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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

#221

Post by clavalle »

valuearb wrote: post #176
clavalle wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No argument here but what do you mean by 'admin'?

"Etsy’s general and administrative expenses amounted to 24 percent of total revenue. (EBay and MercadoLibre.com, the Latin American online marketplace, each spend about 10 percent of revenue on such expenses.) " I should have said G&A (general and administrative expenses). Essentially the cost of your workforce, the offices, benefits, etc. Etsy's is huge compared to any reasonable comp, and nowhere has anyone explain…

Interesting.

So you are talking about executive management, finance, and other overhead staff not developers or product development.

I asked because you mentioned developer salaries earlier in the thread.

24% does seem awfully high.

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

#222

Post by loceng »

tehabe wrote: post #199
loceng wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they took money from VCs who want an exit.

Well, VC have already the word "capitalists" in their name. They don't care for anything but the ROI. While a company has to care about its customers too.

Indeed, the catch-22 is surviving and moving forward as a company when there are potentially little sources of revenue; will the service or product exist at all without VC funding? I don't personally love the idea of feeding into the VC ecosystem either, it all depends on your position and ability to leverage though as to whether it will be a more positive situation or not.

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

#223

Post by anarazel »

nasalgoat wrote: post #220
anarazel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the problem is that the network disk that EC2 provides as EBS is 100x slower than local disk, so keeping all the indexes and data in memory is the only way to replicate physical hardware performance. > If anyone knows of a better EC2 setup for PostgreSQL, I'm all ears. Have a proper replication & archiving setup, and use instance storage. If you have configured streaming replication to 1-2 other servers, an…

Instance storage is much more limited and is heavily tied to the specific instance types you pick.

Indeed. I didn't want to say it's a panacea, just that you can sometimes get a lot better performance for your money. E.g. larger i3's both have decent IO performance and sizes.

Still doesn't even remotely compete with what you can get with "normal" hardware.

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

#224

Post by malandrew »

mintplant wrote: post #107
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.

Not sure I understand your point. Are you asserting that anyone who argues against capitalism as a system must be doing so from a position of ignorance?

What argument did that person make? They merely said they are "allergic" to capitalism, which sounds more like hyperbole than thoughtful criticism.

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

#225

Post by malandrew »

ksk wrote: post #120
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.

Public healthcare, social safety nets, public infrastructure/libraries/parks/schools, government regulation on products that can harm citizens, etc and about a boatload of other things that are considered good/valuable/moral/ are about as anti-capitalist as you can get. Capitalism promotes exploitation (of people, resources, information), socialism levels the playing field. In some cases, the exploitation leads to pr…

Capitalism promotes improvements in productivity that creates the abundance that makes all of those public programs possible in the first place.

Capitalism > productivity > abundance > social welfare

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

#226

Post by valuearb »

carapace wrote: post #196
valuearb wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one example would be if you are CEO of a car manufacturer. Your engineers design two catalytic converters, one that meets all government regulations/requirements, and another that does substantially better, but reduces horsepower and drivability significantly. If you are environmentally conscious and decide to standardize all your cars on the cleaner catalytic converter, and consumers react poorly and sales suf…

But in practice, what we get is VW. It is "contra-survival" to poison the air. You cannot breath profits. The world is bubble-shaped, and we are all trapped together sandwiched between hard vacuum and molten rock. Poisoning in the short-term to make money to make laws to stop poisoning in the long-term is a poor strategy, and I think we as sentient human beings can do better. "Never let ideological purity interfere w…

VW's approach clearly wasn't business optimal, given it almost bankrupted them.

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

#227

Post by ksk »

malandrew wrote: post #225
ksk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public healthcare, social safety nets, public infrastructure/libraries/parks/schools, government regulation on products that can harm citizens, etc and about a boatload of other things that are considered good/valuable/moral/ are about as anti-capitalist as you can get. Capitalism promotes exploitation (of people, resources, information), socialism levels the playing field. In some cases, the exploitation leads to pr…

Capitalism promotes improvements in productivity that creates the abundance that makes all of those public programs possible in the first place. Capitalism > productivity > abundance > social welfare

I don't entirely disagree, because in the end, these are just tools we created to serve us. We're free to use them in whichever way we feel makes the most sense to us.

The /it depends/its complicated/its a grey area/ way of thinking is an essential analysis tool, but the average person can't be motivated towards an ideology (political, economic or social) using that. To me, the most progress is made by adopting a zealous attitude at the beginning and then making major course corrections, rather than pissing about with optimizing via micro adjustments from the start. e.g. Give people unfettered capitalism, and then when you get 13 year old kids in coal mines, you give them unfettered welfare/workers comp for a bit, etc. That way both the negative and positive impact from policies is permanently etched in history.

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

#228

Post by pixl97 »

fapjacks wrote: post #198
cowpewter wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not toys, think more along the lines of art dolls. They aren't for kids, they cost anywhere from $$$ to $$$$ a piece.

I am very interested in the reason for this pricing, if you wouldn't mind enlightening me? I never understood why they are so expensive.

>I never understood why they are so expensive

In the past everything was expensive. The world of mass production hides from us how much it costs to make 1 of something. A few hundred years ago books were insanely expensive and almost nobody had them. A hundred years ago toys were hand made and expensive and a child might have one or two, most likely passed down from someone else.

We live in a world where the amount of cheap stuff has exploded beyond the imaginations of anyone from the past.

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

#229

Post by itchyouch »

thirdsun wrote: post #210
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…

> 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. Speak for yourself. My non-tech employer (small manufacturer) treats me very well and despite being anything but an exceptional developer my experience is that developers are closer to being regarded as magici…

I would imagine that small businesses where most of the employees have the opportunity to interact with the owner(s) is quite different than a large company where a dev's salary is a line-item under liabilities.

Typically with a smaller & medium-sized businesses (There's still a lot of people who view tech folks as wizards of black magic. All they know in their tenure in the business is that some process used to take 5 people 3 work-days to build a widget, while now, the software by the dev + some new fangled machine allows 1 person to build the widget in half a day.

When I did consulting work for a small print-shop during my college days, they were always very appreciative of the work I did and had no problem paying for my work.

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

#230

Post by carapace »

valuearb wrote: post #226
carapace wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in practice, what we get is VW. It is "contra-survival" to poison the air. You cannot breath profits. The world is bubble-shaped, and we are all trapped together sandwiched between hard vacuum and molten rock. Poisoning in the short-term to make money to make laws to stop poisoning in the long-term is a poor strategy, and I think we as sentient human beings can do better. "Never let ideological purity interfere w…

VW's approach clearly wasn't business optimal, given it almost bankrupted them.

I'm suggesting that overemphasis on the "profit motive" affected the strategic judgement of the VW corporation as a whole.

Whether your metric for this disaster is cash or clean air I think the proximate cause was profit-seeking to the exclusion of other values.

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