Airbnb will build a new tech hub in Atlanta

I don't pretend to be an expert, but what 'tech' is there to AirBNB exactly? A SQL database setup and UI CRUD layers for every popular platform?

Why does this company even need a hub? It could use some extra lobbying power I'm sure, given that it's entire business model is dependent upon them remaining a de-facto monopoly.

Don’t forget a batch job framework such as airflow.

Literally every post about one of these companies has a comment like this. The issue for companies like AirBNB is not that their application is necessarily bafflingly complex (though it is absolutely true that, especially during the nosql era, amazingly baroque and bizarre architectures had a heyday) but that operating reliably at scale is hard, requires good decisionmaking on multiple dimensions, and requires attention to things that "just CRUD app" doesn't capture because none of them actually matter at low scale.

The same could be said about flowers.com, macys.com, or literally any company doing business on the internet. Scale is basically a solved problem so pretending that AirBnb is a "Tech Company" or that they have any interesting tech is incredibly naive.

Does a simple CRUD app process $50bn in transaction across 100 countries ?

Scale is not a solved problem at all.

And yes, the came could be said for other, less sexy companies.

Once macys.com gets a page with all the tech they open-sourced that is actually used at a ton of places outside of the company, similar to that of Airbnb[0], then we can talk.

Out of the ones I personally worked with, Enzyme[1] is pretty much the de-facto industry standard for writing React unit tests. Airflow[2] is used very commonly (our team at a big known non-tech company I used to work at used it about 5 years ago), and so is Lottie[3]. And these are just the ones off the top of my head, given that I actually got to use those. They have many many more that seem to have a pretty high usage. And their tech blog is very insightful, I learned quite a bit from it myself when it comes to my development skills.

And no, I neither was nor currently am employed by Airbnb, not a big user of theirs, not paid to say any of this, and I have no particular liking towards them at all.

0. https://airbnb.io/projects/

1. https://airbnb.io/projects/enzyme/

2. https://airbnb.io/projects/airflow/

3. https://airbnb.io/projects/lottie-android/

Lots of different problems that are complex! For example:

+ Text internationalization system

+ Payment processing

+ User auth

+ User verification

+ A/B testing system

+ User metrics collection from UI

+ offline storage of said metrics

+ data pipelines to process stored offline storage

+ iOS app

+ android app

+ Image storage and caching infra

+ fraud detection

+ search ranking and indexing

https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/airbnb-engineering-inf...