from Hacker News

Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff

by tiger3 on 6/21/17, 4:25 PM with 109 comments

• by 20years on 6/21/17, 6:42 PM

  I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made.

  I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.

• by strict9 on 6/21/17, 5:30 PM

  Will echo others regarding China imports, but one last hope to bring me back to their marketplace is a revamp of the review system.

  After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back.

  Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.

• by k3oni on 6/21/17, 4:52 PM

  Etsy should go back at what they did initially and support the craftsmen instead of the china imports, maybe that would help bring them back on track.

• by _Codemonkeyism on 6/22/17, 4:52 AM

  I know this will cost me mucho karma, but

  what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds.

  To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks.

  [1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX

  Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.

• by socrates1998 on 6/21/17, 7:32 PM

  I have just heard a gradual declining of Etsy's quality and creator service of the last year or two.

  Their reluctance to crack down on Chinese crap along with being very unhelpful to it's creators are the two biggest issues.

  I mean, I get that a tech company would struggle with service to it's sellors, that's pretty normal, but if your brand is "handmade quality", then why the hell would you allow Chinese trash?

• by jroseattle on 6/22/17, 1:44 AM

  I remember when this article about the Etsy engineering department came out on Techcrunch 3 years ago.

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377

  The items that jumped out at me:

  > The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter.

  > The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers.

  > It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to bring it in-house and figure it out.

  As a means to an end, this is a _really_ expensive way of operating nowadays. And when the business isn't rolling, these costs become magnified (and the associated operation vulnerable.)

• by Justin_K on 6/21/17, 4:59 PM

  I lost interest in Etsy when I saw a bunch of manufactured crap I could by anywhere else. There was a turning point where Etsy became more of this than original, personally crafted items.

• by dmode on 6/21/17, 7:57 PM

  Etsy is a company that needed to stay private

• by lkrubner on 6/21/17, 7:36 PM

  There was a stretch, I think 3 to 5 years ago, when it seemed that Etsy was on a hiring spree -- lots and lots of recruiters were reaching out to me and asking "Would you like to work for Etsy?" I was intrigued because I used to live in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from Etsy is. So if I worked there, I could have biked to work in about 10 minutes. That would have been cool.

  But every time I asked about the tech, I was disappointed. They wanted me to come in and work on a bunch of PHP code. When I asked about the details, from the hiring manager, I was told that it was, basically, a big monolithic PHP thing. I've no idea if they later moved to microservices, but I have been traumatized by a few too many encounters with horrendous blobs of PHP. For me, its become a bit of a heuristic. If a company is apparently working with a big blob of PHP, I am wary. I need to hear very good things about that company, to offset that wariness.

  More recently I've read criticisms of their search system. At the risk of indulging in "confirmation bias", I'll say this (bad search) is exactly what I would have predicted, based on what I'd heard 3 to 5 years ago.

• by JustAnotherPat on 6/21/17, 4:57 PM

  Seems like a sinking ship for anyone there involved in software especially since they like to blame their tech and poor search for a lot of their problems.

• by amazon on 6/22/17, 2:39 AM

  I have only had positive experiences working with Etsy but a lot of other people I've met have had their businesses shut down and their funds locked on the site. Incredibly shady especially since most of their products were legitimate crafts they made. Hopefully they get their act together because there really is no replacement.

• by upbeatlinux on 6/21/17, 9:29 PM

  Why not initiate a share buy back, continue to trim the fat and go private? A return to their roots is necessary rather than trying to balance the share holder value of their B Corp status.

• by mi100hael on 6/21/17, 6:52 PM

  I wonder if that includes the bike-pedaling office composter.

• by rockmeamedee on 6/22/17, 1:00 AM

  A lot of negative nancies in this thread. I'm not here for kicking people while they're down.

  But didn't they have a layoff a month ago? Isn't there a management saying that goes something like "If you're going to eat shit, eat enough so you only have to do it once", specifically about layoffs?

  Etsy engineers (and other workers) reading this, I wish you good luck! May you survive and thrive through tough times.

• by jbob2000 on 6/21/17, 8:12 PM

  Etsy is looking for a buyer.

• by learc83 on 6/21/17, 5:10 PM

  I remember hearing that Etsy had an unusually large number of women working on the development team. I wonder how this layoff is going to affect that? Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury?

  I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.

• by johnbellone on 6/21/17, 5:26 PM

  I didn't see any numbers on what departments were the most affected, but to my friends at Etsy looking for roles in automation/infrastructure engineering please reach out!

• by ComputerGuru on 6/21/17, 11:54 PM

  Maybe twitter will watch and learn. They have some similar problems.

• by madamelic on 6/21/17, 4:54 PM

  This seems like the 'bubble' deflating.

  Not so much a bang, more of a fizzle as "the big kids" come in and cut deeply.

  That and investors keeping out of seed-stage funding because it has gotten so bloated by everyone wanting their own startup.

  I've seen Genius, Etsy, Uber... etc. It seems like a lot more startups are getting shook up and cut down.