All I can gather from this is Airbnb has way too many engineers and designers for the amount of actual work there is to go around. At the end of the day, the day to day engineering problems Airbnb has are not very interesting. It’s a web app that can handle peak traffic with standard technologies (meaning nothing real time, live streaming, or millions of users at once). I have no clue what most engineers would be doi…
The designers do a lot of product development-- or it seems that way based n the narrative. The website is not AirBnBs product, they sell the entire experience. I get the sense it is a much more designer centric place than engineering.That said, i am sure the engineers are optimizing not only the site but the reams of inbound data that comes with a global business. Clearly they must defend against fraud, protect their users, do identity verification and other data intensive predictions. Its up to you whether these are "hard" or "interesting" but they probably do have a ton going on at their scale and while it is conparatively simple to google/fb i think you are dismissing a lot of challenges that may not be immeadiately obvious.