Back in 2019, I was contacted by Shopify for a job opportunity. After acing multiple remote interviews, their recruiter couldn't contain their excitement. They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Imagine my surprise when, after enduring a 15-hour economy class flight with barely any time to recover, I received a call from the recruiter. They casually informed me that the team had decided to put me through five grueling back-to-back interviews, including a whiteboard session and a pair programming assignment. Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided.
What followed was an unmitigated disaster. The first interview bombarded me with ecommerce questions, completely unrelated to my field of expertise. The pair programming session was a nightmare, as I was handed a barely functional laptop that delayed the start by 20 minutes, and then given just 30 minutes to complete the task without any assistance.
Bear in mind, I was already physically and mentally drained from the arduous journey.
While the remaining interviews were passable, they were nothing to brag about. After being sent home with the promise of a call, I received a cold rejection a week later, citing a lack of experience based on the onsite interviews.
Looking back, I'm grateful I didn't sacrifice everything for a company with a track record of questionable practices and frequent layoffs.
I respectfully declined, telling her that because I was going to do the same long trip about 2 months later, I didn't want to fly. I told her that I would understand if they decided to pass, and no hard feelings.
Instead, she got one of the founders to interview me (Bel!!) And after that they decided to give me an offer. Everything resulted great for all of us, and I had a job waiting for me later that year.
I understand we may be desperate when looking for a job. But trust me that hiring managers are also generally in a hurry to fill positions. I know this bc I've hired plenty of people (both tech, HR, and g&a) in my career.
When hiring people, I ended up making similar concessions for the right candidate.
Was that your first tech onsite? The onsite is an interview you have to pass, you're not guaranteed an offer. Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
Honestly, sucks to fly out far and get rejected but that's part of the process my guy. Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
For bigger orgs, this is a chance to sanity check team fit and potentially re-route if longer-term interests align better with some other team. For startups, it can be more of a vibe check.
Why would I think I'd need to go over another round of interviews after spending over 4 hours interviewing remotely, plus interviewing with engineers, to do it all over again?
I have several reasons for not bringing my personal hardware to a corporate interview, and a couple about the specific situation as described:
* I wouldn't travel with my laptop to an on-site that was described as a meet-and-greet.
* The recruiter promised suitable hardware would be available at the surprise technical on-site interview: "Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided."
* For many companies processing corporate data on personal, not-managed-by-the-business hardware is a firing offense.
* Grabassery happens, but if it's clear that my potential employer is an established company that is unable to plan ahead far enough to ensure that the interview has the hardware and personnel required for the interview, that's a _huge_ red flag for me... and one that's good to get out of the way early.
I’m not really “in tech” but this sounds like some bullshit for me. What if you don’t have a personal laptop? All I’ve got is a desktop machine, because my personal devices aren't for work.
> Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
What an absurd practice.
After after going through a whole crapload of interviews, "most" onsites definitely are not 5 hours. They certainly are a thing. Some are even longer. But out of around 25 interviews, only three places requested that much time (I declined two of them).
Remote interviews are generally phone screens. Aka just weeding out candidates.
On site interviews are the real killer.
But it’s easy for me to believe that the recruiter deliberately mislead the candidate about the on-site. I have experienced on-sites that were indeed more about meeting the team, having more casual technical discussions and being judged for “culture fit” (which has its own problems, but that’s another discussion).
It’s not unreasonable to take the recruiter at their word and be upset about the unexpected challenge, especially after a rough travel itinerary.
The role I’m currently hiring for, the face to face literally is just a meet and greet. All the technical stuff will be done remotely.
Also I wouldnt be surprised if the recruiter lied. I’ve had so many negative experiences with recruiters over the years that I’ve learned to trust very few and those who I do trust I now work exclusively with.
One of them was a zoom call THAT I WAS ON BY MYSELF AND BEING RECORDED. I was told it was going to be a three hour pairing exercise and _after the interview started_ dude told me he would be available for questions but ultimately wouldn't be involved. I'm still angry at myself for agreeing to go through with that.
After that I had a second phone screen with the same recruiter - which I suppose was some sort of behavioral interview? I failed because I got the rejection after that with no feedback. Looking back, I got the impression they already had someone in mind but needed to tick some boxes or something - like show they interviewed multiple people for the role.
Knowing a few people that do work at Shopify I get the impression they are very particular about their cultural fit so maybe that was it.
Whenever I hear this, I immediately think "dick measuring contest" and take the team far less seriously. A lot of these companies think they're training astronauts for the dregs of space when really they're just trying to build efficient database apps.
> “There’s no cuts coming for us,” Harley Finkelstein told The Canadian Press. “We’re in a really good place.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/9494197/shopify-outlook-no-layoff...
Once a coach has to say "[player] has my absolute confidence in their success," you know the player is ~2 weeks from being benched.
