> "The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers."<p>Given that they've produced some impressive things, Etsy always seemed to be the example of a shop that was overdoing it - but I had actually assumed they were overcomplicating it with 20 engineers or so. Looking at their github now, and hearing those recent numbers, it feels much worse. That level of work is great, but for a company that does what Etsy does, much of it seems like overkill. (Managing 1000 instances should be the same as managing 100, this is where automation kicks in. Architecture enables that.)<p>Ultimately, that's a tremendously large amount of engineers, to where I can't really mentally assign what all but about 20 of them might do. Let's be generous and say 30 - or even 40 :) All of that eats into the bottom line (and also makes adding more staff harder, as your tech becomes more and more custom).<p>Really, at the basic level, it's a CRUD-based storefront website. Yes, it has scaling needs. But it's not really novel in that regard.<p>Yet, they've built more automation around their automation (lots of things in the Chef ecosystem) and probably made things a lot more custom.<p>I can understand some of this for say, multiplayer gaming or video streaming infrastructure maybe, but I would suspect Etsy could have been run a lot easier with less wheel reinvention.<p>Startups should really strive, IMHO, to write as little of software as possible, that's outside of their line of business. When wheels are square, build better wheels sure, but what I see from that number looks like MASSIVE levels of maintaince costs for being that custom.<p>So anyway, thanks for producing things that other people use and that are useful - YES - but from the startup accounting / efficiency perspective, I wouldn't want to see my company run that way.
> One way Etsy drives this kind of commitment to deep understanding that seems to underlie its technology choices, is limiting the number of tools it uses as a company. It would rather be the master of few tools than have a broad knowledge across many different ones.<p>Every large(-ish) company I know has pretty strict rules about the languages, frameworks, and tools used for the main products.<p>The more flexible of these do allow prototyping using a different toolsets. The ones that have a developer audience always experiment with new environments.<p>New tools and new processed get adopted over time, but in many cases the cycle they go through emulated pretty closely the adoption cycle seen outside. Even if the new shinny toy syndrome is very strong in this field, this makes a lot of sense, as nobody really wants to throw away everything. (_While writing this I got to think about the numerous rewrites eBay has seen over years_).<p>> The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter. Part of the reason for avoiding the cloud is control, but not necessarily just from a security perspective as you might think. The real reason is Etsy personnel want to get under the hood and understand every aspect of every piece of technology the company controls.<p>I continue to be very curious about how polarizing the cloud remains.