Airbnb Engineering
airbnb.io
airbnb.io
Wow. So brave!
In the last two years I've worked in "open office as portrayed", a more isolated open office, as well as at home. I know my preference.
I still ask why is this a motivator on the cover of the digital equivalent of a glossy magazine?
This has nothing to do with the company (I use airbnb regularly), but the portrayal of environments.
A justification, I get emails regularly, I have no commute. The recruiters that reach out to me I simply ask, "so, I have no commute, can you encourage me to further engage with that first hurdle." So far, none can. Simple question, I've got a great job, sell me on what you have. Reality is most established companies at this point just want bodies to fill positions.
Disclaimer - I've passed on two founding CTO positions (over the last 2-3 years) because my risk averseness wasn't in sync at the time asked.
I see this post as a recruiting glossy and asked my questions as such.
I'm right there with you jmspring. I would not be happy in that environment and I happily pass on each and every company with floor plans that would make my job harder.
How interesting could those kinds of jobs really be?
And if you really need or want world class talent, why would you limit the pool to people who want to commute into San Francisco?
Each additional magnitude of scale also brings a new wave of engineering challenges and opportunities.
I'd be shocked if this didn't apply to Airbnb. This is just as much a teaser of what's to come as it is a shrine to what 's been built.
(I personally have don't have the SF requirement nor any comment on that - Kaggle fully supports and promotes a distributed workforce)
The reality is typically the opposite. Most startups are technically straightforward to start with and only get really advanced with scale.
Maybe its AirBnB's primary product, but it made me think of the old Mapquest vs Google Maps "war" and how Google Maps eventually won out with continuously improving on the core product, even thinking waaay outside the box by strapping cameras on top of moving cars to construct a huge VR map of the world. I'm sure when Mapquest was new most people were thinking it was already a perfect product for what it did.
The truth is that every year is way bigger (and thus harder) than the previous year. We have a graph that shows traffic over time vs response time over time, and thankfully those lines go in opposite directions, but it's only due to the continuous work of dozens of engineers as we discover new ways that large amounts of transactional traffic and data can play mischievously together. And while doing that we also have to move the needle on product: if you look at a screenshot of Airbnb two years ago and compare it to today, it's very different (especially on the native apps and mobile web). And the screenshot you'd be looking at is probably just on the guest side, which is simpler: on the host side, we've done even more that's invisible to the casual traveler, like automatic pricing recommendations based on geographic and seasonal data, major investments into fraud detection and prevention, global currency exchange, etc. Not to mention all of the tooling, monitoring, and alerting that needs to happen to support all of that growth.
None of this stuff is free and usually it requires rethinking how old systems work and interact with each other, especially as we do more complex calculations with larger amounts of data. To be honest I'd say we're generally about a year away from hitting the wall, every year. We've made a lot of improvements (when I joined almost four years ago we were maybe... two months away from hitting a wall? Super scary), but if we all just phoned it in the growth in usage would overwhelm us quickly.
Re: San Francisco — yeah, it's definitely tough to recruit out of a single geographic pool. SF is probably the best area to do it in, since there's a large cluster of really great engineers here, but there's no doubt we miss great talent that won't or can't relocate. It takes a lot of work to do remote engineering offices well: how do you make sure that the engineers in satellite offices feel connected to HQ? How do you make sure they work on meaningful projects, but also don't miss out on context and information that comes from humans naturally chatting to the people that are around them? These aren't unsolvable problems (and a number of more-established, older companies have already solved them to some degree, and even some startups that are trying the Moneyball-style approach), but as a team we haven't done it yet. We do have remote non-engineering offices, so it's not impossible to imagine some day having a distributed eng team, but today we're just in SF. Some day, maybe? It takes work but there's certainly payoff for extending your reach.
Right now, you essentially have to be a part time hotelier if you're renting out one or two AirBNB room and a full time hotelier if you're renting out more. The intersection of people who both have room free and are willing to be hoteliers is pretty narrow. I know people who go on vacations of 3+ months at a time with their rooms empty and leave $10,000 of revenue off the table simple because it would be too much hassle to figure out how to effectively AirBNB or craigslist the room.
What I want is a magical team of professionals who enter my house an hour after I've left for vacation to find my house in whatever messy state it's in. They clean, tidy, professionalize and convert my house into something that's rentable to other people and I don't have to think about my house while I'm away, everything is handled for me. An hour before I get home from my vacation, that same team of professionals restores my house back to exactly the way it was. I'd even be willing to split the revenue 70/30 AirBNB's way if they could handle this because the alternative is $0 for me.
Moving up the value chain and taking over more of the travel experience is also something AirBNB is uniquely capitalized to do. AirBNB is experimenting with this with it's neighbourhoods feature and tentatively trying to become a more complete travel solution. But you could imagine AirBNB being an ad platform for other travel service providers for example. aka: pre-commit to enough museum tickets/sports games/restaurant reservations etc. before you arrive in town and we'll throw in the room for free.
Alternatively, AirBNB could start owning more of the travel vertical. You could imagine AirBNB airport shuttles that drop you off at your AirBNB door (with your key and Wifi credentials provided by the shuttle) if density in a region gets high enough.
It doesn't take much to imagine how much is left to be built of AirBNB as well as pretty much any other technology company. Talk to anyone in any company and they'll tell you they're still only 10% of the way there.
He's been very responsive and helpful to my own projects in the same problem space.
Maybe lots of people are in better situations than I'd expect, but working at Airbnb on projects similar to that on a platform tons of people use sounds cool to me!
Maybe they seek other people who prefer that term too. Personally, I write Job Descriptions with the title "Engineer", and refer to my teammates as "devs" or "engs". But if that's their culture that's their culture, no?
(And if it wasn't "required", don't kid yourself---of course it was required.)
/endrant
After reading your post, I'm having a hard time seeing how this is the case. Perhaps people are not directly forced into doing weekend "hackathons", but I'd imagine there is quite a bit of indirect pressure to show up for these things for fear of not being seen as a team player. Although, maybe my own personal experiences have just made me too cynical.
I personally love my craft and often throw myself into it over the weekends, and outside of standard working hours. Since I also care a lot about what my company is working on (I am an employee/fellow, not a founder), that can include job-related work. Nobody at the company is asking me to do it, and I'm not doing it out of pressure or guilt. It's simply more fun for me than many other activities.
A healthy life outside of work and programming is important too. I don't spend every weekend at the keyboard, and I do try to sleep 8 hours a night. When I don't feel like going into the office, I don't. I'm my own boss and if I choose to the contribute to the world through a company I didn't happen to found, but do believe in, that's my prerogative. I don't know anyone at AirBnB, so I don't know, but I imagine the same may well have been true there too.
The current culture is, "hey thanks NERD for geeking out on that distributed systems BS, really helped me out on my last sales call/commission."
Then the "NERD" gets to wonder what the F to do with their life come their mid 30s, while said sales person is set.
But yeah, let's keep calling ourselves nerds and allowing this to happen.