Shopify

• There are so many technical problems to solve that you will always be able to tackle something interesting.
• Shopify is mostly full of really great, supportive people. You will very easily find people who will be your friends for life. While it is hard to find a good job, it is harder to find a good team. I think at Shopify, this is more common.
• Shopify does have lots of room to learn and grow as a developer (unless you’re a FED).

To work at Shopify, you have to be okay with the fact that part of your paycheck will come from gun paraphernalia and far-right propaganda merchandise shops who use that money to fuel their ambitions, all while at the same time having leadership give one-hour conference talks about how commerce and Shopify are morally good and that Shopify is good for society. Which I am sure for a lot of people is fine, and may start off fine as well, but it can also get very tiring over time as you see one thing and then leadership tells you another. Here are some of my main feelings about this company.

• It is always very obvious when leadership decides to not address something that they don’t like, which they often do, and often about very important things like compensation or attrition. Usually, they will not be able to answer questions and dodge them, and then suddenly every single person in leadership suddenly has the exact same answer about how this new change that you think is negative, is actually positive. Compensation is actually the best in the industry (when it provably is not).
• Backward promotion. I suppose these are common but still a criticism. To get promotions or a raise, you will have had to do the job for a year or more already. This is a good way to underpay high-performing people.
• Work-life balance is not real, especially if you are a manager. Directors and senior staff will message at any time of day. They will say that balance is important and they spent all of “Mental Health Month” talking about this but then go on to push harder deadlines for Unite, an annual conference hosted by Shopify. They say the R&R days (four-day work week) should not make your work more, but the deadlines stay the same.
• Constantly shifting organization structure and constant release of new useless terminology. Often getting the sense that leadership uses this as an excuse to explain what work that they are doing. Sometimes their announcements of reorgs or new words to describe the work we already do, have a feeling of being made up on the spot and always end on a note of work in progress. This adds to the feeling of instability because they want us to use what they have come up with on a day-to-day basis, but it could change at any moment. It also always makes you feel like a pawn or resource to be moved around without regard to building community and relationships (which causes managers to use this as a reason to not promote or give raises).
• Pretending to be open when, in fact, at AMAs, the hardest questions are skipped over to the extent that they have made a team build tools to filter out questions that are too hard and report employees to HR if they asked questions that leadership doesn’t like or seems too critical. The same team built tools into Slack to direct report any employee to HR, which almost immediately killed all Slack discussions that were in any way critical of the company, even good-faith criticism.
• Leadership lacks accountability and refuses to listen to feedback. Usually, when asked for accountability, they will say something along the lines that the conversation has become unproductive and is wasting company time. This will often just result in Slack channels being changed to read-only, forcing the conversation into other channels.
• When I joined the company, they marked themselves as a hacker culture. Everything was hackable, including the company itself. So often we had discussions about what the company could do better and how it could be better. Currently, Shopify has a culture of constantly telling its employees that if you don’t like what the company does, then you should leave. This position was used for remote working as well. They are hostile and gaslighting to employees who have dissenting opinions or criticism.
• Most of the good culture that Shopify still retains is from the people they have hired in the past and good lower-level managers having great connections with their small teams. The company as a whole is seemingly doing nothing to support everyone other than half-assed mental health statements and talking about a future where they will fly the whole company to central points once a year. This is odd because, in the same breath, they will mention how environmentally conscious they are.
• Criticisms of the company are cast as direct attacks on C-levels, who are surrounded by cult-like people who think they can do no wrong. Echo chamber at the top to the extent that it seems obvious that there is a house clearing of any dissenting directors or C-levels.
• C-level execs are highly involved but are not highly informed. They will often say incorrect things, very confidently.
• Leadership has a poor opinion of UX and front-end, as displayed in the past by CEO comments on Twitter and the fact that the UX role was eliminated from Shopify. It has taken years of advocacy to get front-end developers paid nearly the same amount as backends. Leadership will often go on tirades about how no one should write JavaScript at all, even though JavaScript powers a lot of what the company does now.
• Work is not appreciated across teams; it is highly competitive, and if the team did not create it, they will just create their own and try to destroy the other.
• Very strong not-built-here mentality where Shopify tends to rebuild things that already have solutions.
• I would feel bad for Tobi if he was not often rudely opinionated and surrounded by people who will protect him at any time. I get that he has a hard position where he is expected to run a company, but still looks like (or still wants to be) highly connected to the technical aspects of dev. However, it is clear that he cannot. And that is completely fine. However, when he reads an article or tries something out in his spare time, he tries to push people to use things in order to feel relevant, but it is clear that he has not used the technology in a sustained way. If he only brought items up as a suggestion of something he is interested in, rather than something he is telling technical teams that they should already be using, these would be taken a lot better. However, because of the way he approaches items like this, he wastes massive amounts of time as teams are constantly consumed with building up a case to tell him in a fully data-driven way an answer they could have just told him at the start. I mean, there has been enough coverage of Tobi tornadoes; I don’t need to rehash.
• Managers have very little feedback loop. There is no way in Shopify to evaluate a bad manager who is causing their employees to have a bad experience. It is common for ICs to talk about who is a good lead and who is not because the only hope is to avoid the bad ones. Managers are mostly evaluated by the work their team produces and their ability to explain those things in meetings. So when managers are deliberately not promoting or doing terrible things like punitive PIPs, there is no hope for those ICs except to change teams.
• Hiring has no feedback loop. There are many people who participate in interviews that are very pretentious and biased, but there is no way to tell how well interviewers are performing. We hire with committees, so everyone needs to come to an agreement to combat bias, but if the whole committee is full of bad interviewers, then it is doing nothing for bias. I was trained years ago, which was reading a few documents and shadowing two interviews, and then nothing ever since.
• Shopify hires with a pretty strong requirement of using TDD, however, in practice, I would say a small minority of the people at Shopify actually practice true TDD, which just seems hypocritical.
• New hires often get paid more than tenured staff, with very reserved raises. Which is fine if you were just hired; that will only sting a few years in.
• Promotions are really a popularity contest. The loudest, most visible people get promoted the most; the quiet but highly productive people rarely get recognition.