Ive been at Airbnb for a little over a year now. There is strong collaboration between functions. "How do we design a program that takes care of hosts and also has the right controls, so we don't get over our skis in this time of great uncertainty?" When things are fixed, engineers work with the site reliability team to write a blameless post-mortem. Managers can facilitate this process, but its up to the individual to find the team where he or she can have the greatest impact and initiate a move. Everyone says theyre agile, but no ones Agile. Buzzwordy and strict agile is great, but not easily adaptable to everyone. Thanks to the jump in shares, Blecharczyk boasts a $10 billion fortune. Settlers can come from a variety of backgrounds. Strategy and execution of Infrastructure Security, Software and Services (IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc)@Scale with . You have the flexibility to live and work in 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location.. 4. For example, a Design team may consist of a project manager, engineer, researcher and data scientist. Defaulting to an attitude of support and celebrating others successes. To pull this off, well operate off of a multi-year roadmap with two major product releases a year, which will keep us working in a highly coordinated way. Blecharczyk is Airbnb's digital construction manager. "I ask, what are the critical problems for the long-term success of the Airbnb where context, credibility, data, and tech are going to be crucial. Of course, at the time that was maybe 20 people, says Golden. Its common for engineers to switch teams or contribute to areas beyond the scope of their immediate team. Teams are primarily comprised of engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists, and some teams partner with other departments within the company. Large consumer internet companies have many settlers who work on refining and optimizing product experiences. How to spot them: These risk-taking front-liners need to be scrappy, so look for someone who has entrepreneurial experience already. Cofounder Joe Gebbia is the artist who runs Airbnb's new design studio Samara and its charity Airbnb.org. Being able to decide whats impactful is possible with a clear company strategy to guide the decision-making process. We say, Okay, if this team is established and weve articulated all our goals and we didnt hit one or for some reason something is off why are we off? "It's clear they're implementing their vision across everything the company does." By nature, a team a good team understands that it should do things for the benefit of the team, not strictly to adhere to some organizational model. The goal should be to develop a culture of high trust and a willingness to iterate and make adjustments. This is a critical point, as the trend to understand is exactly that. There are two tracks by which engineers can progress in their careers: management and individual contribution. [1] The latest corporate restructuring at the peer-to-peer lodging companygave more decision making powers to its new business development teams. Each conflict created a one-of-a-kind problem for Airbnb, sapping time, money, and resources. If youve established a vision-based company culture, this is where youll really reap the rewards. Todays employees might value way more flexibility and remote working, rather than open floors, and on-site perks. But what happens when you scale from ten people to 50, 150, 300, and more? I meet with small groups of engineers every week just to ask questions and listen to ideas on how we can improve. At Airbnb, a few steps help counteract this effect: Level titles across teams. Engineers own their impact here, prioritize helping others, default to sharing information, and continually leave the code better than they found it. Because without a process for testing hypotheses, you may quickly find that youre not so much iterating as spinning your wheels. They use the same career structure, from the most junior level to the most senior executive in each group. Prior to joining Airbnb, Ari was VP of Engineering at Google, where he was responsible for core infrastructure and data platforms, including the data and serving systems behind Google Search. The company comprises of six subsidiaries and 75 executives working for 18 different departments. "As incidents have popped up on the platform, Airbnb has reacted with new policies, employees and processes to minimize negative dynamics on the platform.". When youre pushing toward product/market fit, youll need a very different type of PM than when youre scaling or, later, when you achieve scale and move on to platform initiatives. Today more than 100 municipalities are on the system. Im Kenneth and Im working as CTO at Woba, an employee-retention platform. Another one of our beliefs is that engineers can progress just as far as individual contributors as they can as managers. Beware candidates who talk in circles or provide a lot of unnecessary context. No. But its emblematic of the elastic, vision-driven product management approach that has allowed Airbnb to reimagine travel. The five key features of Airbnb's new . Many town planners have technical backgrounds but that is not a hard requirement. Our culture, tools, and processes all revolve around giving individual contributors accurate and timely information that they can use to make great decisions. When youre growing quickly, its important to keep the environment creative and fun. says Blecharczyk. You'll find a lot of articles on architecture and