Etsy engineering practices
Hi all. I'm interviewing at Etsy and they told me there is no dedicated QA team for products. That sounds strange to me and it's almost like they test in production during experiments and other controlled roll outs via feature flags. Is Etsy a good place for engineering? The position I'm interviewing for is engineering manager. How is the culture? Any insight on the engineering lifecycle and practices there would be great. Thanks.
Deploy easy & rollback quick. Lets companies move quickly without months of bureaucratic processes. This relies on grade A monitoring & alerting, quality devs, and a complete lack of work/life separation for engineers. But that does make engineers put in 150% effort towards creating reliable systems. One of the rare circumstances where motivations are perfectly aligned with desired business outcomes. Management normally doesn’t need to direct any effort towards encouraging engineers to design systems that scale/recover automatically.
Etsy is a great place for engineering. There is a "QA" but they build QA tools for the dev to use. There's a lot of checks and balances in the engineering team. Lmk if you need a referral
Yeah I can see how QA wouldn't be needed specifically always. I am not sure about "most tech companies don't have a QA team" though. Google and Microsoft both have QA engineering roles. Investing in tooling and engineering surrounding quality is certainly a good idea.
QA teams tend to be cross-functional, they make sure +20 teams are playing well together. They don’t work individually with 20x teams making sure each pull request works. With a few exceptions for truly business critical functions. Like the payments team of an insurance company (outsized legal risk should any issues be released to prod).
also at etsy, having a qa analyst is team dependent. and they usually only test bigger features. but yeah etsy is great, best place I’ve ever worked
There are no QA roles in Amazon or any Aws services Devs do the tests and there are automated processes QA is probably only used in products that have complicated functional requirements ( mostly in banks and consultancies )
Small sized tech companies dont have dedicated qa teams due to budget. Most bigger places have qa. Amzn is an exception. Everyone can emulate Amazon, but they aren't gonna be Amzn.
Most of the top tech companies don’t have a QA team. Jfyi devs are supposedly responsible for issues