7 ms·

Five years, building a culture, and handing it off

83 points by tamersalama 11y ago

jlarocco 11y ago
Not to rain on his parade too much, but a lot (most?) of his "Five years ago..." statements just aren't true. Most of the ideas he says didn't exist or where "heretical" five years ago were definitely around. More of them would be true if he said 15 years ago, but even then a few of them weren't new ideas. Or maybe he implicitly meant "... at Etsy." in which case he may be 100% correct.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I wouldn't word it so dismissively as your last comment does. Doing things that work well in small settings at scale is really hard. Ideas that work perfectly well in small settings break down terribly when you try to organize a large company around them.
  - jlarocco 11y ago
    No offense, but Etsy isn't a large company by most measures. And besides that, some of the things in his list were already popular at companies a lot larger than Etsy five years ago. I'm not saying he didn't do good work at Etsy, but I think he's giving himself too much credit for some of it. It's not as groundbreaking as he's making it out.
ArekDymalski 11y ago
Very condensed experiences from Etsy’s CTO: 1: Nothing we “know” about software development should be assumed to be true. 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change.
- LukeB_UK 11y ago
  I read it as those were the theories he went to Etsy with.
teacup50 11y ago
Why does he holds up an engineering team of 250 engineers, all to maintain Etsy, as proving out his hypothesis? That's larger, by far, than engineering teams producing much larger, much more complex, much more involved pieces of software at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. This "success story" is the kind of circular self-affirmation that can only emerge when you've been given a blank check, and nobody involved cares whether you've spent it wisely. It does nothing to support his belief in the efficacy of his "heretical" ideals, of which I find this one especially disconcerting: "You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying." Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime. How would they ever escape the costly orbit of PHP? How much more would they be spending on server resources, and how many more engineers would they have to hire to keep things running as they grew?
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  > Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime. I don't think Facebook's success depends on their optimized PHP runtime. I'd imagine most of the cost savings disappear when you factor in the engineers that are needed to build and maintain the system. I also don't know the comparative effectiveness of hiring brilliant engineers versus brilliant salespeople versus just hiring average folk all round. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. But it certainly doesn't feel like an absolutely obvious kind of thing, the kind of thing on which to base a theory of how to build and not build a tech company.
  - teacup50 11y ago
    Business efficiency is not generally a controversial goal -- although what counts as 'waste' is. The only time people seem to argue against efficiency (generally via false dichotomy, see 'hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive') is in a blank-check environment where nobody is holding these decision-makers to account for self-serving inefficiencies.
andyidsinga 11y ago
> modern software is a team sport. I couldn't agree with this more, especially when team count is >= 2 && <= ~10. ...working hard during the right hours, eating together, paying attention to the boredom factor, showing each other cool moves ...er code, having each-other's back when we're injured, respecting our non-team lives, being supportive when a team member leaves for a new team. good teams are painful to move on from ..the only salve being years of stories and mythology to drink beers over :)
- eropple 11y ago
  > eating together > respecting our non-team lives These don't feel compatible, and aren't in my experience on teams of that size. Claims on people's time only grow as teams become entrenched, and "eating together" is definitely one of them. My coworkers don't have to be my friends (though some of course become friends), they have to be competent professionals who do the right thing.
  - andyidsinga 11y ago
    you're right about that. In my experience eating together is best done at lunch. I've really love it, especially as I end up being more of a manager/leader : we hardly ever talk about work, its breaks up the day nicely and you get to chat about philosophy and general bullshit with people. one of my former bosses made a habit of taking people out to lunch on Fridays and paid out of his own pocket. It was a small token of his personal appreciation for the team.
stephengillie 11y ago
Dupe from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172
- slyall 11y ago
  Please don't point to dups where there was no discussion. It wastes people's time clicking on them.

83 points by tamersalama 11y ago

Not to rain on his parade too much, but a lot (most?) of his "Five years ago..." statements just aren't true. Most of the ideas he says didn't exist or where "heretical" five years ago were definitely around. More of them would be true if he said 15 years ago, but even then a few of them weren't new ideas. Or maybe he implicitly meant "... at Etsy." in which case he may be 100% correct.

vinceguidry 11y ago
I wouldn't word it so dismissively as your last comment does. Doing things that work well in small settings at scale is really hard. Ideas that work perfectly well in small settings break down terribly when you try to organize a large company around them.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  No offense, but Etsy isn't a large company by most measures. And besides that, some of the things in his list were already popular at companies a lot larger than Etsy five years ago. I'm not saying he didn't do good work at Etsy, but I think he's giving himself too much credit for some of it. It's not as groundbreaking as he's making it out.

ArekDymalski 11y ago

Very condensed experiences from Etsy’s CTO: 1: Nothing we “know” about software development should be assumed to be true. 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change.

LukeB_UK 11y ago
I read it as those were the theories he went to Etsy with.

teacup50 11y ago

Why does he holds up an engineering team of 250 engineers, all to maintain Etsy, as proving out his hypothesis? That's larger, by far, than engineering teams producing much larger, much more complex, much more involved pieces of software at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. This "success story" is the kind of circular self-affirmation that can only emerge when you've been given a blank check, and nobody involved cares whether you've spent it wisely. It does nothing to support his belief in the efficacy of his "heretical" ideals, of which I find this one especially disconcerting: "You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying." Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime. How would they ever escape the costly orbit of PHP? How much more would they be spending on server resources, and how many more engineers would they have to hire to keep things running as they grew?

stdbrouw 11y ago
> Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime. I don't think Facebook's success depends on their optimized PHP runtime. I'd imagine most of the cost savings disappear when you factor in the engineers that are needed to build and maintain the system. I also don't know the comparative effectiveness of hiring brilliant engineers versus brilliant salespeople versus just hiring average folk all round. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. But it certainly doesn't feel like an absolutely obvious kind of thing, the kind of thing on which to base a theory of how to build and not build a tech company.
- teacup50 11y ago
  Business efficiency is not generally a controversial goal -- although what counts as 'waste' is. The only time people seem to argue against efficiency (generally via false dichotomy, see 'hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive') is in a blank-check environment where nobody is holding these decision-makers to account for self-serving inefficiencies.

andyidsinga 11y ago

> modern software is a team sport. I couldn't agree with this more, especially when team count is >= 2 && <= ~10. ...working hard during the right hours, eating together, paying attention to the boredom factor, showing each other cool moves ...er code, having each-other's back when we're injured, respecting our non-team lives, being supportive when a team member leaves for a new team. good teams are painful to move on from ..the only salve being years of stories and mythology to drink beers over :)

eropple 11y ago
> eating together > respecting our non-team lives These don't feel compatible, and aren't in my experience on teams of that size. Claims on people's time only grow as teams become entrenched, and "eating together" is definitely one of them. My coworkers don't have to be my friends (though some of course become friends), they have to be competent professionals who do the right thing.
- andyidsinga 11y ago
  you're right about that. In my experience eating together is best done at lunch. I've really love it, especially as I end up being more of a manager/leader : we hardly ever talk about work, its breaks up the day nicely and you get to chat about philosophy and general bullshit with people. one of my former bosses made a habit of taking people out to lunch on Fridays and paid out of his own pocket. It was a small token of his personal appreciation for the team.

stephengillie 11y ago

Dupe from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172

slyall 11y ago
Please don't point to dups where there was no discussion. It wastes people's time clicking on them.