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AirBNB had less than a few thousand employees in their HQ, I think their engineer count was under 1000. In the scheme of things that is not a lot of engineers.

by novok 6y ago

AirBNB had less than a few thousand employees in their HQ, I think their engineer count was under 1000. In the scheme of things that is not a lot of engineers. And Uber did not write their own slack, they set up a mattermost instance and then put some logos on it. It's a bit more than complex running an exchange server in a corporation. Most of the money burned by these companies was in the operations, marketing and incentive side, not on the engineering side. My estimate at the end of this will be a second tech bubble, due to way more money being printed and given to bankers again, even lower interest rates and surprise surprise, software is one of the few things giving a return, yet again.

Apocryphon 6y ago
Airbnb had around 2k engineers, nearly as many people as the entire size of Stripe (~2.5k): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809778 I'm not saying that engineering is necessarily the cost centers at these companies currently experiencing major layoffs (though the high salaries probably don't help), but it does call into question how much software being written is actually beneficial to these businesses, if they're able to shed engineers just like that.
- novok 6y ago
  The reason why these two companies are having major layoffs is because they are in the travel sector and COVID is a custom made disaster for any company in the travel sector. I think they are hurting themselves in the long run, but they are choosing long term survival and cutting of new incomplete initiatives for the more well proven cash cows, which hurts their future. Also software in many companies managing large complicated multibillion business are a bit of an iceberg. There is a lot of internal software that you are not exposed to as an end user customer. I call it the google search effect. Why so many servers and engineers for a 2 page website?!
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Airbnb and Uber (and Lyft) are far from the only tech companies doing layoffs during this period, though.

by novok 6y ago

Apocryphon 6y ago

Airbnb had around 2k engineers, nearly as many people as the entire size of Stripe (~2.5k): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809778 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809778 I'm not saying that engineering is necessarily the cost centers at these companies currently experiencing major layoffs (though the high salaries probably don't help), but it does call into question how much software being written is actually beneficial to these businesses, if they're able to shed engineers just like that.

novok 6y ago
The reason why these two companies are having major layoffs is because they are in the travel sector and COVID is a custom made disaster for any company in the travel sector. I think they are hurting themselves in the long run, but they are choosing long term survival and cutting of new incomplete initiatives for the more well proven cash cows, which hurts their future. Also software in many companies managing large complicated multibillion business are a bit of an iceberg. There is a lot of internal software that you are not exposed to as an end user customer. I call it the google search effect. Why so many servers and engineers for a 2 page website?!
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Airbnb and Uber (and Lyft) are far from the only tech companies doing layoffs during this period, though.