BlanketApple's comments

Yeah, we've done that. And again, this is totally a cultural problem.

But inevitably I end up writing that shared groovy code (because I have the most familiarity), and so when things go wrong, or it needs to be changed, I end up being the one having to debug it. Definitely a huge bus factor.

It'd be nice if it was a slightly more common language (e.g. Python) so it wasn't such a pain.

Man, I'm having this problem right now at work and it's been a nightmare. Admittedly the problem is like 90% cultural.

People (on my team) don't understand pipeline and they absolutely don't understand Groovy. Before, they would just write a job with a shell script that e.g. ran valgrind, etc. Lots of small repos with similar steps, so they'd write one job and apply it to 20 different repos. It worked pretty well.

That's still an option with pipelines, but it feels much more discouraged (to e.g. write a shared pipeline job that runs a multi-line shell script).

It's also just a bit of an organizational nightmare to see 200+ jobs on the main screen (as opposed to 20 jobs that did the same thing for 200 repos).

Unfortunately, it also seems like declarative pipeline is limited enough that we end up writing a lot of Groovy. I sorta get why Groovy became the official scripting language, but it's like pulling teeth getting people to learn even basic Groovy.

I realize, again, that a lot of this is a cultural problem. Mostly just trying to give a counterpoint that pipelines don't always look as clean as the article implies, especially for orgs with a lot of repos (where committing the same 'test.sh' file to each repo doesn't make a lot of sense).

All very true. I was more thinking from the company's perspective (who often are the ones overtly discouraging inter-office relationships).

> told not to get too close with them

Well, I don't think that's true really. Nobody cares if you're close friends with your co-workers. Many co-workers are close friends.

But, I get that you meant romantic relationships.

The problem of course being that there's so much negative baggage that often accompanies unsuccessful or unrequited romantic interest, all of it detrimental to the company. For example: If a subordinate rejects a superior's advances, and there's even a whiff of unfair treatment (being passed over for promotion, for example), the subordinate has a legitimate grievance that they didn't before.

The woman in the article, for example, that rejected her boss's advances and then was later let go for "poor performance": Maybe she really was performing extremely poorly! And maybe the boss really was totally over it immediately. But she now has a pretty solid case that it was retaliation, forever.

It just puts the company in a position where they have to be hyper-vigilant about monitoring things like this, and it's a huge waste of resources. Regardless of how valuable you are to the company, you're almost certainly not worth the huge headache that you just caused.

> I think, in general, that it is totally fine to have company outings, but propositions of any sort should be avoided.

It's more that I wonder if this is just another nail in the coffin. Again, totally not based on data of any sort, but it seems like people are less and less enthused about company outings and this might just be one more easy justification for not attending the holiday party.

I don't think that's anyone's typical definition of the middle class. It usually refers to work autonomy and relying on expertise to sustain yourself (as opposed to menial labor).

Merely having liquid capital to begin with (i.e. not tied up in your primary residence or retirement vehicles) almost certainly puts you on the higher end of the middle class.

I don't think re-defining "middle class" to mean the top 10% (or less) of earners is helpful.

I'd heard rumors about this at Vice. Glad to see it getting some air.

Stories like this are important, because I think the traditional view of sexual harassment is that it happens at JP Morgan, or Exxon, or "stodgy" old companies.

People don't think that it can happen at their cool, hip workplace where everyone's woke. But, power is power.

Incidentally, and totally based off of a gut reaction and not data: I wonder if this is the death knell of "company outings." More and more it feels like people are content to let work be work, and avoiding things like holiday parties and after-work gatherings.

I wonder if it's partially because of situations like this: You might be inappropriately propositioned. Or, you might have too much to drink and make an inappropriate advance - I don't even mean anything grossly egregious here necessarily, but a superior making an advance on their subordinate is pretty inappropriate even if the advance itself is tame.

Were you riding during peak hours (7-10, 4-7)?

That's when it tends to get really bad - even minor delays cause massive backups, because the trains are essentially running as close together as the (outdated) signaling technology allows.

Once a delay happens, there's no way to catch up other than just waiting for peak hours to pass and catching up during off-peak time.

That being said, it's still a huge step up from pretty much every other city's metro system (save for maybe DC). It's just that it's gone from being a 8/10 to a 7/10, compared to every other city's 3/10.

Of course, there's the old saying that the financial media has correctly predicted 20 of the last 3 bubbles

> My point is that Etsy needed more of a guiding light than their engineering department providing effective technology.

They had that, though. Amazon for unique items.

I think that's just not the guiding light you wanted for Etsy, but it's been there for a long time. They were missing the technology ~2009 up until a couple years ago. It was absolutely the most important problem at Etsy at that time. Now? I'll agree, not so much.

