Airbnb is considered big tech and it makes a lot of sense why people want to work there (TC/culture etc) but why does the company even need strong engineering? The company doesnt seem like a hard engineering problem to me - a listing website, not super high volume. For example, faang is all massive scale and lyft/uber need to track locations in real time etc. Airbnb on the other hand feels more like a logistics company..? So wondering what I’m missing here - what are some difficult engineering problems they’re trying to solve?
Search/Categorization, Payments, Fraud.
It’s a tech based travel and service agency. It also creates an implicit social network based on that. The company is a pioneer of making a combination of the two, which gives it high valuation.
It’s not big tech though. It’s tech concentrated on vacation rentals. A big tech company is a company that has multiple products over very different verticals. Think Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. They all have products or attempts at products (I.e Amazon tried getting into health care) I can provide more in depth examples if needed but I think these speak for themselves
Airbnb is not attractive anymore after ipo.
Yup. Super hard to attract top talent now.
You are correct. It’s not a big tech company. It’s just a normal business that has some mildly difficult tech problems. And it’s in SF so there’s some tech culture to help out
If I ever want to work there I’ll work only for impact. And yes you’re right no google or Facebook fellow (level) engineer would have any meaningful work at ABB.
Good luck making an impact here
There’s pricing and demand models, Smart pricing, host supply incentives, search and listing bookability, calendar syncing across other hosting platforms like HomeAway and Booking .com, fraud and scam detection, building tools for hotels and property managers, managing local payouts and payments across 72 currencies, etc
None of which are hard.
I wish that were true…
Javascript Style Guide. Hardest problem in CS is to get programmers to agree on standards.
Ultimately, in order to receive the “tech multiplier”, which is why ppl generally care if a company is a “tech company”, you need 1. sustained and unparalleled user growh (30% yoy) and 2. as users grow, your margins increase (aka you used to spend 70 cents to make 1 dollar, now with more users, you spend 50 cents to make 1 dollar). Generally, you need to leverage technology and a great, scalable business model to achieve these. As for technology at Airbnb, I do think we produce innovations at a much faster rate than the market, at least in the travel industry. During covid we released flexible search for dates and location, automated messaging for hosts, chat bots, search/categorization, data science work involved to make unique listings visible, etc. At the end of the day, the narrative can all change depending on the outcome. Almost every large coorporation use internet to operate. It is all about the business model, execution and how the market receives it.
CSS and HTML