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Comment by altonzheng | Hacker News Reader

FWIW -- according to LinkedIn, they have 14554 employees, with the top two functions being: 1. Arts & Design (3365 employees) 2. Engineering (1990 employees)

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I see these numbers sometimes and it’s a bit staggering.

Why does AirBNB need 2000 engineers to display houses for rent in two phone apps and website? Kind of amazing.

There are entire companies that successfully run far more complex businesses with less than 2,000 people.

Damn they really have more engineers than stripe has employees

Lots of custom build HR and Sales tooling would be my guess. Also data sciency stuff (i.e. basic analytics pipelines that poop out pretty graphs for the c-levels).

One thing is good sure. It’s not the sport topping or employees

In AirBNB's case the counterfactual actually exists, and you can check its performance. Craigslist.

Great server performance, terrible financial performance for the shareholders

Sure, it's not like they have complex admin tools, customer service systems and lots of other internal systems...

I always read this comment and and amazed how people here underestimate the complexity of running a large business with global reach and billions of dollars in transactions. Airbnb is in >100 countries and uses home grown payment system. Now imagine the number of currencies it needs to process and number of finance and tax laws that it needs to follow. Also, when you have traffic at Airbnb's scale, architecture and engineering becomes competitive advantage. Every millisecond of performance improvement or every last % of latency improvements lead to dollars. Finally, Airbnb is heavily regulated at the regional and city level. So I am assuming they require army of lawyers and ops people at these regions to comply. This is a start, and I haven't even touched the customer support side or defense against fraud and other malicious actors.

> Every millisecond of performance improvement or every last % of latency improvements lead to dollars.

I just pulled up their front page for Vancouver and it took 3 seconds to load completely. Just the initial HTML server time was over 1 second.

It's gotten amazingly slow while it used to set example for other sites.

That said, most real estate related sites suck very badly. It's almost like everyone should stick to a single platform or smth.

Ok, so don’t use a home grown payments system, that sounds daft.

Look at hotels.com, which in many ways is comparable. It has around 1000 employees (one thousand). From wikipedia:

Hotels.com has 85 websites in 34 languages, and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations.

Going back to your comments, you could rephrase some of the earlier comments as: why on earth would you need millisecond performance improvements for a website/product listing rentals?

Hotels.com is part of Expedia group. Expedia has 25k employees.

Millisecond improvement is needed because travel is commodity and bounce rate is very high. If website doesn't load in time, visitors bounce off to other providers

They have 2,000 engineers, not 2,000 employees. Employees are like 13,000.

> Arts & Design (3365 employees)

Wait what? I must be missing something major about their company structure. Any idea what these positions are? There's no way web or app design scales in a helpful way to 3000 designers.

I was surprised myself, and I don't know what they're for. I have heard they are a design-driven company though. Also, they have a magazine (airbnbmag.com)

Might they rent out designers in a Client Services model, where they help owners take good pictures and basically tart up the property profiles?

Likely they're mostly photographers. Airbnb hires a lot of professional photographers to take listing photos. Here's an example job posting: https://careers.airbnb.com/contractors/1404981/

But that posting is "freelance contractor" photographer which means they are not employees. Is AirBnb/LinkedIn counting non-employees in that ~3365 Arts & Design headcount?

Probably? I think it's self-reported. If I was mostly working for Airbnb as a photographer, I might put them as my employer on LinkedIn, freelance or no.

I bet these are not majority employees, but contract photographers or even Airbnb hosts

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