throwaway-1283

Why are there are so many "fake trend" articles? If you find 2-3 groups of people doing something weird is that a "trend"?

I feel like if you're a knowledge worker who isn't interested in management, the IC path is short-lived in almost any profession (not just SWE), no?

To me, the future isn't very bright for anyone who just wants to be an "employee" for the rest of their life, coder or not.

OTOH, the manager path is dangerous in recession times. You lose a lot of "hard" skills, and if you lose your cushy manager job at company A it isn't necessarily obvious to company B what value you have when things are tight.

What do you mean "pay back"? If you're talking about liquidation preferences those all go away in an IPO.

Basically what will happen is that in some month X after IPO the company will be forced to pull back on new driver incentives (the thing that is really making these companies bleed cash), which will slow driver supply growth, which will increase rider wait times and/or make prices spike, which will lower demand, and thus slow growth, and kill the stock price.

I wouldn't touch this at all. Or short it if you're brave :)

I think there's more appetite now because the housing crisis in CA has really reached a tipping point (IMO). There's plenty of inflow into cities like Vegas from CA. Housing prices have rebounded but still relatively speaking cheap.

Reno is really small, but agree it's too bad Vegas hasn't become a major hub for more companies. The best thing is there are so many cheap direct flights, especially during the weekday. And only ~1hr from SFO and less than that from LAX...

Dry heat is fine. It's the humidity that makes heat miserable.

Yes, by "golden age" I'm referring to the fact that "business class" has transitioned from angled lie-flat big economy seats to a mini first class.

I've considered moving to Austin (like so many others). I think my biggest concerns are 1) lack of good public transit 2) scorching humid heat ~5 months of the year 3) not a major airline hub.

I honestly wish Vegas became the tech dream that the Zappos founder had tried to build like 10 years ago. I would move there in a second.

Yep - we're living in the golden age of business class travel. Business class on every major international airline has some variation of a reverse herringbone lie-flat seat, which is the killer feature for paying for a premium seat in the first place (e.g. some privacy + lie flat seat).

I'd have to see the details, but I'm pro something like breaks up the talent monopoly that FAANGs have, especially in the Bay Area.

Early stage startups can't compete for talent in the Bay Area. If breaking up giants creates more competition for talent, then I'm supportive.

Biggest reason I can think of is that airlines have so heavily invested in business class over last 10 years or so to the point where business is nearly as good as first class has been at a fraction of the price.

I've had the privilege of flying international first and business class flights several times over past few years using points (including Singapore Suites), and business class has gotten so good (lie flat reverse herringbone configuration) that there's hardly a difference between the two except a slightly bigger seat and marginally better food but 3x the price.

We are living in the golden age of business class travel.

I'm not saying a "tech" company has to be defined by how "hard" the tech is, or that a "tech" company isn't a "tech" company because it isn't working on LIDAR or AI.

I'm just pointing out that Airbnb's application of "tech" isn't necessarily "hard" tech, relative to other companies that it's usually associated with or compared to in the SF startup scene.

Well like every tech company the entire purpose of an externally facing engineering blog is to maximize their "tech/employer brand." That's the whole point. I would also guess that some of the projects highlighted are could probably fit into "complexity for complexity sake" e.g. teams of bored or overzealous engineers who are trying to justify their jobs by working on complex things that are probably overkill for the actual problem their trying to solve. That's pretty common.

I'm just pointing out that the nature of Airbnb's business means that there's no real-time, no streaming, no billions of concurrent users, etc. The tech boils down to a 1) web app 2) payments mechanism and 3) messaging. Nothing particularly revolutionary on the tech side.

I'm not suggesting they don't have engineering challenges, but if you stack ranked the engineering challenges by difficulty across Airbnb, Uber/Lyft, Google, FB, Netflix, Amazon, Dropbox, Pinterest, etc. I don't see how Airbnb would not very easily rank last by a long shot.

Airbnb is basically just a prettier craigslist with a payment transfer mechanism and messaging. It isn't to say it isn't a great business, just that the "tech" part of it is not really much more than a web app.