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We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation

codeascraft.com

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

#31

Post by benihana »

serge2k wrote: post #26
stevesearer wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

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.

If customer service is stressed so much at Zappos, I imagine working in their call center would be a different experience than most?

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

#32

Post by einhverfr »

paulhauggis wrote: post #25
stevesearer wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Why not? It improves solidarity. Actually when I worked at Microsoft doing tech support, I got pulled off the phones to help with sudden mandatory tech support rotations due to virus outbreaks. It was great to see marketing managers have to help people assess whether their systems were infected and apply appropriate tools. I would take escallations but generally people did a good job. (Oh and these people showed up with very little training on customer service or tech support so that was fun).

But I think one thing that Microsoft got out of it (this was in 2002-2003) was a stronger sense by everyone why it was important to focus more on system security. I think this improved the company and lead to better software.

> Especially since I've been in positions where I have been on tight deadlines.

If management know of the rotation, they will have to adjust the deadlines. How many deadlines are really necessary beyond a simple measurement rationale? Management can usually adjust as needed, or reschedule the rotation to a better point.

> With me, it's difficult to move from customer service right back to software development/engineering.

Isn't the point though to ensure that people are engineering and developing software with customer service in mind?

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

#33

Post by einhverfr »

indymike wrote: post #13
lexap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, but one huge problem here is that getting a customer often requires more than a checklist of features, but rather a product that solves a customer's problem well.

I agree that sales, support, and engineering should all have rotations. The sales and support give you very different insights into what customers need which help you out with your engineering.

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

#35

Post by machinshin_ »

kellanem wrote: post #24
zavulon wrote: 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?

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"

can you explain this? i've always thought a CMS is a good thing to allow non-engineers to work with and edit non-critical data like this.

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

#36

Post by chucklarge »

zavulon wrote: post #29
kellanem wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Etsy blogs use Wordpress, so we do use existing third-party tools where is makes sense.

Kellan might have a rule to not build a CMS but we certainly have built one to manage help page content and other knowledge base pages. That content is largely managed by our support staff.

I wrote the current tool but it is actively being replaced. We chose to to roll our own since we'd have to do some work to integrate a third party tool into our database architecture and authentication system. The tool is heavily integrated into other internal tooling and has specific workflows that also make using an existing tool challenging.

The About page content is largely static, aside from the staff photos mentioned in the above post.

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

#38

Post by pkaye »

I wonder how to do this with engineering that requires deep knowledge. At my work we have SoC designers, layout, analog designers, board layout and firmware among the engineering departments. I don't think we can even rotate within the engineering departments as everything is so specialized.

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

#39

Post by Sanddancer »

tomjen3 wrote: post #14
lexap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you truly feel that way, then I honestly am curious as to why you get up in the morning. Dogfooding, and listening to customer problems and feedback are two of the best ways of making your product better for everyone. A few hours on the phone, or responding to emails is fantastic for breaking up preconceived notions as to what people are doing with your project, and can give new ideas.

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

#40

Post by jacalata »

tomjen3 wrote: post #14
lexap wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For some values of 'good', perhaps. Probably not the one they measure with.
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