Airbnb's Three Biggest Mistakes
This is the perspective of one lowly engineer who cared too much. For context, I spent 6 years at Airbnb from 2016 to 2022, first as a senior engineer, then an engineering manager and finally as a staff engineer.
Hasnain says:
Learnt a lot from this one.
“Looking back at these three mistakes - destroying our culture through rapid growth, fragmenting our architecture with microservices, and outsourcing our core support function - there's a common thread. Each represents choosing short-term scalability over long-term sustainability. We sacrificed what made Airbnb special - its culture, its technical simplicity, and its human touch - in pursuit of rapid growth and cost optimization.”
Posted on 2024-11-13T07:20:08+0000