Not just nerds in a corner
I was inspired to start blogging again after attending a talk given by the CEO of Etsy, Chad Dickerson. The talk focused around the importance of the engineering culture at Etsy and how it’s helping the company move faster than they thought they could. For those that don’t know Chad, @chaddickerson on Twitter, was the CTO until July of this year and has been the driving force behind Etsy’s engineering team. Chad discussed how at Etsy, they have a “just ship” mentality that has manifested itself as a means to ship code to production by anyone at anytime, even by members of the board.
Although I am a strong proponent of continuous deployments, I’m not going to argue the merits in this post (we will save that for another time). I would however like to focus on an underlying theme that was touched upon during the talk. The reason why Chad was able to build such a culture within Etsy is their view on technology. The engineering team is a true partner in the business and not just to the nerds that are put in a corner and only consulted with when there is a system problem. Looking at the technology teams as core to the business allows for more collaboration between the groups creating better alignment on the overall company objectives. It seems like such an obvious thing, but in my experience the technology teams are typically treated like the little brother that you don’t want but have to keep around. Lets face it, almost all businesses today rely on technology for day-to-day operations, and Etsy is no exception. The technology is the backbone of that organization. I don’t want to trivialize the amount of effort that I’m sure the team put in to get to this point, this was not an overnight process. The point I’m trying to make is that the company supported this approach and could have only been accomplished with that support. Chad, please keep up what you are doing, you are not only a great example for technology companies to follow, but I think for CEOs of all types.
You can find out more about Etsy’s engineering culture at their Code As Craft blog.
