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Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

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Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#81

Post by valuearb »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #67

I've lost count now of how many companies have started unconventional and then migrated to just being another regular old corporation with all the usual corporate problems. Investors are regular people and like regular people they like being around the devil they know vs the one they don't.

A business is always a business.

The profits from it are owed to the owners, not the suppliers, nor the employees. If you want to do something different with those profits, then you should not invite other investors in as partners, then use some of their share of the profits to fund your own CEO cult.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#82

Post by delias_ »

MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

>Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft”

So many times people fail to look at problems in terms of trade-offs instead of right/wrong or fashionable/faus pax

Running your own infra vs public cloud has so many considerations beyond a simple price tag. Massive scale companies on AWS have hadoop clusters just to work out their goddamn bill. But there are considerations you have to make about the number of people to maintain something and how that affects your org on just a cultural/sustainability level, what the velocity of SaaS allows you, etc.

Running your own infra doesn't have to be full of cruft. And maybe the rolling-your-own approach to certain things is paradigmatic to the way your business works, maybe it isn't. You have to figure out the trade-offs.

Newer, fashionable tech is often decorated with tag lines of "faster, cheaper, better". That's actually not what I care about. Instead, sell me on "recoverable", "debuggable", and "sustainable".

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#83

Post by valuearb »

shawnbaden wrote: post #37

This applies to any job: work where what you do is the core discipline. At a law firm, be a lawyer. At a medical practice, be a doctor. As a software engineer, work at a company where software is the product. Don’t write software at an insurance company and expect job satisfaction. At such companies software engineers are seen as replaceable. Another option: work where what you do is largely represented by upper mana…

I up-voted you because there is a lot of truth to what you wrote. But you also have to realize that today many businesses that don't understand how to develop software but still need to have effective software development processes. That's a huge personal opportunity if you are an effective communicator who can emphasize with managers from disparate backgrounds. They need someone who not only can implement and manage a successful software development process, but communicate to them what is possible, what is risky, and what the best trade-offs there are to develop software to meet the company's goals.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#84

Post by valuearb »

kgwgk wrote: post #60
valuearb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't have to be. They didn't have to sell stock privately either.

They had to if they wanted to spend someone else's money...

This party wasn't going to pay for itself!

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#85

Post by sciurus »

Black-and-white Capital's press releasing calling for changes at Etsy is at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170502005999/en/blac...

To me it's fascinating how deep in the technical weeds it is. For example, suggesting changes to their search ranking algorithms.

Some of it strikes me as likely inaccurate. E.G.

"It is black-and-white’s understanding that more than 50% of the approximately 450 people on the R&D team focus on maintaining the Company’s costly internal infrastructure. A shift to the public cloud would provide long-term cost savings while also establishing a more flexible infrastructure to support future growth."

I doubt that Etsy can significantly reduce headcount by moving their servers from on-prem to public cloud.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#86

Post by bluetwo »

MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

My understanding is that eBay runs their own servers. It kind of sounds similar to me.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#87

Post by giobox »

djsumdog wrote: post #70
hueving wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.

Most of the larger shops I've worked at have started moving away from hosted providers to save money. When you're starting out, hosted solutions will save you a lot of time. Running your own servers is a high cost and you need a dedicated team. But once you're pulling in that revenue and can afford it, running your own can save you some money and add a lot of flexibility. If you're starting out, I highly recommend no…

I completely see how it's theoretically desirable to not be tied to a particular cloud/VPS provider, but I'm not entirely convinced Terraform alone is the answer. In my experience, Terraform does not let you declare VPS resources in a "provider neutral" way - you would still have to completely rewrite your Terraform files if you say, switch from AWS to Azure. Then there's the wider issue that whole concepts in one VPS provider that you used in Terraform don't necessarily exist in another, or require a completely different approach. A great example is just look at the documentation for Terraform's DigitalOcean Support, vs their AWS support. The AWS documentation is many times larger! Once your stack reaches a certain degree of complexity this is a non-trivial task. I should make clear this isn't a knock against Terraform - it's a great tool, but it isn't going to magically make it easy to leave AWS for lots of people.

Amazon aren't stupid, and to really realise the full value/potential of their cloud offering you kind of have to design for the proprietary features of their stack, which of course is the whole point - driving you to be locked in as much as they can. Treat them as just a bunch of generic compute boxes in the cloud and you will end up driving your costs up, not to mention often markedly increasing the complexity of your deployment.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#88

Post by MichaelGG »

sciurus wrote: post #74
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

> Edit: Yes, I understand the pricing differences of cloud. So just say "it's cheaper to run our own stuff", don't pretend its due to some desire for "craft". I think your criticism would make sense if the article was accurate. But I don't think this quote > Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that…

Well that makes sense. I keep forgetting how articles incorrectly portray people, especially when it fits a narrative. I guess I was only too ready to believe that a company that bikes around leftovers would actually believe in craft-servers.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#89

Post by wutbrodo »

athenot wrote: post #54
malandrew wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about capitalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that capitalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how capitalism supports their blissful ignorance. Capitalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.

I directly benefit from capitalism in my current occupation. Yet I'm also aware that it dehumanizes anyone who can't produce value within that model. Therefore I support attempts to make it inclusive of all human beings, even if that means making the model "less ideal" or "less pure". I find it strange that we somehow have come to value assets over humans. Yes, that means I will loose out on some of the value I earn…

Yes, and "our implementation of capitalism sorely needs improvement" is different from "I'm allergic to capitalism".

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#90

Post by technotarek »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #78
MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

There's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't some…

You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person:

https://attic-dc.com

Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't expect it will ever be.

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