[throwaway61891]

> By the way, all this time you're developing open source you're not helping the company so let's stop that, it costs us developer time and money.

that was not my experience at all. officially, open source was encouraged because it raised etsy's stock in the tech community, which was beneficial for hiring.

unofficially, middle managers discouraged it because it detracted from shipping quickly (which made them look good to upper management).

obviously the CTO/etc. could've just been paying the engineers lip service about open source, but they seemed to genuinely support and encourage open source contributions. they certainly celebrated when open source contributions actually happened.

[a3camero]

The (former) CEO seemed like a tech guy at heart and I think he was the CTO before being promoted. I met him a couple times at hackathons around 2009 and he was definitely not a suit guy. I doubt it was just lip service.

[badosu]

Thanks for taking the time to write this!