Mike Brittain

There is a meetup being planned in NYC (at The Gingerman) for SysAdmin Appreciation Day tomorrow night (July 30).  As it turns out, Etsy is picking up the tab.  This is one of the really wonderful things that I appreciate about Etsy.

So be sure to come out and join us for a drink!

We still have a number of open positions at Etsy that are located in both New York City and San Francisco.  John Allspaw and Mike Brittain will be at O’Reilly’s Velocity Conference this week.  If you’re attending Velocity, don’t miss out on the chance to talk to one of us about working at Etsy.

These positions include:

• Senior Operations Engineer
• Web Operations Engineer
• Senior Engineers and Lead Engineers in various areas, including Search, Payments, Social Systems, Community, Internationalization, Internal Tools, Fraud and Risk Management, and Content Platforms
• Test Automation Engineer
• Release Manager
• Technical Project Manager

Check out our recruiting site for more details about each of these positions, or email me directly.  I hate having to say it, but please, no recruiters.

And don’t miss out on John’s talk at Velocity: Ops Meta-Metrics, The Currency You Use to Pay for Change.

When you bring new engineers on-board, it’s important to make them productive as soon as possible.  Spending days (or weeks) in training session, locked down permissions, and/or watchful eyes simply constrains your shiny, new developer from getting shit done.  (I’ll be honest and say that I’ve been one of those types in the past.)

At Etsy, every engineer has access to deploy code to our production site.  We use a tool called “Deployinator” to do this quickly and easily.  It’s one button.  A culture of unit and functional testing (know when your code done broke), transparency (know when releases are happening), operational metrics (know when your servers are crying), and personal accountability (know when it’s your fault) keeps the entire process under control.

Earlier this week, we did something brand new for us…

watching a new engineer who started at Etsy today push code RIGHT NOW. awesome.

~chaddickerson, Etsy’s CTO

That’s right. On his very first day, Jason got setup in his development environment, made a change to our code base (albeit a small one), tested, committed, and deployed to the production web servers.

I can just hear it: “Why would you ever let someone deploy code on their first day?” But if you’re asking this question, I have to assume that you’ve also found your self wondering at times, “How long is it going to be before Joe Newbie is going to be up to speed?”

Sure, it’s going to take time for every new hire to learn all of the ropes. But it’s better for them to be productive, confident and experienced in releasing code (even if it’s small changes!) while they’re learning all of the other details than it is for them to sitting on their hands waiting for coach to put them into the game.

And in case you’re wondering, Jason has already released code three times in his first week… possibly four by time I finish writing this.

Want to get in on the action? We’re hiring in both Engineering and Operations.