Etsy is a company that needed to stay private
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Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
91–100 of 112 posts
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#92Etsy is looking for a buyer.
As they do all day every day http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/etsy
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#93I remember when this article about the Etsy engineering department came out on Techcrunch 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377 The items that jumped out at me: > The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter. > The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers. > It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to bring…
I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud costs, but you still need people to manage these services.
Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case.
I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#94I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. I will never again use or trust…
> They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. That seems illegal. Then again, Etsy does its own payment processing now, and Paypal's been using that same tactic for years. I wonder if Etsy could get in trouble for doing both, since they have more info and can generally confirm shipment, given you print labels from them, and the problem is not that your items were misleading or fraud, but that they prefer y…
Most likely, it was held for the period in which customers could get returns. This is sane.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you also have to deal with people that leave negative feedback because of issues that have nothing to do with what they ordered I gain a little bit of hope for humanity whenever I see a low-star review like "arrived 2 days late" or "wouldn't accept my visa card but I just bought gas with it yesterday and it worked fine" followed by "0 of 19 people found this review helpful".
"Best" review I ever saw (on a book): 3 stars "I haven't read it yet but looks interesting. I'll try to get to it this summer." This was the worst review of the book.
In part that may be down to review procurement.
Amazon's product questions are like that. It seems people get the emailed question and think a person has reached out to them, they respond "sorry i haven't used it yet", or whatever, and that fits in with the other 20 useless answers.
They don't appear to have user rating on answers, only on reviews?
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. That seems illegal. Then again, Etsy does its own payment processing now, and Paypal's been using that same tactic for years. I wonder if Etsy could get in trouble for doing both, since they have more info and can generally confirm shipment, given you print labels from them, and the problem is not that your items were misleading or fraud, but that they prefer y…
Most likely, it was held for the period in which customers could get returns. This is sane.
Held for 180-day period. Far longer than needed for customers to get returns and far from sane imo.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#97Maybe twitter will watch and learn. They have some similar problems.
Yes, but their crap products overwhelming their ecosystem tend to be Russian, not Chinese.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#98I know this will cost me mucho karma, but
what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds.
To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks.
[1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX
Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#99I know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds. To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO…
Spot on.
Re: Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most likely, it was held for the period in which customers could get returns. This is sane.
Held for 180-day period. Far longer than needed for customers to get returns and far from sane imo.
180-day holds are generally standard if you're worried about chargebacks.