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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know, having spent a significant amount of time with Airflow and Superset, their analytics stack must take an army of engineers, product people, and analysts to use. They have to troubleshoot issues with visits in real time. They have to not double book properties and keep an audit log of every crazy thing hosts do, and detect all kinds of fraud, all while supporting global localization. The have municipal level compliance to manage, and I’m sure a huge back office to help their various legal efforts.

I’m convinced that any business that operates at global scale needs an army of engineers doing, training to do, and coordinating across hundreds of technical areas.

Or is hiring engineers somehow so glamourous that doing so outweighs the profit motive?

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Sorry but are you really citing the problem of “not double booking” properties as one of the reasons Airbnb needs to hire an army of web developers?

“How many developers does it take to design a reservations schema?”

I would put open source projects like the ones you’ve mentioned as more evidence Airbnb has too many idle engineers. I think even Google uses Tableau for their BI analytics stack. There’s not necessarily any business justification for a private startup to have to build that from scratch, and the only way Airbnb could justify working on projects like that is if they had a ton of engineering capacity not already working on the core marketplace product.

Most if not all of the challenges you listed are non-engineering related (legal, compliance, host operations, localization)

Hmmm, then one has to wonder, how did AirBnb become so successful while so many others have failed? It's a mystery that will tease our imaginations until the end of time no doubt. If only there were some clue, some window into their company and culture that could help us explain this puzzle?

But yeah, seriously, how hard can it be to make AirBnb? It's just a couple of tables in a database, a HTML form and a jQuery image gallery.

That's a strawman. No one has stated that the success of AirBnB is easy to replicate, nor that a system of equal functionality is easy to create.

Isn't that just a transactional database and support staff? Sounds to me like any simple bookkeeping software with a web front-end.

In fact, were I inclined so, I could make an airbnb in a weekend. /s

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