotel is the night-shift clerk making $13 an hour, and his manager, who makes $17, both of whom are utterly terrified of getting fired.
True, but this is still a major upgrade from the $1/hour outsourced drone working in atrocious call-center-like conditions trying to close as many support tickets as possible.
But as long as hotels exist, Airbnb is optional anyway, isn't it? Even ignoring hotels, there are plenty or real BnBs around. I have never felt the need to use Airbnb and haven't suffered from that.
I can't think of any competitors in the same space. Maybe they exist, but they're terrible at advertising. Hotels aren't the same industry. Completely different experience.
I've actually been hearing ads for Vrbo on a lot of the podcasts I listen to, so that comes to mind immediately for me. Searching for airbnb alternatives seems to suggest that there are a number of options out there.
This seems like claiming that a pizza place and a taco place aren't competing because they're completely different experiences - I'm still only going to eat one lunch, and I'm only going to use one service for lodging overnight somewhere
Well, just for the two you, they have combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants, so you can have a choice of pizza and/or tacos, depending on what you feel like eating at that exact moment!
Probably several signals including clustering via IP address.
A couple of years ago I discovered I'd been banned from AirBNB. They didn't notify me this happened and it was months after I'd last used the service (which left a good review), so I only discovered once I tried to log in much later. I know it wasn't related to the prior stay because they'd been emailing me to thank me for being a part of the "AirBNB community" for months afterwards.
As far as I could tell the only possible reason was that my girlfriend had a dumb moment and booked a place for a friend, and that friend then invited other people round in the apartment. It wasn't trashed or anything but the neighbours complained about the noise (they were playing loud music or something). So by the transitive rule of AirBNB: random person I never met makes too much noise once -> girlfriend banned -> me banned.
We weren't married and the accounts weren't obviously linkable in any way, except that we use the same internet connection. So presumably they're clustering based on that.
AirBNB claims in the article that it "employs an appeals process for people who feel they have been unfairly banned". This isn't true. The only way to appeal was to click a button, and because they don't tell you why you were banned and back then I hadn't figured out they were clustering users, all I could write was something like "I can't log in and don't understand why". Then you get a stock email back a few hours later saying the ban was upheld. That's not an appeals process worthy of the name.
I understand the chain of reasoning that leads to this sort of thing, but ultimately hotels don't pull this kind of stunt and have lots of other advantages so AirBNB is dead to me even if one day the ban is reversed. If the model AirBNB is using requires this sort of hyper-aggressive banning of users who have not actually done anything wrong then it's a broken and unsustainable model. Competitors like booking.com clearly don't need anything like this either, so that's where my business goes these days.
For convenience, Airbnb lets you send/share the itinerary with other guests via their platform. That's not literally every customer's relationship status, but it would be trivial to use that to ban known associates of bad actors.
Fact of the matter is Meta has problems almost no one else has. Acting like people will choose less pay and boring work over interesting work and more pay on a moral basis is a little naive. But I see you apparently have a political axe to grind. Meta is not a morally acceptable place to work I agree. However, if you were offered 350,000 USD to work on something hard like a compiler or a data pipeline designed to ingest petabytes of data I'm sure you'd at least think twice about it. For example, you could work at Meta and use the money they pay to fund organizations you support that run counter to Meta's mission. This all not even mentioning having Meta on your resume is basically a golden ticket to the industry for the rest of your career.