I loved everything about this article. At my company, we've also found that providing spaces where people are able to work in a cross-disciplinary fashion gives the opportunity for innovative ideas. Every Thursday, a team member is paired with another from somewhere else in the company. While say, a marketing person can get to learn tech – it's also very rewarding to an engineer to be able to work with a marketer or a sales person to see that side of the business. Exposing a marketer to engineering may help her have epiphanies like, "i might be able to track how effective my last campaign was by doing X" and an engineer might think about things that could be added to a feature to maximize user growth. We wrote a blog post about our intra-company pairing here: http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/91759651948/pairing-thurs...
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
#22Wish my employer had that. I'd kill for an engineering / IT dev rotation...since those we're close 2nd & 3rd on my choice of career.
What's your current career?
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#23Great 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.
At the first software job I had (94-97), every engineer was expected to do customer support on rotation. Typically it amounted to one day a fortnight. I found it to be hugely helpful, in particular the software we were building (Desktop GIS) wasn't something that I was going to use myself, so understanding what the users got hung up on was really helpful. We could also be pretty responsive, it wasn't unusual to just fix a bug either while on the phone to someone, or within an hour or so of getting off the phone, and then we could just dump in on our BBS and tell them to dial-up and download it...
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#24It'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?
We actively resist automating this process. Because of the way Etsy development is structured this gap gets fixed periodically and then we have to go back and un-automate it.
It's a key part of our 1st day push program: https://codeascraft.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-...
Also it would violate my first rule of engineering which is: "Never build a CMS"
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pit…
So instead of temporary staff, they take people off of their current projects to work in customer service?? This doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Especially since I've been in positions where I have been on tight deadlines. The most likely outcome in this scenario is that the employee will not only have to get their customer service rotations done, but also get their tight-deadline project done. With me, it's difficult to move from customer service right back to software development/engineering.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pit…
Never working for Zappos, good to know.
That actually probably works pretty well, but I have done my time in a call center and never want to go back.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pit…
So instead of temporary staff, they take people off of their current projects to work in customer service?? This doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Especially since I've been in positions where I have been on tight deadlines. The most likely outcome in this scenario is that the employee will not only have to get their customer service rotations done, but also get their tight-deadline project done. With me, it's di…
That makes the assumption that zappos has tight-deadline projects that take priority over taking care of their customers. If they're truly a customer comes first type company, they'll make room to take care of the CSR.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#28Great 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.
Etsy does support rotations for engineers -- even our CEO does his share: https://twitter.com/chaddickerson/status/545313526626385920
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#29It'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?
We actively resist automating this process. Because of the way Etsy development is structured this gap gets fixed periodically and then we have to go back and un-automate it. It's a key part of our 1st day push program: https://codeascraft.com/2012/03/13/making-it-virtually-easy-... Also it would violate my first rule of engineering which is: "Never build a CMS"
Thanks for the explanation. Totally agree with "Never build a CMS" rule. But why not use a pre-built CMS in the first place? Either use Wordpress, or a CMS plugin for your framework if you're using something like ROR. If you're not using a CMS, how are you updating the copy on pages like About? Does that process require a developer each time?
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#30Great 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.
Everyone in the company does these as well (our CEO Chad answered did his holiday rotation a couple weeks ago), typically during the holiday season when we slow down our deploys and our support volume increases. But we're encouraged as engineers to do them once a quarter.
I don't know if it's more important, but I agree with the sentiment that customer service rotations are extremely important. Nothing brings your brilliant head-in-the-clouds engineering ego crashing down to earth like reading an email from a frustrated user who can't figure out how to get (what you thought was) your brilliant product working right.