Building an Inclusive Codebase
Code is our craft. At Airbnb, we view our code and product as a reflection of our values. Each developer imbues their work with a piece of themselves. We want all engineers to be proud of the codebase in which they work and the systems that they use every day.
We want to share with you some of the work that we are doing at Airbnb to build an inclusive engineering culture. We hope that sharing our story may energize and bolster similar efforts to eliminate non-inclusive terminology throughout the industry.
Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Continued violence and prejudice against under-represented groups threaten belonging and equality. Increased diversity in Airbnb Engineering will allow our team to better empower Airbnb hosts to serve Airbnb guests. It is imperative that Airbnb engineers from all backgrounds feel like they belong when contributing to Airbnb.
In the summer of 2020, we identified terms in Airbnb’s technical stack that undermine our core value of belonging. Team members proactively organized a volunteer effort in a Slack channel, working with employees from affected communities to operationalize change. Together we co-authored a proposal to address non-inclusive terminology in our codebase. Within a month, we presented the proposal to our CTO. He then prioritized this work by staffing dedicated engineer hours to make our code and systems more inclusive.
