

Ask HN: Engineers' hatred toward working at e-commerce startups - kimcheeme

I&#x27;ve come across a lot of developers who would tell me that the last startup they want to work at is an e-commerce based one. What are the main reasons for wanting to work at a company like Twitter or Dropbox instead of Gilt or Birchbox?
======
codeonfire
The operational focus. Half the company is working to get the most work out of
the blue collar workforce for the lowest price. What do you think they see
when an engineer walks through the door. They see another blue collar job that
costs five times as much as normal. True or not, that's how management at
e-commerce companies want to approach engineering.

Management doesn't even understand software development. E-commerce management
is hardwired to expect a simple action-change-reaction cycle that lasts a
couple of days. You don't 'develop' software over a few months or years. You
make a software 'change' and things start happening immediately with bottom
line improvement in a few days or weeks.

Their thinking is "we're going to optimize forklift operator costs by having
people work 2 hour shorter shifts and position forklifts differently so costs
next week will be $x less." Their equivalent idea of what software development
is is "write a program to reduce shifts by 2 hours and reposition forklifts so
costs next week will be $x less." The industry is hardwired to think of
software as a tactical tool instead of a strategy.

Even if the company doesn't have operations and is just a website, its still
'make a change to increase conversion so that revenue next week is $x more.
Again, software is not a strategy, but a mechanical 9-5 type job.

------
kremdela
I'm the Director of Engineering at an e-commerce startup in an industry I know
very little about (BaubleBar, fashion jewelry), and our challenges are in a
much different realm than a product based startup, and I would say that we
attract a different kind of developer.

As far as the business goes, operations and marketing need to scale much
faster than our technology. Acquiring customers and efficiently supporting
them (building and supporting tools for improved reporting, logistics, order
fulfillment) are definitely more important to company growth than building a
recommendation engine.

Our work varies a lot more and we get the support a huge variety of different
types of projects. We support marketing, creative, customer service,
operations and are constantly integrating with a new advertising network,
analytics platform or shipping API.

I think engineers want to work on things that are impactful in measurable
ways. Some want nerd cred, or really hard technology problems, my team builds
cool stuff supporting a (more traditional) business that's growing crazy fast.
And for us, that's exciting.

P.S. We're also hiring in NY.

------
lumberjack
Well a techie with a tool box for a tech skills feels a bit out of place in
the e-commerce space where technology is done the boring way and where
innovation happens in the business, marketing and sales departments.

~~~
kimcheeme
How about utilizing latest machine learning technology and improving latency
as business scales while trying to include higher quality pics and videos?
Providing a superior recommendations engine specific for your business and
better ui/ux for your various customers so it doesn't suck like amazon's? How
about growth hacks built into email customer retention funnels and
understanding how data, marketing, and technology translates in real-time to
improved metrics in various parts of the customer acquisition funnel? What
about logistics and technologies built to bridge outside in in-house logistics
(the other half of the business) and making sure it's integrated seamlessly
and efficiently for that period (knowing that systems will be altered /
upgraded every few years and processes have to be constantly fine-tuned at
various points within the e-commerce company's life). What about dealing with
robotics and algorithms on shipping and fulfillment that shaves off costs by
the millions, fine tunes labor productivity, reduces injury rates, etc. that
can make or break the business because margins are thin and building scalable
tech solutions is a core value prop.

Wouldn't engineers be interested in doing all of these things or most SF
techies just want to be building and deployment code?

~~~
lumberjack
Well for one I'm quite interested in logistics but I don't consider that a
subset of the e-commerce business.

Recommendation engines are definitely interesting though.

I don't pretend to speak for every techie on HN but I think the qualifier for
startup guys is whether there are going to be hard problems to solve as
opposed to just doing routine stuff.

------
whichdan
Scale. Twitter and Dropbox are dealing with problems in a completely different
realm than Gilt or Birchbox. Shopify would be a more interesting comparison;
it's an e-commerce platform, rather than an e-commerce site, which undoubtedly
deals with a lot of issues Twitter and Dropbox had to in their earlier days.

~~~
kimcheeme
Good point. But do you think that an average engineer few years out of college
working at twitter / dropbox is working on projects that enables one to see
the big scaling solutions or are they just working on one little side project
that no one really cares about; whereas at Gilt, they may have a much smaller
engineering team so each engineer has a broader set of responsibilities. I
think if you are like a VP level person, yeah I completely agree with you, but
wondering if that experience is similar at the junior level.

------
ig1
Both Amazon and Etsy are ecommerce players that attract plenty of good
developers.

