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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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echelon

Have you ever worked at a large engineering org? Your impression might change unless you've seen dysfunction firsthand.

There is work to be done everywhere!

- Keeping the lights on

- Deprecating old and broken systems, finishing migrations

- Tweaking the product. Small optimizations can create massive windfalls at scale.

- Maintaining and updating business logic. Imagine the complexity of laws in all 50 states and abroad.

- Improving product performance so customers don't get a bad impression.

- Improving support flow so fewer supporters can get more done.

- Exporting data, doing ETLs, etc. for analysts.

- Doing greenfield development of new products and features to further growth and deepen the moat so that competitors don't encroach.

Most businesses wouldn't pay for engineers if they didn't think they needed them.

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- Open Sourcing an animation library for After Effects (https://airbnb.design/lottie/)

- Making a plugin for exporting After Effects to JSON (https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-web)

- Porting their open sourced animation library for iOS (https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-ios)

- Porting their open sourced animation library to a mobile framework that another company created that doesn't really have anything to do with its core business. (https://github.com/react-native-community/lottie-react-nativ...)

- Writing a 5 part blog post on why they're moving away from that technology

Look I love Lottie, but it's hilarious to me how far outside of "Facilitating short term rentals" it is. Facebook has the same thread to pull with React. I get that they're "trying to contribute to the ecosystem" but it's like an extension of the PhD for these coders.

That’s also recruiting and media as well as retention work for skilled experts due to the competitive space.

For sure! Need a skilled expert to port it to Expo.

All of this is valid and I don't really disagree, but would add that a lot of these longer lived companies do seem to spend a lot of resources on projects that are nothing like the items you listed and do seem rather pointless.

Except for the bit about laws. Uber and Airbnb are specifically to skirt laws which apply to their competitors.

I have not but my co-founder worked at Uber for 5+ years. He said they had engineers basically building whatever anyone wanted. He said they built their own Slack more or less just because they could.

It's sad, because if they would just travel the world (or look at the data) instead of building unnecesary infrastructure, they would realize how broken the Uber experience is in less developed countries.

Data quality issues, like missing tolls, intersection being different on Uber's map than in real life means that Uber is underpricing drivers, which leads to driver cancellations. It was very frustrating for me to start the whole process again mutiple times after waiting 5-10 minutes and try to haggle with the drivers all the time.

I think it's likely that they don't put much value in delivering a quality product in these markets, where the revenue is relative peanuts compared to first world countries. It's enough just to exist there and claim the territory for the brand. And they can always just blame the sub-par experience in these areas on bad infrastructure. Retaining talent by keeping their engineers happy with pet projects is probably much more important to the company.

They did need them at one point. And the product was successful enough that nobody in management ever had to get around to cost cutting, in the cases of Netflix, Facebook, etc. But that doesn't mean engineers are doing anything important.

I asked a similar question to a sibling comment in this tree but have you considered that there's a lot more than meets the eye at these companies? If the product seems "simple", "done" or "just works" that's a good thing and intentional.

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