We Invite Everyone at Etsy to Do an Engineering Rotation (opens in new tab)

Great idea. I'd love to see a writeup about a rotation in the other direction, ie give engineers a taste of the business side of the house. As a data scientist I speak a lot with Sales and Engineering and sometimes the two teams seem worlds apart...

It's a great idea, but I'm having difficulty understanding the specific task non-coding employees are doing: adding their own photo to Staff page. Shouldn't there be a nice user-friendly back-end interface that would let them do that in about 10 seconds without any code knowledge?

I like the rotation idea, but I can't say I see much logic in the desire to have new engineers deploy to production on their first day mentioned/linked in the opening. At VMware (or at least on my team) we try to have new engineers commit code their first week (this doesn't always work out, and when it does it's usually the 4th or 5th day) and I almost feel that's too soon...first day just seems nuts.

You don't see this in other professions, e.g. I doubt doctors are performing surgery or lawyers are going to court on their first day at a new hospital or firm. I'm just not seeing the value in having someone commit code before they're possibly familiar with the codebase and [unless it's a product they used before getting hired] may be equally unfamiliar with what the product even does.

Wish my employer had that. I'd kill for an engineering / IT dev rotation...since those we're close 2nd & 3rd on my choice of career.

I'm continually impressed by Etsy Engineering's descriptions of their practices and process.

Rotations are a wonderful idea and, IMO, should be done more regularly.

It's not just tech companies doing this. At Volvo we did it as part of our continuous integration process. It was great fun, it really helped you to understand the business better.

I'm a huge fan of cross disciplinary rotations of all types. A startup company, or any organization, should act as a unified whole. "It's not my problem" is not an option, especially when the company is small and the stakes are high. Sales depends on engineering which depends on support and management, an interconnected web. Rotations build empathy, lead to innovative thinking from outside perspectives and give people greater context. I've proposed them at several of my past jobs only to be shot down each time. It says a lot about the management of Etsy that they encourage designers and product managers to do a rotation on the coding side, when I wasn't able to convince my team leaders to let php developers from one project rotate to work on another.

"Human resources" has come to mean paperwork and discipline, but the real value of the term is much closer to its literal meaning. Developing peoples' innate capability is very important. Any company can compete to hire the "best people", but the really smart companies put that effort into increasing the value of the people that they have. The capacity of the human mind is one of the broadest and most versatile things in the universe, but most of us quickly settle into limiting patterns of thought. Just a few days of seeing things from a new perspective can make all the difference in the world. Etsy's engineering rotations seem like fun, but I think they will pay off in a big way. It's hard to put a number on increasing teamwork and understanding. Programs like this are a great way to maximize that value.

I loved everything about this article. At my company, we've also found that providing spaces where people are able to work in a cross-disciplinary fashion gives the opportunity for innovative ideas. Every Thursday, a team member is paired with another from somewhere else in the company. While say, a marketing person can get to learn tech – it's also very rewarding to an engineer to be able to work with a marketer or a sales person to see that side of the business. Exposing a marketer to engineering may help her have epiphanies like, "i might be able to track how effective my last campaign was by doing X" and an engineer might think about things that could be added to a feature to maximize user growth. We wrote a blog post about our intra-company pairing here: http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/91759651948/pairing-thurs...

That is just the coolest idea ever. For non-engineers, software can be a sort of black box filled with "code," whatever that means. This knowledge gap frequently leads to conflicts when engineers take longer to build a feature than non-engineers would like, or when things break that just seem so simple. Getting everybody involved in the deliberate, painstaking process of writing quality software is a fantastic way to ensure the everybody is on-board with the way code is written and minimizes interdepartmental friction. Kudos to Etsy!

Kudos to Etsy for doing this. I think there's great value in learning basic programming skills even if not everyone has the inclination to become a software designer. Kind of like how taking music lessons has all kinds of tangential value even if the student doesn't turn out to be another Van Cliburn.

From a UI perspective, I don't love Etsy but I think they really have a world class engineering team. This not the first time I've heard of good things from that outfit.

As much as the rotation idea is interesting, and can be beneficial on the surface, I'm not sure if doing so on a recurring basis provides more value than interruption and the setup/teardown costs of context switching.

Sure, a non engineer could learn a thing or two about how code works, and an engineer as well on handling support, but I'd be cautious about these sessions leading to a false sense of understanding how things actually work, which might eventually lead to, for example, a support person making wrong assumptions about an issue a customer is having just because he/she paired on the relevant code base.

IMO cross disciplinary 'rotations' should happen naturally, instead of making it explicit on a certain day in the quarter. Engineers should have exposure on a day to day basis on what customers want as well as have exposure to the product and business side of things in the planning stage of a sprint, understanding why a story or task is prioritized the way they are, etc. Same goes for non engineers like product managers or support personnel who often deal with engineers on an ongoing basis, and the sharing of technical knowledge should come naturally with each discussion.

I wonder how to do this with engineering that requires deep knowledge. At my work we have SoC designers, layout, analog designers, board layout and firmware among the engineering departments. I don't think we can even rotate within the engineering departments as everything is so specialized.

This should be also applied to within engineering teams as well. Employees when encouraged to move from team to team after certain intervals (such as 3-4 years). There has been argument that this doesn't allow people to specialize but I feel 3-4 years is long time after which returns are probably diminishing in developing specialization. This keeps life interesting and you get insights on how other teams work, their process and tools etc.

Thank you for not putting "Why" at the beginning of the article title.

This is really cool. What would be awesome is a design rotation for engineers. The way some of the top designers work is a joy to experience. Even their scratch book looks so well organized.

So many parallels to other industries. The greatest chefs often describe how they'd held every job in a restaurant before becoming chefs.

This is like an opera company inviting everyone - altos, contraltos, baritone and bass male singers, the conductor, the symphony orchestra - to do a rotation as a soprano singer.

This is awesome.

It is true, i used to clean the bathrooms there and i went on code rotation, or as we called it "stink patrol". I thought the stalls were bad, but man, that codebase was far worse!