Shopify

Strong commitment to work-life balance. Overtime is rare and, in my experience, was always compensated for with time off or leniency in the next few days. Lots of folks I've worked with had children they had to pick up, appointments in the middle of the day, etc., all without issue.

High-caliber engineering team; seriously smart people.

The company moves fast on policy, process, and projects; you're not going to suffer from inertia like you might at a more corporate entity.

Highly competitive compensation by Canadian standards.

Strong anti-meeting policy, tons of contribution time for ICs.

The company moves fast on policy, process, and projects. Disruption is a constant, and there will be many periods of frustration throughout your time here where your time is squandered due to a hasty change or last-minute decision.

It's all remote, and on many teams, opportunities to see one another are limited to once a year at the company-wide event. I've found that makes it difficult for teams to build cohesion and blow off steam when stressful events happen, like a performance-related exit. There is the ability to schedule an offsite, but only to accomplish a specific work purpose, and 'people build connections and rapport better in person' is not one of those reasons.

Aggressive performance management makes it difficult to keep the team motivated. I've experienced a strong sense of fear amongst my colleagues, especially in the last few months.

Like many tech companies these days, they're hastily rolling back diversity measures and indirectly encouraging bias by adding vague hiring criteria that could only be answered using bias, e.g., "Even if someone checks off the boxes, would you fight for them to be on your team?"

I think Shopify undervalues building strong teams.

Teams ship products, not individuals, and great teams are not constructed by taking the strongest ICs and putting them in a room together.

Great teams are built by putting a wide diversity of skillsets together, giving them the leniency to focus on the project rather than their personal performance, taking development roadblocks out of their way, and then giving them time to celebrate and vent to close off the project.

Shopify has great teams, but they are struggling under the current policy environment, which dismisses in-person socialization and the negative outcomes of frequent staff changes.

It seems to be moving toward a loose network of anti-social contributors, which is perhaps their intention, but isn't for me.