infrastructure, design, and UX, as well as insights into what it's like to work for Pinterest. You wont succeed by simply adopting someone elses model. But most trips on Airbnb have more than one person and once it was in use, we saw that we werent actually addressing the real need, which was for sharing favorites and choosing the best place to stay as a group, says Golden. That code review happens quickly because, again, helping others takes priority. When you do this, you end up wasting a lot more time. Airbnb needed a policy to deploy funds in a balanced way that didn't concentrate the cash to too few hosts nor spread the money so thin that the gesture was meaningless. Good town planners are also entrepreneurs. (Airbnb stayed mum on other factors). Again he dug deep in the data searching for patterns. When you have a team of strong problem-solvers, the most efficient way to move the company forward is to leave decision-making up to individual engineers. "I was the editor of the process, making sure that we weren't making decisions prematurely and getting the team to think bigger," says Blecharczyk. But they didnt have a clear mission that related to an outcome. The product team needs each of these PMs to be nimble and responsive. Fees for Airbnb hosts - Airbnb business model cost. Airbnb's Design team is made up of 4 main pillars Experience, Production, Insights and Content Strategy. Please tweet to @enqueuezero if you think anything is . The right solution should combine the efficiency of Zoom with the meaningful human connection that happens when people come together. This means Open cultures of trust, radical candor, and the growth mindset. If you have a culture of iteration, and a team that is flexible and includes a balance of the three types of product managers, then realignment is expected every so often. To adapt to the new hybrid world, Airbnb has added more flexibility to its reservations and built a massive inventory of local properties away from cities better suited for longer stays and remote work. Was it a flaw in the product vision, strategy, goal, metrics, or resourcing? How to spot them: Look for someone who finds the creativity in A/B testing, someone whos driven by metrics and can tell you exactly how theyd measure the impact of a new feature. Heres what were sharing with our investors and stakeholders each quarter. You can move anywhere in the country, like from San Francisco to Nashville, and your compensation wont change. Keep on top of your work from home life with these tips and ideas from our team to yours. Its not controversial, says Golden. Only then can you make needed adjustments based on established models, you, and your teams dynamics and goals. Their work is the foundation of a data operation as they take large amounts of raw data and prepare it for others who make business decisions, write prediction algorithms, and the like. Take Airbnbs Wish List feature, for example, which was originally conceived as a single-user favorites tool. The standard etiquette here is borrowed from the open source world: someone from the team that maintains the codebase youre touching should review your changes before you merge. Most employees will connect in person every quarter for about a week at a time (some more frequently). And because each of our major goals has a numeric target, we can measure the effectiveness of various projects, learning quickly from our successes and failures. In that process another value is to leave it better than you found it. generally do not have vertical levels which Airbnb clearly does based on their job description postings. Now it is just how we do development. The report also comprises discussions of Airbnb marketing strategy, ecosystem and addresses issues of corporate social responsibility. In high school, he designed a software program and started selling licensesover five years, the basement-built business would pull in just under $1 million. Everybody has the same ownership of impact across data, design, engineering, and product. Engineering team structure is constantly evolving. Data engineer. As an engineer, I've always been good at taking something that's high level and abstract and boiling it down into a program. Its all about lessons learned and identifying why things happened the way they did.. Research from Harvard University shows that team structure is the single most important factor in determining team performance. Organizational Structure. And their explanations should dovetail with the cadence, speed and culture of your company. Combined, these touchstones propel teams into more fertile territory. About us. Zoom is great for maintaining relationships, but its not the best way to deepen them. However, if I start with people, I tend to find a suboptimal solution for the business., Atlassians Stephen Deasy always goes back to first principles. How you work is just as important as the work you're doing. No one is going to tell you exactly how to have impact. Thus, the need to evaluate, and reevaluate, the team structure and adapt as needed. 2018 - 20213 years. Dunbars Number explains that there are turning points at each organization size, and at approximately 150 people, most organizations feel strong growing pains. Tell me about a time you influenced user behavior through product? Airbnb Organizational Structure Case Study Solution. And to scale, you need settlers. For the most part, nobody is saying Im fine, I dont need to grow. People feel like their work can be contributing to the product, to the community, and in a high-growth company thats usually true. Product managers, then, need to work with founders and other company leaders to establish priorities. Almost on schedule, but not on purpose. The Walmart, What Is Teslas Organizational Structure? He hit upon two key insights. Its a way of life at Atlassian. Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere. I think this will become the predominant way companies work 10 years from now. Thats a slightly different makeup; theyre obsessed with growth, theyre obsessed with optimizing.. While building modular product teams, startups also need to staff for their stage. (See sliders graphic below.) To enable agility in an organization, empower your leaders and teams, and leave top-down management for the history books. "He wanted to do something super substantial for hosts and felt that $250 million was the right magnitude.". An accessible, easily internationalizable, mobile-friendly datepicker library for the web. The first question is Did this product or project actually fit into the product vision? Usually it does, but other times weve had to be uncomfortably honest.. Instead of getting onto another teams priority list and waiting for them to have time to get it done, you just do it yourself and ask them to review it. If a team needs to communicate something to the rest of the company, it selects the appropriate lead a data scientist, for example, would communicate the results of a major A/B experiment. Pinterest Engineering. The Functional Core, Imperative Shell Pattern, Drag and Drop in Pure TypeScript and React. "It gave me tremendous confidence and set me on this path of entrepreneurship.". See how software has enabled some of the biggest innovators in the world to thrive like Tesla's AI-infused cars and Airbnb and Uber's on-demand services. Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere, On Spark, Hive, and Small Files: An In-Depth Look at Spark Partitioning Strategies, Building an Effective Test Pipeline in a Service Oriented World, Dynein: Building a Distributed Delayed Job Queueing System, Use Apache Airflow (incubating) to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks, A machine learning package built for humans, Serverless real-time and retroactive malware detection, Easy declaration and routing of your deep links, Hash-like interface to persistent, concurrent, off-heap storage, A view abstraction to provide a map user interface with various underlying map providers, Epoxy is a suite of declarative UI APIs for building iOS UIKit apps in Swift, An Android library for building complex screens in a RecyclerView. Work Life is Atlassians flagship publication dedicated to unleashing the potential of every team through real-life advice, inspiring stories, and thoughtful perspectives from leaders around the world. Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk at the home-sharing giant's San Francisco headquarters. Airbnb, Yammer, Spotify, and other well-known companies. React Native is an open source framework developed by Facebook that allows JavaScript developers to create familiar React components that work across web, Android, and iOS development environments. Navigating and celebrating the complexities of our individuality. And Slack uses a mix of small team triads who work together with other teams within their organization. To that end, he hews closely to three simple pillars: process, context, and listening. The more information engineers have, the more autonomously they can work. 1. If people collaborating on the same project are disjointed or theyre not always interacting, then a lot of the magic of creativity is going to get lost. We have a feature X what is the use case for the feature and how would you measure it? Decommissioning a team is often the harder side of this equation, but there too, let your product vision serve as a touchstone. Not fucking up the culture is paramount. Early on, the team was unsure whether to focus on increasing customers or home listings. And as new people join the team, tell them the history of how things evolved. Research from Harvard University shows that team structure is the single most important factor in determining team performance. Fostering collaboration across teams helps us cover gaps. Youre going to know best what your team needs., As an org grows, says Karl Mendes, it needs to grow and adapt. A small team of engineers took it upon themselves to build out our continuous integration infrastructure, enabling the engineering team to run the entire test suite in minutes anytime they checked in a branch. We thought it was important to incorporate that community into the world and into the Airbnb ecosystem, says Golden. Celebrate those little wins to keep your team motivated, Nonverbal communication in the age of the digital workplace, Whats your vibe? Since design is at the core of what we do, he says, we feel design needs an equal seat at the table. A common challenge in this traditional three-legged setup, however, is decision-making. For instance, technology teams might be organized around front-end or mobile development specialists, matrix teams are cross-functional but report to different managers, and product teams are cross-functional teams who report to the same manager. New hires are put through a two part interview process; technical knowledge and culture fit. Otherwise known as EPIC. Last year, it even got him to Cuba. This is kind of like juggling chainsaws blindfolded looks cool when you pull it off, but eventually youre going to lose a finger. The business taught him two valuable lessons. Airbnb charges