Etsy NYC Culture
From a far seems just what I want, including the office w/ rooftop in Dumbo.... Anyone from #etsy care to share? More meaningful and interesting product than something like #Datadog or #Asana or #Square or #Squarespace or #Databricks or #Doordash... y'all on the same page? #nyctech #nyc #etsyculture #workfromhome #returntooffice #perks #ecommerce #etsyhiring #etsycompensation
does the thumbs up mean... yes? good culture? or yall just like this post hahah
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I can confirm culture is soooo different from other places in a great way. Mission feels real. I feel proud to rep Etsy and would highly recommend joining to anyone. Ping me if there are specific questions.
I have an offer from them. Could I dm you?
A friend I know that started working there in NY says WLB is great. To the point where they’re working remote and traveling around the US
how about the pay?
Someone told me it's "granola culture" what does that mean?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Granola I was gonna say hippie, but maybe not exactly
lol meaningful
The culture is certainly different at Etsy... but not exactly in a good way in my experience. Very political. Decisions are made mostly based on feelings and agendas, not facts or logic. Perhaps why people say it is a hippy culture. Some points: 1) The main product is the website, which is written in PHP, and is a huge tech debt blackhole. The fact that at this stage after 16 years of Etsy being around it is still in PHP should tell you a lot. 2) Another area that getting more attention in recent years is ML for Search/Recommendation. The problems to be solved are genuinely interesting and hard to find elsewhere in terms of complexity and scale. 3) Etsy is very behind on ML front, though. Recently, that has been some slow progress. The biggest improvement in recent years was moving completely to Google Cloud Platform, which has created some room to start using more modern tools for ML. The weak ML teams are partly because the company still feels like a bunch of teams maintaining a PHP website, not a 30billion dollar tech company focused on using its platform to gain high quality data/insights and build good models around them. Many of ML engineers/researchers are embedded in product teams assigned to a specific product, working more or less in isolation along with people with very different skill sets with managers that do not understand ML, This is not always true though. For example, in recent years some ML platform teams are formed too. 4) Product has too much power at Etsy and often interfere with engineering. Product mangers who do not know a first thing about ML working in that space is the norm. It is not uncommon for PMs to actively prevent engineers from looking into things that require attention because "it has no value for our product goals". Take a look at this PM story proudly published in NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/jobs/an-etsy-product-managers-do-it-yourself-career-path.html This probably can tell you why Etsy's search is still so ineffective. 5) Etsy has very good HR policies. Probably because of the hippy culture. WFH/full-remote is possible, and you can choose between that and a hybrid model. Everyone is paid NY salary no matter where you are residing in US. Generous paternity leave. Since the pandemic, they implemented one extra company-wide holiday per month for people to not burn out. 6) Compensation is certainly lower compared to big names in tech, however it is easier to get promoted because of the hippy culture as long as you know how to play politics, and you have liquid stock options. Because of pandemic Etsy got lucky and saw their stock go up 3-4x in one year, so people joined before pandemic now are probably taking home something closer to (but still probably lower than) big names in tech.
Thank you for sharing
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