This should be also applied to within engineering teams as well. Employees when encouraged to move from team to team after certain intervals (such as 3-4 years). There has been argument that this doesn't allow people to specialize but I feel 3-4 years is long time after which returns are probably diminishing in developing specialization. This keeps life interesting and you get insights on how other teams work, their process and tools etc.
We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
41–50 of 72 posts
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#42Thank you for not putting "Why" at the beginning of the article title.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#43It'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?
That probably exists, too, but I think the idea is to expose folks in non-engineering roles to the code without it being overwhelming.
Indeed. I've seen this in academic labs as well that have a lot of undergrads exposed to research - deliberately keeping something undone, or less efficient than it might be to have an experienced postdoc do it, do that someone without a lot of experience can get their feet wet without having to try and tackle a full-blown project (coding or otherwise).
"This is what we do and how we do it" with a non-critical system that's approachable seems to be a great way to set up rotations.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#44It's not just tech companies doing this. At Volvo we did it as part of our continuous integration process. It was great fun, it really helped you to understand the business better.
Many academic departments do this as well, to give people exposure to lots of different projects in their first few years of graduate school.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#45I like the rotation idea, but I can't say I see much logic in the desire to have new engineers deploy to production on their first day mentioned/linked in the opening. At VMware (or at least on my team) we try to have new engineers commit code their first week (this doesn't always work out, and when it does it's usually the 4th or 5th day) and I almost feel that's too soon...first day just seems nuts.
You don't see this in other professions, e.g. I doubt doctors are performing surgery or lawyers are going to court on their first day at a new hospital or firm. I'm just not seeing the value in having someone commit code before they're possibly familiar with the codebase and [unless it's a product they used before getting hired] may be equally unfamiliar with what the product even does.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#46Earlier 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"
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.
I think the point is "use existing technology" vs. "roll your own."
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#47I like the rotation idea, but I can't say I see much logic in the desire to have new engineers deploy to production on their first day mentioned/linked in the opening. At VMware (or at least on my team) we try to have new engineers commit code their first week (this doesn't always work out, and when it does it's usually the 4th or 5th day) and I almost feel that's too soon...first day just seems nuts. You don't see t…
In my experience, I think it has more to do with getting an engineer acquainted with the pipeline from writing code to getting it live on production. Once he/she is familiar with this, it takes a huge barrier out of the way for the person to be productive whenever they are ready to write some non trivial code in the codebase.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#48I like the rotation idea, but I can't say I see much logic in the desire to have new engineers deploy to production on their first day mentioned/linked in the opening. At VMware (or at least on my team) we try to have new engineers commit code their first week (this doesn't always work out, and when it does it's usually the 4th or 5th day) and I almost feel that's too soon...first day just seems nuts. You don't see t…
You're not performing surgery and you're not arguing in court. You're making many mostly-trivial changes to a website, and that process should be trivial enough that it can be learned in a day.
Having people deploy on their first day is a check on the complexity of the process as much as it is intended to educate new employees.
(n.b. I don't work for Etsy anymore, but I still feel compelled to go to the mat on this thing.)
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#49I like the rotation idea, but I can't say I see much logic in the desire to have new engineers deploy to production on their first day mentioned/linked in the opening. At VMware (or at least on my team) we try to have new engineers commit code their first week (this doesn't always work out, and when it does it's usually the 4th or 5th day) and I almost feel that's too soon...first day just seems nuts. You don't see t…
In my experience, I think it has more to do with getting an engineer acquainted with the pipeline from writing code to getting it live on production. Once he/she is familiar with this, it takes a huge barrier out of the way for the person to be productive whenever they are ready to write some non trivial code in the codebase.
That's exactly right. It's not about pushing meaningful or complex code to production, it's about pushing a small change so that a new engineer can see the whole process from end-to-end.
We do have people push on their first day here at Gridium and I think it's really beneficial. The new engineer sees how we work, and the rest of the team sees that new name in the git logs, on chat, and everywhere else. It sends a strong message that there is a new member of the team who is going to be contributing from now on. It helps to establish cultural norms (everyone makes a big deal out of that first commit which is fun).
I really like the effect it has on our team. Even changing two characters in a string feels like a big deal and that's awesome.
Re: We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
In my experience People don't dislike helping others, people dislike getting yelled at. No matter how good Zappos is, their CSRs will get yelled at, and I think everyone has a right to not enjoy getting yelled at, I sure don't enjoy it.