Pros: I was on the development team at Shopify, and I looked forward to coming to work every day. I received fairly generous pay and benefits, and the work was interesting. But the thing I appreciated most was a manager that really cared about how I was doing and gave me actionable feedback to help me improve. I felt like it was a great experience for developing my career. Among the other pluses were: * Worked 8 hours a day for the most part; people didn't care when, as long as I showed up to meetings and got my work done. I personally felt no pressure to work longer hours. * Was never concerned with making money, only with delivering the best quality product. * Great emphasis on craftsmanship and quality of product; everyone was very dedicated to this goal. * An excellent CEO: technically skilled, visionary, and inspiring. Tobi deserved to win CEO of the Year (Globe and Mail 2014).

Cons: It was sometimes difficult to communicate between teams, and sometimes the decision-making process was a bit opaque (though upper management was remarkably transparent). Though developers are treated well, sales and support staff seemed to get their jobs reduced to performance metrics (which are visible to everyone in the company). I don't know if I'd want to work in a job like that.

Pros: Money, and you will generally work with extremely intelligent people.

Cons: Shopify holds sham AMAs/town halls to build the facade that leadership is open to feedback. But like politicians, they skirt questions, have moderators alter them, or (strangely enough) will attack the question raiser for challenging them. Senior leadership will also gaslight employees, dismissing problems and concerns vocally. However, they will then come up with and present solutions months later to the previously dismissed concerns after pretending they didn’t exist (without even acknowledging that they had first dismissed them). There is a cult of personality around senior leadership and the buzzwords and metaphors they use. Each time a metaphor is used in a talk by a senior leader from an overrated self-help book, you can look forward to every product manager reusing it until the next one drops (have fun placing your work into the context of the metaphor). Culture is optimized for special interest groups. Groupthink is highly valued. Highly competitive, you will generally find your work to be low on collaboration. Shopify introduced a six-week product cycle model. When it was first introduced, it was sold as a way for teams to hold themselves accountable and set goals. Now, you will spend your time having to worry about if your work can be done within a cycle, potentially rushing development to hit arbitrary deadlines. We are told that we should be okay with not having the best salaries in the world “because of our culture” while simultaneously being told that we are the best engineers. Specifically, one of our senior leaders said they had to answer the phone while their child was being born at their last job, so we should essentially be grateful that our salaries are lower because we do not have to endure that (not that they should have set proper work-life boundaries at their old position). We are told that we should not care about the stock price or optimize for it. However, talent says the stock we have been granted is factored into our total compensation and is given as the primary reason for not increasing base salaries—figure that one out. New hires are held to lower standards. In talent's drive to hire as many engineers as they can, standards have noticeably dropped. As a tenured developer, you may get the privilege of seeing new hires with less skill, seniority, and context get a higher pay than you. It’s clear that it’s easier to go out than go up. Shut up and vest.

Pros: - Flexible work hours - Passionate coworkers - Awesome perks

Cons: Honestly, I can't think of any.