Shopify

Good pay package, perks, and other financial benefits.

Working here will surely help you evolve into a better software engineer.

I'm not saying that all teams/employees are like this, but here are some negatives I found from my experience.

Some employees/teams can be very judgemental; one wrong move on the wrong day and you're out. At the same time, some teams are more lenient and even take syntax errors lightly.

Work-life imbalance, especially after they went remote.

Some employees/teams have strange expectations. Say, your task depends on a senior member from another team. You might be blamed for delays caused by that member.

Unequal treatment of employees in certain teams. For example, a lead or a senior developer can break prod with their mistake and the team laughs it off, while a junior developer can be criticized for small things like code-style preferences. When I needed help understanding some vaguely described issues, nobody was available to reply to my messages. However, I was surprised to see that even the busiest team member would take time to help the other noob that joined, not only by replying to their messages but by even jumping on a pair-programming session.

Some teams are not open/ready to accept new members. For example, if they don't like you, they won't reply to your messages or GitHub comments, they'll take weeks to review even the simplest PR you write, and they won't hesitate to make a big issue out of any small mistake you might make.

It doesn't matter if you get your work done and work hard to meet the team's expectations (growth mindset). If you don't have a certain "je ne sais quoi", the team will not cooperate with you.

Some teams are not good at communicating. For example, vague comments on PRs which might take 15-30 mins to decipher. Someone might post a vague comment about something, and if you try to address that comment by changing your code, they might post a follow-up comment saying, "you don't have to change the code just because I suggested". Additionally, delay in PR reviews can make you feel useless and makes it look as if you're taking more time to do your work.

Improper feedback might lead you down the wrong path. For example, I was always told by my lead that I was "on the right track", until the last month when they suddenly sent me a warning to terminate my employment.

Finally, if they put you on probation, chances are that they've already decided to terminate you. I did my performance-evaluation task way before the deadline that was assigned to me, but I was terminated despite that. And I wasn't even asked for my feedback when I was being terminated.

In summary, I've never had such a strange experience in the 10+ years of my career. Again, maybe it's all my fault. Please don't be discouraged by the points I shared above. I'm just saying that a series of unfortunate events is probable.

Only make promises that can be kept. Don't turn into a hire-fast, fire-fast company now that you have access to global talent in the "digital by default" era. Always provide real/true feedback.