Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by arenaninja » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #38

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…

> That reminds me of the silly StackOverflow "if you are a real you must setup your own servers". There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Do they build their own Ethernet cables? Racks? Make their own distros, compilers, etc.? Build their own network -- after all, your network is critical in delivering pages to your users, why outsource this to XO and Cogent…

That's insanely cheap. Can you share where you're renting this and what plan? A cheap DigitalOcean plan is around $20 a month, and since you said "server(s)" (plural) I'm assuming you get more than one for that $20?

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

#122

Post by smileysteve » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

dboreham wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be something very wrong when an article about the problems with a company that facilities an online marketplace is talking about the details of how their servers are run and paid for.. By this I mean that in such a business the issues surrounding servers and even software should be very minor compared to the bread and butter of helping people sell stuff so money is made. The costs of said servers and sof…

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

You left out the paying multiple people >$10k/month that can replace a hardware failure immediately (and somehow with 0 downtime), the redundant hardware, etc.

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

#123

Post by tonyedgecombe » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #83

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…

That's very true but it's not much fun.

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

#124

Post by irrational » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

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…

1) Etsy has been around longer than EC2

This is a good point. My company is on cloud servers, but not EC2 since EC2 didn't exist when we moved to the cloud.

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

#125

Post by stock_toaster » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #119

shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

Except then you're stuck with a $15K server, and you had to spend all 15K up front. What happens when a component prematurely fails? Better buy two. What about the person-hours you spend with ISPs, CoLo provider, etc? You want network redundancy? Big ISP bills. Yes, cost per compute measurable (memory, CPU, etc) is higher in the cloud. But what's never mentioned when people complain about the cloud being expensive: a…

  > Except then you're stuck with a $15K server, and you had to spend all 15K up front

I think you missed the part where the parent said "lease it at $400/month (OpEx)"

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

#126

Post by sushid » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

Exuma wrote: post #55

vosper wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only comments I saw were one from an unnamed staffer, at the end, and two from software engineers. What about these comments (from people who've just lost their jobs, bear in mind) seems entitled to you? I just see people who agreed with the principles and ideology of the company they worked for. > Jason Wong, a former engineer, urged his ex-colleagues to “fight” for “all the sellers who rely on you, for the valu…

Well for one, the part about "fighting" anything... just appreciate your job experience the company gave you and move on. "For all the things you love about working there"... so basically fight for your overly cushy job where you were overpaid to organize paperclips, because of untracked spending. I'm being somewhat facetious but you get the point. I also have no problems with cushy or overly cushy, more power to you…

I don't think the guy is telling his former colleagues to fight for the nice perks, but more for the culture. It's clear from the article that the company's values are shifting to be more profit-oriented.

He personally finds this shift questionable because those might not have been the core values that motivated him (and perhaps his colleagues). I'm not sure if that makes him an "entitled goomba."

I do agree that the second quote is purely stupid. You work(ed) at a online marketplace, of all things and _now_ you're allergic to capitalism?

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

#127

Post by dkarapetyan » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #81

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.

I'm not disagreeing. My point is that I've seen this pattern enough times now to know you can't escape it. It will happen whether you like it or not.

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

#128

Post by ryanbrunner » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #45

wgyn wrote: post #25

> “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” the economist Milton Friedman famously wrote in 1962. And that is “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” It's strange to me that Friedman is viewed (at least by economists and "business" folk) as a paragon of logical reasoning and empiricism, all the while his views reek so strongly of ideology. There are tons…

Friedman is of course right, whether lawmakers and jurists have tried to codify rules allowing directors to betray shareholder interests. A single business is not responsible for externalities, any more than a single citizen is. We are ALL responsible for negative externalities like pollution and have to solve those problems together, using the political process and sharing the costs among everyone. And his statement…

You're correct that ultimately, at the end of the day, the shareholders are the owners of the business, and should have ultimate control over how their resources are allocated or spent. That doesn't mean that the shareholders interests are necessarily for profit above all else. If your shareholders were perfectly happy with being ecologically conscious and providing an above-average place of business for employees irrespective of profit, wouldn't demanding focus on profit above all else be working against the shareholder's interests?

I think this is especially true in the case of Etsy, which as the article points out, is registered as a B corporation and so arguably has agreement from the shareholders that benefiting society is part of the mandate of the company.

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

#129

Post by sushid » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:24 PM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #12

dominotw wrote: post #7

Why is ETSY stock soaring? I don't get it. Are they doing something to get rid of crap on their site? Edit: sorry, I meant soaring this week.

it's down over 50% since the IPO.

Not actually? It's trading at $12.97 at the time of this writing. Its IPO price was $16.

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

#130

Post by giobox » Thu, May 18, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #97

giobox wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 VP…

You touch on what I think is a bigger concern, as somebody who spends a lot of time on this sort of work: Terraform doesn't actually solve any problem that I encounter. You aren't "provider neutral" when using it, as you say, and moving from one nontrivial provider (AWS, GCE, Azure) to another is a full rewrite. I disagree--and rather strongly at that--that it's a lock-in thing, unless you are aggressively climbing a…

I think Terraform does solve some problems, for some teams. For us it's really the process it provides - by moving VPS infrastructure definition to code, rather than management UIs, we can apply our existing code review processes we have to our hardware infrastructure before promoting through staging environments, not just the product code. This is vastly preferable to letting individual engineers run wild at the AWS management console, and allows for rollback of breaking changes much more easily etc. This arguably the real value in Terraform, which i think earlier posts about using it to somehow become cloud neutral missed.