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It's bizarre to see how Etsy went from producing a significant amount of technical software and community engagement a few years ago and then suddenly stopped.
by ahmeni 9y ago
It's bizarre to see how Etsy went from producing a significant amount of technical software and community engagement a few years ago and then suddenly stopped. Their GitHub is a testament to this sudden dropoff. Was there anything ever mentioned about why they went from super public about things like dashboarding to nothing?
- mason55 9y agoCode as Craft was one of the best engineering blogs ever at a time when the concept was pretty rare.
- on_and_off 9y agoWow, what a flashback ! Code as Craft was one of my favorite blogs back when I was a junior dev.
- throwaway61891 9y agoformer etsy employee here: lots of reasons, but around that time etsy invested heavily in infrastructure and tools like statsd resulted from it. the last few years the focus has been mostly on product, and product teams usually don't produce the kind of significant technology contributions you're talking about (huge generalization there obviously). this is more of a personal opinion, but my experience was that the last few years etsy has focused less on technical solutions to problems and more on "people solutions" - if something is inefficient they look for non-technical solutions to that problem, sometimes fruitlessly. as you can imagine in that environment, things like statsd don't get made.
- look_lookatme 9y agoI just assumed everyone booked it after the IPO.
- throwaway61891 9y agonot really. some people, but very few all things considered.
- badosu 9y agoA scenario where a new 'top dog' enters and proposes the solution to all problems™: let's measure our conversions, optimize this and that and make more sales. By the way, all this time you're developing open source you're not helping the company so let's stop that, it costs us developer time and money. It's not unfeasible. It would be a scenario that could explain both portfolio degradation and community leave, and not too uncommon. Of course, it could be unrelated and this is just speculation.
- throwaway61891 9y ago> By the way, all this time you're developing open source you're not helping the company so let's stop that, it costs us developer time and money. that was not my experience at all. officially, open source was encouraged because it raised etsy's stock in the tech community, which was beneficial for hiring. unofficially, middle managers discouraged it because it detracted from shipping quickly (which made them look good to upper management). obviously the CTO/etc. could've just been paying the engineers lip service about open source, but they seemed to genuinely support and encourage open source contributions. they certainly celebrated when open source contributions actually happened.
- untog 9y agoThe CTO left in 2015. He was a big open source guy so I wouldn't be surprised if that had an impact.
- jldugger 9y agoAnd you think the new CTO, John Allspaw, was less of an OSS fan?