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I was #5 at Etsy back in the early days. Three co-founders (who actually bought the site from some other dude, they didn't create Etsy), Jared Tarbell, and the

I was #5 at Etsy back in the early days. Three co-founders (who actually bought the site from some other dude, they didn't create Etsy), Jared Tarbell, and then me. (There were some other folks, support staff who technically worked for the investors IIRC) It's pretty much my only "impressive" job of my career, in terms of name dropping at parties. But in terms of technology and business it was a madhouse. I remember thinking "Nothing like a business was happening at Esty." when they fired me. (I was going to quit, but my girlfriend at the time convinced me not to, and then they fired me a week or two later anyway. Long story.) I always figured someone would eventually show up and want to interview me about it, but that's never happened so far. I've forgotten most of the wild stuff. All the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so as you can imagine it was always on fire. Upgrading didn't help because our growth rate was ridiculous. The frontend PHP guy was a newbie to programming. He barely knew what he was doing but he could nail those beautiful UX designs pixel-perfect. The guy's probably a millionaire now. The backend sysadmin, DBA dude was a total Master-Blaster. If he didn't like it he would literally throw a fit and scream at the CEO and shut things down until he got his way. He used to lie to the CEO all the time if he didn't want to implement something he'd just say "it's impossible". They built a skateboard half-pipe in the office even though none of us skated. It was pretty nuts. I found out later on that they hired me because my resume was the first one on craigslist that had Python on it. Then during the interview they found out I used Devorak layout on my laptop and that's why they hired me. The "middle layer" they had me write was pretty much useless. It basically passed requests from the webservers to the DB. Over 80% of the API was empty methods, literally just a docstring, with all the processing happening in a decorator. I implemented a cache in there (early use of Memcache. Glyph hisself wrote a Twisted interface to it in front of mine eyes! They were like "We want to hire a networking consultant. What about this guy?" Me: "You want to hire Glyph and I get to hang out with him and learn from him!? Yes. Yes, please." So that was nice.) The thing is they didn't turn on the cache. It just sat there. The investors pushed this Sid person onto us to try to get some semblance of adult supervision. ... I've told this story before, Sid wanted some information on long-running requests, and I had to switch it (the cache) on in prod myself to show them that the required logging was already there. There there was the other Sid who wanted to rewrite everything in Java. (First Sid wanted to rewrite in C++.) "Project Phoenix" he called it, that didn't go over well. (Recall that the problem wasn't the implementation language of the server code, it was that all of the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so rewriting the server code was never going to help.) That's all I got this morning.

jvidalv 4y ago
I honestly think that these kind of situations are the best ones of our careers. I barely can’t rembeber the perfectly written API, but I still laugh over some of the wild shit I saw over the years on companies that started with a single php file and a mysql db, and when you go to have beers with your teammates its a 100% safe topic to just have laughs all the way long.
- carapace 4y ago
  I'm sorry but I cannot agree. While there was excitement and fun, we objectively were doing a terrible job, and that felt terrible. Rob and Chris were simply incompetent, and succeeded only despite themselves. Haim at least knew his stuff, he was just unprofessional (screaming at Rob, etc.) (Edit to add: Rob was a great UX designer, all those beautiful layouts and pages were his work. He was incompetent as a CEO.) Working there became so frustrating I was going to quit. (It's the only time I didn't quit a job that was obviously bullshit. I don't blame my girlfriend for convincing me to stay on, it was my choice, but i recognize that it was the wrong choice.) We wasted so much investor money. The thing that bothered me the most was that we used our users as the QA dept. Chris would push to prod, things would break, and he would scramble to fix them. The users thought he was their hero fixing problems and didn't realize he was the one causing the problems in the first place! And then, in the end, the whole thing was gobbled up by (I think) the Waltons? And now it's a caricature of what it aspired to be. Despite the "success" of the company I see it as a cautionary tale.
  - ratww 4y ago
    I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horrible environment for development. IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the problems as an employee. One of those companies still has one of the founders in a "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy, great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are clearly not really good at producing a good design, and also not good at finishing, considering the messes left behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to the DB. The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery, Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses it), even though the home page didn't really change for a few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the items in the homepage would change (it started changing while I was there, though!). The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising that they had so many rewrites. I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of looking for a less stressful job. Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I couldn't stand the tech culture.

jvidalv 4y ago

I honestly think that these kind of situations are the best ones of our careers. I barely can’t rembeber the perfectly written API, but I still laugh over some of the wild shit I saw over the years on companies that started with a single php file and a mysql db, and when you go to have beers with your teammates its a 100% safe topic to just have laughs all the way long.

carapace 4y ago
I'm sorry but I cannot agree. While there was excitement and fun, we objectively were doing a terrible job, and that felt terrible. Rob and Chris were simply incompetent, and succeeded only despite themselves. Haim at least knew his stuff, he was just unprofessional (screaming at Rob, etc.) (Edit to add: Rob was a great UX designer, all those beautiful layouts and pages were his work. He was incompetent as a CEO.) Working there became so frustrating I was going to quit. (It's the only time I didn't quit a job that was obviously bullshit. I don't blame my girlfriend for convincing me to stay on, it was my choice, but i recognize that it was the wrong choice.) We wasted so much investor money. The thing that bothered me the most was that we used our users as the QA dept. Chris would push to prod, things would break, and he would scramble to fix them. The users thought he was their hero fixing problems and didn't realize he was the one causing the problems in the first place! And then, in the end, the whole thing was gobbled up by (I think) the Waltons? And now it's a caricature of what it aspired to be. Despite the "success" of the company I see it as a cautionary tale.
- ratww 4y ago
  I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horrible environment for development. IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the problems as an employee. One of those companies still has one of the founders in a "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy, great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are clearly not really good at producing a good design, and also not good at finishing, considering the messes left behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to the DB. The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery, Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses it), even though the home page didn't really change for a few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the items in the homepage would change (it started changing while I was there, though!). The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising that they had so many rewrites. I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of looking for a less stressful job. Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I couldn't stand the tech culture.