[venantius]

I used to work at Airbnb.

Airbnb does not, in fact, have a CTO who dictates the company tech governance and/or stack. They prefer to run things in a federated manner, with individual teams making the decisions that they feel are best for them. While they're encouraged/required to draw up design docs and have them reviewed by an architecture review group, the group's recommendations are non-binding.

This model has advantages and disadvantages. On the upside, it creates an environment where people can take risks and do things that haven't been done inside of the company before. On the other hand, it means people sometimes go out on a limb and push the company into supporting something that turns out not to be sustainable in the long term.

As a matter of personal preference, I like to have a set toolchain that a company is built around. But it would be unwise to suggest that Airbnb's strategy hasn't worked out pretty well for them overall.

[stareatgoats]

FWIW, I regularly use Airbnb for my travelling lodging needs. I usually find what I'm looking for (an apartment with washer, WiFi and many good reviews in the lower price-bracket).

But I always open the site with some apprehension, since I know I'm in for a bad user experience. It's sluggish, and I can't bring myself to appreciate how the layout and even menus differ (or even disappear) depending on which area on the site I visit. It makes navigation cumbersome, and hard to remember how to navigate between visits.

I would switch to a similar service in a jiffy if it had solved these problems.

I always suspected a lack of a top-down coordination to be the reason for these issues, thanks for confirming. I've come to believe that this kind of loose federation strategy mostly suits junior devs (on which a startup might be deeply dependent by all means), hardly a serious long haul business. I expect they will change policy in due course, or perish.

[tvanantwerp]

I've had the exact same problems using AirBnb. I can never rely on things to be in the same place one visit to the next, if they continue to exist at all.

I don't think AirBnb is alone in this. There are many sites and apps that change UI's radically with disturbing regularity. I've begun to wonder if there is a glut of UX/UI people in tech right now, and that this endless cycle of zero-value-added change is just an attempt to justify their continued employment.

[untog]

I actually think the problem isn't a glut of designers or UXers, it's an obsession with A/B testing and multi-armed bandit scenarios. I'm sure that at any one time there are dozens of A/B tests running on the site, and the inconsistency we all see is a direct result. Netflix is a similar offender in this area, I never have any idea where "continue watching" is going to be when I open up the app.

[ForHackernews]

I think AirBnb's strategy has worked out well for them for reasons completely unrelated to any of their technology choices. We're living in a time of cheap airfare, insanely inflated real estate in popular markets, and overburdened local governments unable to enforce regulations. That adds up to great success for Airbnb, regardless of what software runs their website.

[untog]

I think this is an underappreciated point. It's tempting to believe that every tech company succeeded because of the tech, but what if Airbnb succeeded because of aggressive advertising and incentives, financed by hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding?

[ForHackernews]

I don't even think most of these supposed "tech" companies are actually tech companies: Uber is a cab company, Airbnb is a holiday lettings company, WeWork is a commercial real estate company. None of them makes their money by building and/or selling software.

[weego]

They're serving inventory that can almost entirely be described in static content caching layers with a booking system layer.

How many risks and how much necessity to do things no one has done before can there really be?

[sokoloff]

I disagree. I think you're thinking primarily of AirBnB's main listing pages.

What about recommendations? What about map or multi-constraint search? What about fraud detection/prevention, activation/reactivation email triggers, an analysis system to help hosts be more financially successful on the platform, building an ecosystem of services where people can make money while helping hosts make money, SEM optimization, the ratings/reviews system, the communications between guests and hosts or guests and support, or 20 other things that are likely going on under the covers? Their mostly static content is likely just the visible tip of the iceberg.

I saw a javascript course the other day that claimed it would teach how to "build a full AirBnB clone in this course". I chuckled.

[venantius]

This is the correct answer. When you search for listings in Airbnb what comes back is heavily personalized.

Of course, that only accounts for one of the various pages you'll see in the checkout flow, and I agree that not everything is as snappy as it could be. But keeping things snappy turns out to be a very hard problem when you're growing as quickly as Airbnb has.