Shopify

Internal compensation tool. You can change your compensation base pay/stock ratio throughout the year and ride bear or bull markets appropriately.

Compensation is also pretty good for a full remote company.

Modern data stack, so your tooling is current.

Recognizable company. The public has not caught on yet to how bureaucratic and slow-moving Shopify is yet, so I was able to get another job quickly.

The work is fake. Giant, multi-month migration efforts where tens of thousands of lines of code are moved from repos in order to rename tables in BigQuery. I am not exaggerating. Data leadership still found a way to design graphs and charts to show misleading amounts of storage and processing time cleanup. Despite many people understanding this was not real optimization, everybody clapped and gave congratulations emojis.

Highly process-oriented workflows. Building anything new requires satisfying an enormous set of arbitrary CI/CD rules that are not consistent and have small loopholes. The end result is a brittle and bloated data infrastructure.

People here wear ballcaps like it's a part of their uniform.

Heavy Star Wars fandom. This is a red flag in any post-high school environment, and I wished it was expressed before I joined so I didn't have to learn so late.

There is serious cultural rot going on in the company, being expressed more loudly as days go by, that is being ignored.

While the CEO is pontificating and virtue signaling on Twitter, some of the very things he espouses about trust batteries and minimizing process are happening in the opposite direction internally.

The codebases and spaces within Shopify are all suffering a tragedy of the commons.