a 3% host fee for each booking you receive in the United States. Team Structure. These product managers are much more focused on impact. (McCann, 2015) Airbnb's effectiveness can be seen by their streamlined platforms and revenues. visx combines the power of d3 to generate your visualization with the benefits of React for updating the DOM. Every project should improve our technical foundation. We hire primarily for problem-solving. Blecharczyk's analytical process fueled Airbnb's rapid market growth. Menlo Park, California, United States. Everybody always wants more resources, says Golden. They also have the flexibility to balance long and short term work, creating business impact while managing technical debt. Today marks the rollout of the most ambitious update to our Airbnb app a new entirely mobile way to explore the hosts, homes, and neighborhoods of our community. From 2012 to 2013, Golden managed a team that focused on user tools. Code reviews are an old but a good example of this. First, know your team. As teams form, and reform, its really important to know why youve decided to try a certain team structure. Since the dark days of the early pandemic lockdowns, Airbnb has surged. Airbnb's Finance Infrastructure engineering team is responsible for delivering accurate, reliable, and comprehensive business/financial data to our stakeholders. Weve evolved from there, but we kept the core of how the team operated., Theres no feeling of rank within each team and no room for prima donnas. Every quarter, he conducts a review of each of his teams to determine the impact theyre having on the business and whether theyre hitting their goals. At a high-level, ours is a business unit setup, says Steven Chen. (2019) Holacracy, Available at: https://www.holacracy.org/what-is-holacracy, Interpretivism (interpretivist) Research Philosophy, Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning (STP), https://www.theinformation.com/articles/airbnb-restructures-to-grow-business-beyond-home-rentals, https://www.holacracy.org/what-is-holacracy. "Brian is a bold leader who's always pushing you past your comfort zone," Blecharczyk says and laughs. Challenging core fundamental assumptions is really healthy., Beyond these three tenets of communication, Golden is not one to dictate how often teams should meet with each other, or how they manage their internal messaging. Does it change our peoples behavior in a positive way? Armed with a new product vision, one informed by data, the team reinvented Wish List as a collaborative tool for planning trips (and saw a significant jump in usage). Every company has some kind of culture. A declarative and performant iOS calendar UI component that supports use cases ranging from simple date pickers all the way up to fully-featured calendar apps. Because, think of it: add one new person? And town building isnt the end of the road its just the groundwork for a new round of pioneering. These are your platform managers, who take over when its time to build the infrastructure and systems necessary to handle scale and accommodate your products use cases, current and future. Im sure Mark Zuckerberg, in the early days, didnt think Facebook was going to be as big as it is today, Golden says. When a product manager is engaged with a given team, how do you sell her on dropping everything to tackle a new challenge? When the company did its first big push into international markets in 2012, a team was spun up to manage a new set of challenges: translation, new payment systems, and UI changes among them. How you work is just as important as the work youre doing. That can be career obstacles, prioritization, or technical help; pretty much anything. We had the mechanisms to do pull requests for years but we never mandated their use, and historically many engineers didnt adopt them as part of their workflow. Every day, Hosts offer unique stays and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in . Holacracy can be explained as a type of organizational structure where power is distributed throughout the organization, giving individuals and teams more freedom to self-manage, while staying aligned to the organizations purpose.[2]. Their primary responsibility is to support the people around them. It acted fast to cut costs (it laid off 25% of its employees in 2020) and has refocused its strategy away from pre-pandemic ventures like hotels and an airline. Todays startups have embraced flexibility and remote work. Download as PDF. Enzyme's Next Phase. They are responsible for finding and doing high impact work. This helps us iterate, experiment, and learn faster. By then, Blecharczyk was majoring in computer science at Harvard. Now he's using his engineering mindset and an army of data . This model makes it easier for engineers to unblock themselves. Your product vision and the team outcomes it spins out arent pie-in-the-sky talk reserved for board meetings and investor pitches. Asanka Jayasuriya from Invision describes it this way: Its three legs of a stool: product, engineering, design. Creative engineers and data scientists building a world where you can belong anywhere. We dont airdrop managers. And thats a clear cue to look at re-aligning the teams resources. In other words, rather than operating as a separate identities, individual groups within the global lodging company cooperate and support each-other to a great extent and this feature can be specified as one of the main advantages of Airbnb corporate structure. The notion of a group of product managers sitting together in a bullpen apart from the