Shopify

Terrific people: Shopify has hired some wonderful people, but the best have either left or been laid off.

Work-life balance: Fully remote work and flexibility can be a big plus.

Exciting products and cultural cachet: The mission of Shopify is compelling, and the company is innovating in many ways. This will help advance your career and give you plenty of stories to talk about in subsequent interviews.

Top employees have left. Remote work resulted in many employees moving away from major cities where jobs in tech are plentiful, and they stayed at Shopify despite the low salary because they had few other options. Meanwhile, the best employees who joined pre-2022 have left for higher compensation and better treatment overall. I don’t mean to imply that no talented employees remain, but from my perspective, the folks I admired and looked up to most are no longer there (for good reason).

Poor compensation. Shopify underpays as a matter of strategy to keep expenses low and admits to not aiming to pay competitively. Recruiters will gaslight you and say that offers are not open to negotiation, which is not true (I and many others have successfully negotiated).

Toxic culture. Before the first round of layoffs (Summer 2022), the culture at Shopify was wonderful, but, as other reviewers have noted, the culture and morale have since been totally decimated. My team environment is incredibly soul-sucking and toxic. Folks are miserable, and mental health issues abound. This is not an exaggeration, and I really can’t overstate it.

Systemic gaslighting. Leadership flat-out lies to employees constantly to try to distract them from management’s failures and poor decisions. Raises and promotions are delayed endlessly (for years, literally), cheating employees of tens of thousands of dollars with no explanation or recourse.

Constant layoffs. Shopify stack ranks and conducts mass layoffs as well as silent layoffs. Some of the top performers on my team were laid off, and no one can make sense of the rationale. A member of an adjacent team (a top performer) was just laid off a month after returning from disability leave for cancer treatment. The layoffs are brutal, clinical, and constant.

***I implore you to please pay attention to recent reviews of Shopify before accepting a job there.

Hire experienced leaders and managers.

Develop a program to rebuild trust.

Implement measures to improve employee retention, as your top talent is leaving at a staggering pace.