
Airbnb Engineering - ChrisArchitect
http://airbnb.io/
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chuckcode
Seems like it is getting to be a trend to write your own workflow engine and
open source it. Spotify has luigi, LinkedIn has Azkaban and Airbnb has
Airflow. I wonder at what market capitalization companies start rolling their
own language like .net, go and swift?

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eva1984
Don't forget Chronos.

[http://mesos.github.io/chronos/](http://mesos.github.io/chronos/)

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toomuchtodo
Isn't Chronos more of a distributed scheduler ("fault tolerant cron") than a
workflow engine?

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eva1984
Distributed job scheduler is, in a larger sense, a workflow engine. It will
need to understand what is the next job to trigger, handle different situation
where job fails\timeouts and do the retry if specified.

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jmspring
"Engineering Culture" photo makes me think of a call center. Why would I want
to do something as brain intensive and doesn't do well with disruption as
software engineering in the environment depicted?

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jmspring
I'm fine with down voting, I still ask the question, how many engineers would
be happy with the closeness of workstations portrayed? As someone who was
reached out to by a couple of recruiters for companies w/ similar setups in
the last couple of days, I don't see this as a selling point. Maybe it is just
an image, but down votes and no comments to contrary say a lot.

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bau5
> I'm fine with down voting

Wow. So brave!

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jmspring
I'd like to understand why as knowledge workers a portrayed environment where
you have minimal space between you and an open environment it a good working
environment? The photo used by the AirBnB add portrays an extreme of the
popular open office concept.

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.

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throwaway549
Because we aren't respected the way other knowledge workers are. Look at the
abuse heaped on us by the press or the anti-tech worker protests in SF.

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ilaksh
What I don't get about these kinds of jobs is, its already built. Its already
scaled. You already created the architecture.

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?

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paul
I remember that an engineer we tried to hire at Google in 2000 turned down the
offer for the same reason -- he thought that all of the interesting problems
were probably already solved :)

The reality is typically the opposite. Most startups are technically
straightforward to start with and only get really advanced with scale.

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bliti
Exactly. Currently working a project that started out as a simple django
application with Mongo db (don't ask me, wasn't my decision). It used Parse,
heroku, and some other platforms. I'm in the process of building what will
replace parse (file storage) using Go, Redis, postgre, and nginx. Then when in
done with that, the main api will get turned over to the same basic
architecture, though with other parts to balance load, etc. This is more
complex because now we have to do a lot more maintenance. Which means that
more code will get written to automate things. More programs talking to each
other and more different parts moving at different speeds. I love it, but it's
complex. And then you realize you are in charge of doing it all. :)

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toomuchtodo
That does sound like exciting greenfield though; sounds like a
refactoring/scale out project.

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bliti
It is exciting! I'm in charge of scaling a business to support an explosion of
users. I say business because I'm also building / extending the sale &
marketing systems, the internal communications, and some other stuff I have
planned out. It's a lot of work but we need it and good tools help me move
quickly. I love scaling businesses as a whole.

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ericclemmons
A lot of negative reactions here. My impression of engineering at Facebook has
been the work ethic seen in Josh Perez's "Alt" Flux library for React.

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!

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spir
FWIW, your "meet the nerds" segment is fantastic, original marketing. I expect
it to catch on. Above all one wants interesting, inspiring, admirable
coworkers.

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toomuchtodo
"Meet Our Engineers" would've been much better copy.

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odiroot
Yeah, the "nerd" thing again. It's obvious some PR guy with us-vs-them
mentality prepared this content.

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warpdude
This is patently untrue. "Nerds" is a self-selected moniker that we've worn
with great pride for more than five years.

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kmdent
They should call it AirBnE.

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tentakull
Wait, as a quirky nerd that learned BASIC at 5, I can't fathom not wanting to
spend the weekend with my peers hacking on projects and yes, just maybe,
changing the world. But not before I meme-bomb Larry and start a nerf war!
Being an adult is neat.

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jonsterling
can't tell if this is brilliant sarcasm

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jonsterling
Wow, a weekend hackathon where employees worked all night
([https://www.airbnb.com/careers/departments/engineering](https://www.airbnb.com/careers/departments/engineering)).
Capital is getting smarter every year! Now you can make workers think that
_they_ were the ones who decided to do unpaid overtime.

(And if it wasn't "required", don't kid yourself---of course it was required.)

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mrdmnd
I used to be an engineer at Airbnb. It's not, in fact, the case that people
are doing "unpaid overtime". My favorite example of this: there are a great
number of people who work there who were MORE than willing to take a free
Saturday/Sunday and host their OWN hackathon with their work-friends when the
company-supported dates proved inconvienient for a lot of us. While it's true
that a lot of the projects were company focused, a great deal were purely
"stupid shit nobody needs and general shenanigans" projects. It's not the kind
of place where people feel forced into working in a silly way. It's an awesome
place full of rather clever people.

/endrant

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mtbcoder
> It's not the kind of place where people feel forced into working in a silly
> way.

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.

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x5315
"Meet the Nerds"

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TheGRS
That made me cringe a little. Especially when the rest of the page seemed
pretty professional (save for the now industry-standard cartoon icons
everywhere).

