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In my experience, in such a large and "app-centric" company the requirements on the app is changing constantly. Just having a specification that you implement is a hundred times easier than building a constantly evolving target.

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Also, once you have a lot of developers, the urge to over-engineer grows exponentially

Truer words have never been spoken on Hacker News.

This is often driven by the developers who don't want to appear to be redundant (and who can blame them - everyone wants to hold on to their job!)

So in other words, you think they don't have a spec and they're throwing more bodies at the problem instead of fixing their process? That would be very short-sighted, but it could be possible.

Large consumer apps generally are iterative affairs where the engineers & designers have a big say in the final product. At any given time Airbnb probably has multiple cross functional teams building different features.

These teams are probably constantly testing and iterating the final design based on user research and testing.

At least that was my experience working at Facebook on their iOS app.

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