
Five years, building a culture, and handing it off - tamersalama
http://laughingmeme.org/2015/08/31/five-years-building-a-culture-and-handing-it-off/
======
teacup50
Why does he holds up an engineering team of _250_ engineers, all to maintain
Etsy, as proving out his hypothesis?

That's larger, by far, than engineering teams producing much larger, much more
complex, much more involved pieces of software at Google, Apple, and
Microsoft.

This "success story" is the kind of circular self-affirmation that can only
emerge when you've been given a blank check, and nobody involved cares whether
you've spent it wisely. It does nothing to support his belief in the efficacy
of his "heretical" ideals, of which I find this one especially disconcerting:

 _" You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your
improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is
more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying."_

Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely
smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP
runtime.

How would they ever escape the costly orbit of PHP? How much more would they
be spending on server resources, and how many more engineers would they have
to hire to keep things running as they grew?

~~~
seiji
_all to maintain Etsy,_

Etsy is a strange thing. Founded by a literally borderline insane person,
taken away from him, given back to him, taken away from him, run as a complete
engineering organization for what would seem almost like a trivial website.
They routinely release world-class tools, but why is a silly yarn-based-
economy website incentivized to even create such things?

It's like the Twitter problem: twitter has so many developers, but nothing
seems to change. What are all the engineers _doing_ and why isn't there
anything to show for it?

Part of easy being a tech powerhouse is: they are also a cultural landing hub
for people who just want to live and play in Brooklyn. They end up with a lot
of talented "well, I live here and I want a job, where do I work" people
shuffling through who can do good work but don't want to live far from their
apartments. There aren't many tech companies nearby to compete against, so
they have a weird concentration of talented people for being an oddly non-tech
company.

~~~
jacques_chester
From what I can tell, peering in from the outside, a lot of what Twitter's
engineers do is maintaining the illusion of constancy.

Which is actually pretty impressive, if you consider the number of axes
they've grown on and by how much. It used to be that the failwhale was an
industry punchline. Now when something is flakey we turn to Twitter to see
what the status is.

~~~
seiji
There was a joke going around recently: Twitter finally allows more than 140
characters in direct messages! Meanwhile, Facebook releases AI powered
personal assistant and 12 new open source projects powering their entire
company.

Is Twitter doomed because they are public? Their stock is in the toilet, so
they are afraid to change anything in case the changes make things _worse._
So, things are bad, nobody can change anything, and nothing will get better on
its own? And since their stock is in the toilet, what motivates employees who
want to be like all the other cool kids and cash out for millions? Does
everybody abandon ship?

Considering Twitter's entire gimmick is being a short message broadcast
service, how much can they innovate without changing the core of what they
are?

~~~
dasil003
I definitely think Twitter is doomed because they are public. Actually the
seeds of their downfall came earlier when they decided they needed to monetize
and kill anyone else that was earning money by leveraging Twitter. But being
public and having to listen to Wall Street where they are judged by _Facebook
's_ chosen KPI is the thing that will prevent Twitter from realizing its
potential.

The thing about Twitter is that to this day, no one really understands what it
is. It is stable only because the investors have been beating this drum for
Twitter to explain and define itself. But whether you talk to founders,
employees, or daily users, no one really can pin it down. However it's obvious
that it has some unique properties in terms of how it lets celebrities get
close to their fans, and how it allows a conversation to take place among
influential people. Twitter has the power to spread ideas faster and across
more varied demographics than any other tech product.

But the question Wall Street keeps asking is how can Twitter grow 5x so it has
the same number of users as Facebook. They don't give a shit if the average
Twitter user is 100x as influential. And it goes even deeper than that,
because Twitter still faces this existential question of what it can become,
whereas Facebook is pretty clear what it is, and the question is only how
valuable their data is. In other words, I believe Twitter has a lot more
upside than Facebook, but of course it can't take a risk on any of those ideas
if it's judged by Wall Street's unimaginative criteria.

------
jlarocco
Not to rain on his parade too much, but a lot (most?) of his "Five years
ago..." statements just aren't true. Most of the ideas he says didn't exist or
where "heretical" five years ago were definitely around. More of them would be
true if he said 15 years ago, but even then a few of them weren't new ideas.

Or maybe he implicitly meant "... at Etsy." in which case he may be 100%
correct.

~~~
vinceguidry
I wouldn't word it so dismissively as your last comment does. Doing things
that work well in small settings at scale is really hard. Ideas that work
perfectly well in small settings break down terribly when you try to organize
a large company around them.

~~~
jlarocco
No offense, but Etsy isn't a large company by most measures.

And besides that, some of the things in his list were already popular at
companies a lot larger than Etsy five years ago.

I'm not saying he didn't do good work at Etsy, but I think he's giving himself
too much credit for some of it. It's not as groundbreaking as he's making it
out.

------
andyidsinga
> modern software is a team sport.

I couldn't agree with this more, especially when team count is >= 2 && <= ~10.

...working hard during the _right_ hours, eating together, paying attention to
the boredom factor, showing each other cool moves ...er code, having each-
other's back when we're injured, respecting our non-team lives, being
supportive when a team member leaves for a new team.

good teams are painful to move on from ..the only salve being years of stories
and mythology to drink beers over :)

~~~
eropple
_> eating together_

 _> respecting our non-team lives_

These don't feel compatible, and aren't in my experience on teams of that
size. Claims on people's time only grow as teams become entrenched, and
"eating together" is definitely one of them.

My coworkers don't have to be my friends (though some of course become
friends), they have to be competent professionals who do the right thing.

~~~
andyidsinga
you're right about that.

In my experience eating together is best done at lunch.

I've really love it, especially as I end up being more of a manager/leader :
we hardly ever talk about work, its breaks up the day nicely and you get to
chat about philosophy and general bullshit with people.

one of my former bosses made a habit of taking people out to lunch on Fridays
and paid out of his own pocket. It was a small token of his personal
appreciation for the team.

------
stephengillie
Dupe from 4 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156172)

~~~
slyall
Please don't point to dups where there was no discussion. It wastes people's
time clicking on them.

------
ArekDymalski
Very condensed experiences from Etsy’s CTO:

1: Nothing we “know” about software development should be assumed to be true.

2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it.

3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning
and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for
correctness.

4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally.

5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change.

~~~
LukeB_UK
I read it as those were the theories he went to Etsy with.

