Airbnb Engineering problems
Does Airbnb have actual hard engineering problems? As someone mentioned on Hacker News today: “the day to day engineering problems Airbnb has are not very interesting. It’s a web app that can handle peak traffic with standard technologies (meaning nothing real time, live streaming, or millions of users at once).”
Most companies do not have hard problems. Most companies are not Google or Facebook working on trillions of tcp packets per minute or whatever. Not every company is Apple or Intel or AMD working on maximizing performance and features in a confined hardware space. At Oscar we also do not solve difficult algorithmic problems, but the seamless end-to-end processing pipeline (such as getting data from vendors and patterns, from providers from customers to Oscar for processing, then back) needs a lot of work. Data-driven operations like marketing and predicting costs can are also difficult in the insurance space. So yeah, eventually I do want to move to a bigger challenge at a much larger scale. So really depends... but there is enough challenge what I do day to day I am content.
Airbnb has engineering? Why can't they even make an app that does not crash??!!
i know someone who works on their fraud detection teams. he seems pretty happy with day to day challenges
I assume the front end team is fun, lots of fun app building
Lots of interesting ML in fraud. Big SOA movement now so opportunities to design new services
High QPS isn’t the only thing that creates interesting engineering problems. There are many unique and interesting problems in trust/fraud, payments, maybe in search as well. Large portions of the eng team work in those areas. And generally things are being reworked across the board at the moment so there are many many opportunities for growth in backend/infra roles.
I’ve also heard from the grape vine engineering is pretty weak at Airbnb. Not many technically challenging problems.
Their hiring process is very thorough and it seems like they have a high standard for the people they bring on. Would you say the talent they hire is put to good use?