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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 p

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.
  - stdbrouw 11y ago
    But hardware expenses are predictable. X load means Y outlay. Investments in better software through more or better programmers is uncertain – just look at how even experienced devs continually underestimate the time it takes to implement any given feature.
seiji 11y ago
all to maintain Etsy, Etsy is a strange thing. Founded by a literally borderline insane person, taken away from him, given back to him, taken away from him, run as a complete engineering organization for what would seem almost like a trivial website. They routinely release world-class tools, but why is a silly yarn-based-economy website incentivized to even create such things? It's like the Twitter problem: twitter has so many developers, but nothing seems to change. What are all the engineers doing and why isn't there anything to show for it? Part of easy being a tech powerhouse is: they are also a cultural landing hub for people who just want to live and play in Brooklyn. They end up with a lot of talented "well, I live here and I want a job, where do I work" people shuffling through who can do good work but don't want to live far from their apartments. There aren't many tech companies nearby to compete against, so they have a weird concentration of talented people for being an oddly non-tech company.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  From what I can tell, peering in from the outside, a lot of what Twitter's engineers do is maintaining the illusion of constancy. Which is actually pretty impressive, if you consider the number of axes they've grown on and by how much. It used to be that the failwhale was an industry punchline. Now when something is flakey we turn to Twitter to see what the status is.
  - seiji 11y ago
    There was a joke going around recently: Twitter finally allows more than 140 characters in direct messages! Meanwhile, Facebook releases AI powered personal assistant and 12 new open source projects powering their entire company. Is Twitter doomed because they are public? Their stock is in the toilet, so they are afraid to change anything in case the changes make things worse. So, things are bad, nobody can change anything, and nothing will get better on its own? And since their stock is in the toilet, what motivates employees who want to be like all the other cool kids and cash out for millions? Does everybody abandon ship? Considering Twitter's entire gimmick is being a short message broadcast service, how much can they innovate without changing the core of what they are?

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.
- stdbrouw 11y ago
  But hardware expenses are predictable. X load means Y outlay. Investments in better software through more or better programmers is uncertain – just look at how even experienced devs continually underestimate the time it takes to implement any given feature.

seiji 11y ago

all to maintain Etsy, Etsy is a strange thing. Founded by a literally borderline insane person, taken away from him, given back to him, taken away from him, run as a complete engineering organization for what would seem almost like a trivial website. They routinely release world-class tools, but why is a silly yarn-based-economy website incentivized to even create such things? It's like the Twitter problem: twitter has so many developers, but nothing seems to change. What are all the engineers doing and why isn't there anything to show for it? Part of easy being a tech powerhouse is: they are also a cultural landing hub for people who just want to live and play in Brooklyn. They end up with a lot of talented "well, I live here and I want a job, where do I work" people shuffling through who can do good work but don't want to live far from their apartments. There aren't many tech companies nearby to compete against, so they have a weird concentration of talented people for being an oddly non-tech company.

jacques_chester 11y ago
From what I can tell, peering in from the outside, a lot of what Twitter's engineers do is maintaining the illusion of constancy. Which is actually pretty impressive, if you consider the number of axes they've grown on and by how much. It used to be that the failwhale was an industry punchline. Now when something is flakey we turn to Twitter to see what the status is.
- seiji 11y ago
  There was a joke going around recently: Twitter finally allows more than 140 characters in direct messages! Meanwhile, Facebook releases AI powered personal assistant and 12 new open source projects powering their entire company. Is Twitter doomed because they are public? Their stock is in the toilet, so they are afraid to change anything in case the changes make things worse. So, things are bad, nobody can change anything, and nothing will get better on its own? And since their stock is in the toilet, what motivates employees who want to be like all the other cool kids and cash out for millions? Does everybody abandon ship? Considering Twitter's entire gimmick is being a short message broadcast service, how much can they innovate without changing the core of what they are?