Appreciate your insight on automation, and fully agree with the need for startups to use commodity software as much as possible and focus on business needs. How

Appreciate your insight on automation, and fully agree with the need for startups to use commodity software as much as possible and focus on business needs. However, I suspect most of the 200+ engineers would be needed to keep the business running in either case. They've written StatsD (Node), a custom deployment framework, an A/B testing framework and a bunch of other technology software (https://github.com/etsy https://github.com/etsy) that could need dedicated engineers to build and maintain. But all of this would pale compared to the needs of the business itself. At sufficiently large scale, any CRUD-based storefront website becomes an entire supply chain management system. I suspect there are many ways to slice up an SCM, but from a functional level, you'll need subsystems for each part of the domain: managing customer orders, warehouses, logistics, payments, offers & promotions, developer facing APIs, accounting & book-keeping, .. These systems can be built using a service-oriented architecture, but Etsy is famous for promoting the large monolithic app architecture (http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/28/the-great-microservices-vs-monolithic-apps-twitter-melee.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/28/the-great-microser...), which would remove the need for a lot of SOA plumbing work and communication overhead. Apart from the core business logic, they'll also need a whole bunch of QAs, Android and iOS developers, designers, DevOps folks, database admins, security specialists and so on. All told, they could probably run a leaner ship than the 200-odd engineers they now have, but I wonder how much more leaner.