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Comment by shimms | Hacker News Reader

As an example of what some of the engineering people do, that wouldn't be an immediately obvious need if you haven't been involved in running global businesses at scale:

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/tracking-the-money-sca...

A tiny part of what they need all these resources for.

Obviously running any sufficiently large business on a global basis is a tad more complicated than simply keeping a website up that can absorb usage spikes.

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I worked on payments at Uber for 2 years, so I know there is unavoidable complexity in operating at a global scale. I would argue payments is harder at Uber especially on the remittance side compared to Airbnb but obviously I’m biased.

I would agree that money engineering is probably the hardest problem they have. But unlike Uber they don’t have any realtime/streaming/GPS-dependent tech.

So outside of payments it’s not clear what “interesting” engineering problems they really have, which means throwing engineers and designers to work on pet projects they’ve convinced themselves is really important to the future of the company but are just...pet projects.

As any company grows, I’d argue that solidifying their identity becomes increasingly more important. Hence, a custom typeface they can use to distinguish the brand.

Whether it will be successful or worth the effort and expense is a different discussion. It seems like a well-designed and cohesive set of fonts, but otherwise unremarkable (in my opinion).

Brand is all they have, since the app is so simple. Saying that a typeface in an app is wasteful is like saying it’s wasteful for Starbucks to commission their own chairs.

...and does Starbucks commission their own chairs? Serious question

Yes, as in their purple chair [0]

[0] https://news.starbucks.com/news/how-a-purple-chair-changed-t...

Airbnb handles hosts and guests paying each other in different currencies. They're also active in 190+ countries. I would say their payments system is more complex than most companies.

Setting up payment interfaces in each currency takes a while but matching isn't hard. FX streams are easy to get, the algorithms to convert currencies so that you avoid exposure are not complicated.

It's probably mostly keeping all interfaces to payment vendors working.

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