Agreed, there is a whole lot more to the story that sadly this comment area is too small to contain. Dickerson and Allspaw definitely did a great job of modernizing Etsy from the relatively ragtag team that operated it prior, and it seems pretty robust now.
That’s great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.
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. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.
That’s great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.
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. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.