Corporate Relationships That Bring Mutual Benefit

I read a fascinating blog post about the engineer exchange program between Etsy and Twitter and wanted to share it with you. For one week, the companies swap an engineer to observe and take an active role in creating code at the other's company.

The purpose of the exercise is for both companies to improve by learning from one another. The exchange helps the engineers realize what his/her company does well and learn new techniques from the company they are visiting. After all, you can only learn so much from a textbook or working in the same environment day after day. I like this program because it takes an innovative approach, putting life into learning.

Etsy and Twitter have their own ways of doing things, such as releasing new versions of products, but through this program both companies learn about themselves and areas of potential improvement. There is a mutual trust between the companies to allow this to take place and I would love to see more of this in the future.

Marc Hedlund and Raffi Krikorian said it best in their original post, "Of course some people would be uncomfortable with letting this happen… we believe the value of cross-pollination of ideas and practices is far too high to be blocked by these concerns."

I think it would be great if Marc and Raffi also wrote a follow-up post on the outcomes of the exchange. What were the personal experiences of the engineers and did the companies participating in the program gain what they anticipated? Or were their expectations exceeded?

That's my take. What do you think? Would your company consider a program like this? Let me know at [email protected] or in the comments.