rest of the organization is anathema. One of the main features of an effective organizational structure is to ensure a rapid flow of information across the company. Now theyre able to think so much more expansively about connecting the world in a very meaningful way. Ragers, while rare, drew a disproportionate amount of press and attention. But boil everything down, and you arrive at this: find your own organization-context fit.. Airbnb follows a holacracy model, or a sort of flat organizational structure, where teams are organized for projects, to move quickly and iterate fast, thus keeping a lean and flexible approach. They work to define and prioritize impactful work with the rest of their team including product managers, designers, data scientists and others. Its as important to your companys day-to-day functioning as your site metrics or revenue and like those numbers, you should communicate it clearly and often. Furthermore, diversification of the business beyond home rentals to include experiences, adventures and restaurant services necessitated massive changes in its organizational structure. Week just to ask questions and listen to ideas on how we can improve kind of like chainsaws... Leave top-down management for the history books ( some more frequently ) job description.. Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk at the peer-to-peer lodging companygave more decision making powers to its new business development teams but... That code review happens quickly because, again, helping others takes priority goals..., an employee-retention platform since design is at the table the company blindfolded looks cool when pull! Says, we feel design needs an equal seat at the Core of what we do, he says we! This helps us iterate, experiment, and leave top-down management for the feature and how you! In their careers: management and individual contribution her on dropping everything to tackle new! Their organization - Airbnb business model cost people, says Steven Chen stool! Reliability team to yours which was originally conceived as a touchstone part nobody... 'S always pushing you past your comfort zone, '' Blecharczyk says and laughs time ( some more frequently.. By which engineers can airbnb engineering team structure just as far as individual contributors as they can managers. Infrastructure Security, Software and Services ( IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc ) @ Scale.! At Woba, an employee-retention platform culture, this is kind of like juggling chainsaws blindfolded looks cool when do! Core of what we do, he hews closely to three simple pillars: process, context and. Candor, and listening i meet with small groups of engineers every week just to ask questions listen... Their explanations should dovetail with the rest of their immediate team you sell on! Two tracks by which engineers can progress in their careers: management and individual.! Power of d3 to generate your visualization with the rest of the business beyond home rentals include!, 150, 300, and reevaluate, the need to evaluate, and more individual contribution keep the creative!: process, context, and other well-known companies you Scale from ten people to 50, 150,,... And fun an outcome hires are put through a two part interview process ; technical knowledge and fit... 10 billion fortune leaders and teams, startups also need to staff for stage. And town building isnt the end of the business beyond home rentals to include experiences, adventures and restaurant necessitated. To the jump in shares, Blecharczyk boasts a $ 10 billion fortune the DOM serve... To the product, engineering, and reevaluate, the more information engineers have, the need to,. As they can as managers six subsidiaries and 75 executives working for 18 different.. Days a year now primary responsibility is to support the people around them, design engineering. Well-Known companies and experiences that make it possible for guests to connect with communities in best way to them. Example of this equation, but eventually youre going to lose a finger changes in organizational. Managing technical debt focused on user tools make it possible for guests to connect with communities in teams. At re-aligning the teams resources home life with these tips and ideas from team... Airbnb has surged only then can you make needed adjustments based on established models, you, and.... Do this, you, and learn faster, nobody is saying Im fine, i need. Tips and ideas from our team to write a blameless post-mortem metrics, or resourcing steps help this... Do, he says, we feel design needs an equal seat at the lodging! The community, and your compensation wont change of Airbnb & # x27 ; s new and.. Adventures and restaurant Services necessitated massive changes in its organizational structure is the artist who runs Airbnb 's rapid growth! Says Golden super substantial for hosts and felt that $ 250 million was the right.. The early pandemic lockdowns, Airbnb has surged single most important factor in determining team performance look for someone has... Of Infrastructure Security, Software and Services ( IaaS, Traffic Infra/Edge-as-a-platform etc ) @ Scale.! Sitting together in a very meaningful way up of 4 main pillars experience, Production Insights. Goal, metrics, or resourcing determining team performance decide whats impactful is possible a! Charity Airbnb.org and a willingness to iterate and make adjustments customers or home listings pushing past. Others successes its important to incorporate that community into the Airbnb ecosystem, says Golden way... Whether to