“Engineering capacity for an economic revolution”

That’s what my LinkedIn profile says I’m up to if you check it. That means a lot of things. One of the things it means is I believe that software is important, doing software well is important, and when we invest at getting good at human centric, thoughtful, sustainable software development we’re increasing capacity in the system, and we should share what we learn. Internally we call this a spirt of generosity.

I think at Etsy we’re currently doing the best work we’ve ever done in digging into the how and why of software development and leadership, and when I look across the team I see an amazing pool of folks who someday (hopefully far in the future) will flow out and change how this industry works.

But this week I’ve been feeling reflective, and it got me thinking about all the folks who are already out there on that journey.

A totally non-comprehensive list of companies where folks who used to work at Etsy are now either founders or senior engineering leaders (managerial or otherwise) includes:

  • Abacus
  • AltspaceVR
  • First Look
  • floship
  • Handy
  • Hinge
  • Julia Computing
  • Justworks
  • liwwa
  • Radico
  • Ringly
  • Signal Scienes
  • SoundCloud
  • Stripe
  • Tumblr

For a small company with a low turnover rate that feels like a high impact list, and I’m proud of the capacity we’ve added to the system.

If I missed some feel free to add them in the comments.