I think Airbnb should throw away everything they've done to date and hire all the Hacker News commenters to run their strategy instead.
> it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this.
It doesn't look like anyone from Airbnb wrote this. But you're right, that's a good strategy - instead of the accommodation and experiences thing, they should implement AMP and get paid by Google for it. That's how business works: https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h
Congratulations Brian and Gil on implementing this!
Steve - For the love of god, do not listen to any of this! You should 2x or 3x your prices.
Focus on the users that get the most utility out of the product, and relentlessly focus and optimize for them. There's plenty of value there for people that truly want to learn another language. These price comparisons to Netflix are comically misleading.
This is fascinating. It doesn't look like it's designed for bitcoin miners. It looks like it's the start of a future where computing power is traded for digital goods and services.
I guess my concern is that most recruiters aren't you, and probably aren't anyone commenting on this thread.
My bias is that mass-adoption (and ultimately, online learning as an alternative to a ~100k education) will only happen when an entry-level recruiter is able to filter through and use online courses as a hiring signal. So far, the only people I've seen get anywhere close to this, or care at all, are very technical founders hiring for a very small team, usually in the valley.
Even if they respect the course or what was learned, they don't actively seek these people out. I've seen startup founders aggressively seeking out and trying to hire Stanford / Harvard / Princeton alumni because they're alumni. Yet I've never heard anyone saying "Let's go recruit and hire CS184 grads".
Last summer I took CS184 Startup Engineering. It was a free Stanford Computer Science Course on Coursera, taught by Balaji Srinivasan.
It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.
Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".
My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.
This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.
I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.