> Rob Kalin was not an artist - what was his art, Swimmy? BS? A couple wooden computer cases? In my perception he was a con-man hipster who dabbled in craft.

I have no love lost for Rob Kalin as a CEO, and I would never work in a business run by him again, but this is an extremely unfair characterization of him.

He's an artist. Sorry. To call him otherwise is to pull a "no true scotsman."

> someone with retail experience would be nice, ideally online as well as the typical setting where Etsy members sell their wares offline like art galleries, craft fairs, jewelry stores, boutiques, and so forth.

Etsy had plenty of people like that in senior leadership roles. Not the C suite, sure, but high up there.

I also don't see any reason why Etsy needs people like that, to be honest. Bezos had little (if any) retail experience before starting Amazon. Clearly hasn't impeded them any.

> All the time I've dealt with Etsy, I've heard the excuse that it's impossible for them to police their market place in any sort of pro-active way. But the sellers in each category have no problem finding obvious violations in their categories every day, and reports have never been dealt with logically and promptly.

You're grossly unaware and underestimating of the volume of support emails Etsy got (and probably it's even worse now).

Sellers outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Reports outnumber Etsy employees by a godawful amount. Not sure if it's still the case, but we used to have so many reports that we needed employees to all go on rotations where they answered emails and went through reports.

I personally must've gone through close to 1,000+ support emails and reports a year during my time there just doing these support rotations. The full-time community staff probably handled that much each day, if not more.

Even with all that, I bet we answered maybe 25% of all reports and emails. And this was way, way before the IPO.

> I don't have a preference for Etsy's future, as I gave up attempting to use it years ago and have recommended to my friends and clients for years that they buy a domain and set up a shop they actually control, using shopify or big cartel to make it simple.

That's fine, but I think it's naive to assume Etsy's future would look anything other than this. Actively managing a marketplace of Etsy's size is a technology problem.

You can bring up Myspace/etc. all day, but don't forget that in addition to monitoring for resellers and mass produced goods Etsy also has to watch out for:

1) Illegal activity e.g. money laundering 2) Pornographic/inappropriate items 3) Scammers 4) Legitimate support complaints (missing items etc.) 5) General complaints (I don't like this new feature, etc.)

Support staff monitoring all of those numerous issues would bankrupt Etsy, even if they did farm it out to a developing nation for pennies.

> That’s great – for their engineering department.

Well, no - it's great for you too. Nobody can buy anything if the site is down. First-time buyers are especially sensitive to that. If their first experience with Etsy is a timeout page they won't be back (we actually had numbers asserting as such). Amazon famously wrote that 100ms of additional latency cost them 1% of sales, and Etsy is very similar in that regard.

> What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering.

The guiding vision was, and likely still is, to have Etsy be what it is today (but with much better execution, obviously). Amazon with a more hand-made slant to it.

I saw this frequently when I was there - sellers want Etsy to be more like ArtFire or ArtYah is now, but that's not what Etsy's leadership and funders want Etsy to be. They want Etsy to be Amazon, but for unique items.

Now sure, that's not what Rob Kalin wanted it to be. But that vision was lost years ago, way before Chad et. al took over.

> As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually.

No argument there. The decisions usually made sense internally, but the external communications were poor. I would not be surprised to find out it's part of why the C-suite was gutted. I'm really sorry you had to be a customer during that phase. Seriously.

> Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.

They tried that. Rob Kalin is an artist, through and through.

Turns out artists don't always make great business leaders. And let me tell you, definitively, Rob Kalin would have ruined that company had he stuck around for much longer than he did.

> Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm.

It is a technology problem. Etsy can't possibly afford to hire enough people to sift through items manually looking for mass-produced goods. They'd go bankrupt. The marketplace is just way too big for that.

Etsy can remain a small marketplace and do that, which is I'm guessing your preference, but that's not the preference of the VCs who backed Etsy. Unfortunately, money has the final say.

Disclaimer: I worked at Etsy, a long time ago.

> The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for technology’s sake, more than what Etsy was actually doing with that as a company.

I think you're missing quite a bit of this story. I was around during the transition of Chad from CTO -> CEO, and the truth is that Etsy needed to focus on the technology badly during that time. The site would go down constantly. We had very little insight into what was going on with sellers or buyers. Every busy day was basically us crossing our fingers that the site wouldn't go down.

We needed someone focused heavily on the technology. We could never have continued on that path and grown as much as we did.

> Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other.

Deciding what potential buyers are interested in and what items to display to them is a pretty difficult technology problem.

Detecting mass-produced goods in a way that's more subtle than "ban all Chinese sellers" is a pretty difficult technology problem.

If anything I would argue that Etsy didn't focus nearly enough on that, and focused way too much on "low-hanging fruit" (minor workflow adjustments for sellers and buyers).