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I'm consistently surprised with Etsy engineering. (I guess that means I am not updating.) For what appears to my eye to be a rather generic "e-commerce marketpl

I'm consistently surprised with Etsy engineering. (I guess that means I am not updating.) For what appears to my eye to be a rather generic "e-commerce marketplace" (my only visibility is regretsy) they really do a lot of big engineering projects. I would have expected that a public company in this position would scale back engineering since it doesn't, at first glance, seem to be directly relevant to their business (they're not a tech company). How does a company end up with "good" management that keeps the tech so strong?

rjbwork 10y ago
I would guess it has something to do with tough lessons learned from their catastrophic early technical debt that brought the site and development to somewhat of a standstill right around 2009 or so. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenrfm50mXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eenrfm50mXw
- kristianc 10y ago
  Many of the acknowledged leaders from a tech architecture standpoint started from the point of their architecture being a real mess. Soundcloud and Spotify come to mind.
bigiain 10y ago
A "generic e-commerce marketplace" like, say, Amazon?
__derek__ 10y ago
> (they're not a tech company) Is that a nod to Anil Dash's post[1] arguing that there is no tech industry as such? [1]: https://medium.com/humane-tech/there-is-no-technology-industry-44774dfb3ed7 https://medium.com/humane-tech/there-is-no-technology-indust...
dc2447 10y ago
I love when the guys from Etsy present at conferences and they start with that joke: We are a monitoring company with a side line in being an online marketplace