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We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

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Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#11
post #8

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

A customer service rotation for everyone in the company is more important.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#12
I'm a huge fan of cross disciplinary rotations of all types. A startup company, or any organization, should act as a unified whole. "It's not my problem" is not an option, especially when the company is small and the stakes are high. Sales depends on engineering which depends on support and management, an interconnected web. Rotations build empathy, lead to innovative thinking from outside perspectives and give people greater context. I've proposed them at several of my past jobs only to be shot down each time. It says a lot about the management of Etsy that they encourage designers and product managers to do a rotation on the coding side, when I wasn't able to convince my team leaders to let php developers from one project rotate to work on another.

"Human resources" has come to mean paperwork and discipline, but the real value of the term is much closer to its literal meaning. Developing peoples' innate capability is very important. Any company can compete to hire the "best people", but the really smart companies put that effort into increasing the value of the people that they have. The capacity of the human mind is one of the broadest and most versatile things in the universe, but most of us quickly settle into limiting patterns of thought. Just a few days of seeing things from a new perspective can make all the difference in the world. Etsy's engineering rotations seem like fun, but I think they will pay off in a big way. It's hard to put a number on increasing teamwork and understanding. Programs like this are a great way to maximize that value.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#13
post #11
post #8

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

A customer service rotation for everyone in the company is more important.

I think sales may be more important. Getting an appreciation for how hard it is to get a customer would alter how a lot of engineers think about features. Customer service is honestly easy in comparison.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#14
post #11
post #8

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

A customer service rotation for everyone in the company is more important.

If you want your good engineers to leave you, yes. Oh and have even less care for your customers after that.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#16
post #11
post #8

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

A customer service rotation for everyone in the company is more important.

I agree. Understanding the customer is a key principle of good business. To paraphrase Ducker, you're selling satisfaction to the customer, and if you're building it, you should know what makes for a happy customer.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#18
post #3

It's a great idea, but I'm having difficulty understanding the specific task non-coding employees are doing: adding their own photo to Staff page. Shouldn't there be a nice user-friendly back-end interface that would let them do that in about 10 seconds without any code knowledge?

One answer is that it's convenient to have the task around for engineer first-day deploys, which serve a greater purpose.

A second answer is building a database-backed CMS to replace editing html for every dumb page on the site would be a boondoggle and not an improvement.

Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

#20
post #11
post #8

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

A customer service rotation for everyone in the company is more important.

Zappos does this and their customer service is some of the best in the business:

"Each new employee goes through a rigorous month-long training that focuses on nothing but customer service. They spend 40 hours on the phones helping our customers because regardless of the specific department they were hired for, customer service is the priority. Each holiday season when call volume goes up, everyone in the company pitches in and jumps on the phones because we want to maintain the same level of service no matter how busy it gets."

http://www.zapposinsights.com/blog/item/zappos-insights-anno...

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