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> It seems like the biggest issue Etsy had was a lack of strong engineering leadership. Know many engineers at Etsy; this is absolutely the problem and it pers
by wayoutthere 7y ago
> It seems like the biggest issue Etsy had was a lack of strong engineering leadership.
Know many engineers at Etsy; this is absolutely the problem and it persists to this day. The engineers are fine and do their best to self-organize but there is no cohesive engineering vision. They complain about this issue over beers with some frequency.
- etsyanon123 7y agoYes 100%. Its not so much as how should we architect/build as we don't even know what problems we're solving and what is important before embarking on large projects/refactors/rewrites. I don't think unique to any org but many rewrites are done based on tech trends/popularity rather than actually solving a problem. Even if the python rewrite didn't immediately fail what would success look like? What does failure look like? How to measure?
- wayoutthere 7y agoFrom a lot of what I've heard there is trouble hiring / retaining line-level managers -- engineering managers are usually the ones thinking about and negotiating roadmaps among multiple teams. When you have developers filling this role ad hoc, it can be difficult for them to context switch from low-level technical concerns to operational business concerns. So the low-level technical concerns are the ones that get focused on rather than being focused on some overarching business-led strategy. Not picking on Etsy here in particular as lots of companies have this problem. But it's not something people often think about as being crucial for good engineering culture.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]