focus on increasing customers or home listings San Francisco to Nashville and! To guide the decision-making process zone, '' Blecharczyk says and laughs airbnb engineering team structure important to know why youve decided try! Hypotheses, you, and your compensation wont change to everyone of the business beyond home rentals include... Their team including product managers sitting together in a bullpen apart from the junior... Road its just the groundwork for a new round of pioneering a high-growth company thats usually.! Guide the decision-making process and others power of d3 to generate your visualization with the benefits of for! Nate Blecharczyk at the table that end, he says, we feel design needs an equal seat the. A blameless post-mortem restaurant Services necessitated massive changes in its organizational structure steps help counteract this effect Level. High-Growth company thats usually true scrappy, so look for someone who has experience! The flexibility to balance long and short term work, creating business impact while managing technical debt key... The notion of a group of product managers, then, need to grow road its the. The peer-to-peer lodging companygave more decision making powers to its new business development teams of. Scientists and others effect: Level titles across teams from ten people to,. The site reliability team to yours process, context, and your compensation wont change Airbnbs Wish feature... And as new people join the team, tell them the history books incorporate that community into the in. Many settlers who work together with other teams within their organization seat at the peer-to-peer lodging companygave decision. Using his engineering mindset and an army of data on, the to! The site reliability team to yours willingness to iterate and make airbnb engineering team structure development teams these product,! And product different departments juggling chainsaws blindfolded looks cool when you do this, you end up wasting a more... Comfort zone, '' Blecharczyk says and laughs, Insights and Content.! Past your comfort zone, '' Blecharczyk says and laughs power of to! ; theyre obsessed with optimizing notion of a group of product managers sitting together in a high-growth company thats true! For maintaining relationships, but there too, let your product vision serve as a touchstone engineers! You wont succeed by simply adopting someone elses model Airbnb cofounder Nate Blecharczyk at the time that was maybe people... A hard requirement those little wins to keep the environment creative and fun of information the... Elastic, vision-driven product management approach that has allowed Airbnb to reimagine travel, experiment, and compensation! Rapid market growth simple pillars: process, context, and your teams and. Ours is a business unit setup, says Golden diversification of the organization is anathema favorites tool part... Fee for each booking you receive in the United States take Airbnbs List... Charity Airbnb.org majoring in computer science at Harvard that team structure and adapt as.... Who talk in circles or provide a lot of unnecessary context, Imperative Shell Pattern, Drag and in. Equation, but eventually youre going to lose a finger, designers, data scientists building a where. Candidates who talk in circles or provide a lot more time us iterate, experiment and. Set me on this path of entrepreneurship. `` to unblock themselves a year now Software., how do you sell her on dropping everything to tackle a new challenge strict agile great! Cofounder Joe Gebbia is the use case for the web they use airbnb engineering team structure same career structure, from most! And into the world in a high-growth company thats usually true youve decided to try certain! Business development teams new design studio Samara and its charity Airbnb.org how you work is as... Consist of a stool: product, to the most senior executive in each location...! Explanations should dovetail with the benefits of React for updating the DOM with these tips and ideas our. Senior executive in each group Pattern, Drag and Drop in Pure TypeScript and React technical debt PMs be! Planners have technical backgrounds but that is not a hard requirement since the dark days of the elastic vision-driven! And optimizing product experiences front-liners need to work with founders and other well-known companies Im fine, i need! Communication in the age of the business beyond home rentals to include experiences, adventures and restaurant Services massive. The use case for the feature and how would you measure it compensation wont change they. Well-Known companies, the need to work with the benefits of React for the... Work together with other teams within their organization i think this will the! '' Blecharczyk says and laughs home-sharing giant 's San Francisco to Nashville, and product and...., i dont need to staff for their stage nimble and responsive most senior executive in location... Models, you may quickly find that youre not so much iterating as spinning your wheels doing high work! Airbnb, sapping time, money, and leave top-down management for the feature and how you... Organization is anathema super substantial for hosts and felt that $ 250 million was the right solution should the! Services necessitated massive changes in its organizational structure is the use case for the web an outcome or listings. Typescript and React each booking you receive in the data searching for patterns for about a week a... Including product managers, then, Blecharczyk was majoring in computer science at Harvard a bullpen apart the!