Shopify

• Great pay & benefits
• Great colleagues and a nice place to be if you no longer want to feel like the smartest person in the room
• So far, the best company I've actually worked for
• Remote work is great, it takes away a great chunk of drama, time, favoritism, etc.

Not what it used to be anymore. During my 1.5 years, the company changed from caring about employees, their mental well-being, and making sure it's a great, fun place to be, to the complete opposite of that.

Layoffs: After the first 10% layoffs, secret layoffs happen all the time where people are kept in the dark. Then, recently, another 20% layoff that targeted mostly new hires in the EMEA region and around 90% of folks in Germany. I wonder how the company will ever be able to grow if it keeps laying off people who have just gathered enough Shopify context and domain knowledge to be rockstars.

Lots of toxic positivity and "mumbo jumbo" positive words that are really used as a glass ceiling for career advancement, nothing more. I applied for a staff position and was downleveled to L6 despite my interview having nothing negative and passing the interview. I was told by the recruiter that I'd be able to get to that level after a year, which obviously didn't happen. The ones that get promoted to such levels are the ones who've been there for 4 years or longer. They're not necessarily stronger/better engineers or have more experience, just the domain knowledge because at Shopify, all the tech/tooling and knowledge is domain-specific, not really technical.

Senior management and the company keep changing direction every week, causing radical changes in the org which no one likes. Examples include pushing Facebook as a work tool on people to use and reducing Slack usage, cutting off vital meetings from everyone's calendars, reducing any actual chance for communication and aligning on blockers in a remote-first environment.

Impact reviews and performance reviews are very subjective. It's really more about your manager's opinion of you and how much they like you than your actual performance and knowledge. Impact, mastery, scope, level, opportunity are all correlated with each other, and your manager is really the one that decides who to give that opportunity to have a higher impact or to be in line for a promotion, and there's nothing you can do about it.

It's very difficult to gather context and knowledge that you need at Shopify since everything is domain-specific. You have to constantly pull knowledge and ping people to understand anything or get anything done.

New tools and technologies change every 2 weeks, not necessarily for the better. The latest tools were a disaster, and no one really liked them, and they never worked as expected (e.g., Ramp, Workplace, etc.).

During my 1 year, I already changed managers and ended up with a worse, newly hired manager that created a competitively toxic culture based on favoritism.

Go back to what Shopify used to be in early 2021.

Stop gaslighting people, telling them their work is "side quests" when you, as senior managers, decide on a quarterly and yearly basis what the most important projects to work on are. You also get to create, approve, and review any projects before they begin. Today's side quests are what you deemed the most important thing to work on a few months ago. Take some accountability.

Stop adding incompetent people into high-level positions.

Create an actual career development plan with fair impact reviews instead of creating a subleveling system that ensures no one gets promoted.

Take some responsibility for your mistakes and dumb decisions instead of doubling down on them.

You'll never be able to grow a company that is functioning purely based on people who've been there long enough to keep it running, and then fire them along with new hires who need at least a year to get an idea of what's going on in their domain.