My reaction to this as a professional programmer: Etsy sounds like a terrible place to work and the CTO is a moron.
Some programmers are more motivated by solving business problems than they are by inventing and adopting shiny new technologies. At this point in my career I'm definitely more interested in applying proven languages and systems to novel product problems than I am inventing new frameworks and debugging cutting-edge runtimes.
So: different strokes for different folks. Insulting people who disagree on issues for which there's more than one answer is just unnecessarily snarky IMHO.
Sometimes boring technology choices are a sign that the programmers are innovating in their actual technology rather than blindly adopting whatever they see in blog posts.
My stance isn't really about shiny new tech. I find flavor of the week stuff about as annoying as anyone.
Rather, my reaction is this is basically a puff piece. Fair enough, but as a professional reading about the supposed virtues of this guys "philosophy", my reaction is that I wouldn't want to work in an environment where I would be treated with so little esteem as etsy seems to regard their engineers. Maybe that's harsh, but that's my impression.
Here's an example of what I mean: "Shadow IT, that idea that employees can and will provision their own software (because they can), is everywhere because IT is powerless to stop it. Elliott-McCrea, however, is adamant that his company has no patience for freelancing when it comes to software and he claims it’s not happening." As a programmer, this strikes me as ridiculous -- I use non-company-sanctioned software to do my job all the time and nobody bats an eye (ie, text editors, graphics software, etc). If their trust of developers is so low that they won't even let them choose their own software, what does it say about how much respect they have for them?
If this were an objective analysis I wouldn't be so mean, but given that it's a puff piece, I don't see any reason not to be blunt about how toxic I think that CTO's ideas are.
Because they recognise that devops means something other than "we let our developers run wild in prod"?
The result was that their website was dependent on 50 Javascript packages that took forever to load. They had parts of their system written in Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python, and .NET.
That's how you get job ads that say "Candidate must have 2+ years experience in Python, PHP, Ruby, C#, and Javascript."
Imagine putting a big effort into Angular 1.0, only to discover a year later that it's no longer going to be supported. Is it so bad for Etsy to be avoiding problems like that?
The problem is hiring the wrong developers, ones that use that freedom irresponsibly.
Keeping developers on a short leash doesn't solve that problem, it just covers it up. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because any developer capable of making their own decisions won't work there, so what you end up with is people that need that level of micromanagement. (Yes, this is a form of micromanagement.)
And that's what I read in the whole article: an inexperienced CTO who has shaped his policy based on his own limited experience, not acknowledging that that vision is heavily influenced by his own weaknesses.
He is projecting his own attitude as a developer on all developers, and extrapolates from there.
If you give developers carte blanche permission to add whatever they feel is necessary, you're using your business success/failure to teach them. That is wrong.
As the CTO, the author's primary responsibility is to make sure the right tech decisions/solutions are made. It sounds to me like he's doing exactly that.
If an experienced, "responsible" developer thinks they can make good use of tech X, surely he/she will understand that there is a standard process to have this new thing approved for use, and then it can benefit the entire company.
If you can't identify to someone else why you think tech X should be used, what problem it solves, what process it makes more efficient, etc, then you're probably the wrong person to be making a decision about adding new software to the stack.
Any "engineer" (I really bet actual engineers love how software developers have co-opted that term) who is "responsible" as you put it, and wants to add software to the stack, will surely discuss that plan with at least someone, right?
Or maybe not. Maybe you think every developer should be allowed to make grand architectural changes to a platform worked on by 200+ other staff at their own discretion? If so I suspect somehow, that your reply is just a knee-jerk reaction to a place that expressly prevents cowboy-developer antics before they begin.
Also, many developers will use whatever tools they feel like padding their resume with, instead of what is best for your project.
As the CTO, my first responsibility is to hire the people that make the "right" decisions/solutions. Of course they discuss those decisions with their coworkers and me. That's just common sense.
Sure, I'll make the odd hiring mistake, but that's no excuse to create and entire culture around the assumption that every developer I hire has the maturity and professionality of a teenage sociopath.
My reaction is a knee-jerk reaction to a culture of distrust, bureaucracy and micromanagement.
The alternative to letting the inmates running the asylum is not to lobotomise the inmates, it's to not turn the place into in asylum in the first place.
I don't even really like to call this "conservative". To me, "conservative" would be no XHR, no custom fonts, etc - the sort of stuff you know will work on IE5. I would consider the approach Etsy uses simply as "sane".
Because they place little value on the expertise of their engineering staff, as evidenced by the comical restrictions they inflict on intelligent professionals.
Just because you have to convince someone to agree with and approve your use of shiny-new-thing v0.0.0.1alpha doesn't mean they have "comical restrictions".
It says very clearly they will use new things when the benefit can be shown.
So it still just sounds like you don't like that you would need to prove why you're changing something on a whim, because "oh this is better" doesn't cut it
Edit: fixed weirdest typo/autocorrect weirdness ever.
The article, to my perspective, suggests a situation in which there is very little trust towards their employees. Having seen both ends of the spectrum, I wouldn't want to work in an environment like that.