Or a sign of the kind of delusional optimism that leads to over-hiring.
What a way to lead, and what an absolutely grotesque euphemism (not to mention a barbaricly tortuous use of English). Why do companies write like this? It's just awful.
I'm only half-joking when I suggest that if they'd taken this text and asked GPT-4 to rewrite it in a compassionate tone they'd have got a better result. (I say this having used GPT-4 quite regularly in recent weeks, although not for these kinds of purposes. It's quite impressive, along many axes, and I'm confident would have made a decent fist of this piece.)
EDIT: All right, I have to give some credit here. I've now had chance to read the full release and, whilst I don't love the RPG-esque references, I understand that this is fundamentally a piece of internal comms sent to a group of people who are probably used to discussing things in those terms (Lord, preserve us - not my bag). That aside, I thought a lot of the rest of the release was decent and the severance terms seem good, so I have to give props for that. I've left my first impression unedited because, if nothing else, it's an honest reaction to some quite poorly composed introductory remarks and on that basis certainly not entirely unfair.
There are a number of consequences to this, and I don’t want to bury the lede: after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics; this means some of you will leave Shopify today
So are they going to fire 20% of the C-suite and upper management as well? :)
It was genuinely Tobi. That's how he talks and writes. That's exactly the analogies he would use. No PR person anywhere would write this letter for him.
Also, he is wildly obsessed with LLMs. I would place a large money bet that he did have GPT help him edit this document.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
> to pay unshared attention to our mission
...unshared attention?
You aren't the audience, that's why.
https://1fish2.github.io/buzzword-bingo/corp-bingo.html
none yet. Jerry's working on adding weights to the buzzwords.
Today, we're making some substantial changes at Shopify, all with the aim of focusing more intently on our mission. We believe these adjustments will help us better serve our community and we're excited about the journey ahead.
It seems like these two facts should at least go out in different press releases on different days.
For Shopify, does anyone know whether the 20% figure includes the people leaving with the sale of SFN to Flexport?
Edit: just heard in the earnings call that the 20% headcount reduction does _not_ include the logistics teams going to Flexport.
> Shopify to cut 20% of its workforce, beats an already/comparatively-to-history reduced/calibrated quarterly revenue estimates for the current economic landscape
The headline is to pitch possible future investors that Shopify will prioritize investor returns over anything else (as ordained by the Prophets of capitalism)
When Bezos was still at the helm of Amazon in the 2000s, the investors demanded a profit (and a dividend?). Not giving in, he kept reinvesting any earnings back in the business for years to come.
The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
Still, seeing the same response across all companies in every industry is bizarre. This gives more credence to the big-three-index-funds-control-most-companies theory[1].
[1] Hidden power of the Big Three? Passive index funds, re-concentration of corporate ownership, and new financial risk https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
Put it this way - would you like to be paid to mow a lawn using scissors? I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.
If you are an employee, nothing management does is for you.
Shopify was just a really fun place to work. And in part this was because they did a really good job of interviewing. Technical, yes, but in particular behaviorally.
So I can honestly say that many of the colleagues I know being let go are truly great colleagues. They were some of the most impactful people I worked with in my org (discovery) and they are a great get for any company.
People who mentored me, who work hard, and do high quality work, and people who really carried the best of culture of the company (both technical and personal culture).
Really a shame to see this happen.
I'm bummed to hear about the layoffs, I hope the culture doesn't suffer too much. Shopify Ottawa was genuinely warm and familiar in a way few tech offices are able to be.
Sadly I got vetoed by one interviewer for an inelegant game of life solution (first time I’d ever seen GoL and I got bogged down in the middle logic) - never been so disappointed ever as every interview I had went really well on a personal level and (with the exception of that one) all my code was fine.
I hope to see Shopify continue to do well, I’ve used it for over 10 years and love using the platform.
https://techcouver.com/2021/01/06/shopify-to-double-engineer...
Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
Then why are they compensated like they're gods?
"Back where you started" with a now highly demotivated team isn't quite back where you started.
When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
Also, this is largely a coordinated effort from activist investors specifically targeting large tech salaries. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce...
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.
Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
Is there evidence of this now?
What I see is a small fraction of the open roles I'm used to seeing.
Compensation, on the other hand, is the same at these big companies. If not even higher than it was a couple years ago.
AI is already displacing some people from their work. I hate both absolute capitalism and socialism/communism. How can AI help us find a sweet spot?
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.
That’s drastically different. Most orgs that’ve run layoffs over the last few years have terminated access immediately, or even before informing those losing jobs.
This feels more human, and I hope it goes well for them.
The last time I got laid off was from a fintech company while WFH. It went like:
8am: Mysterious all-hands appears on all our calendars
10am: All-hands happens, layoffs announced
10:45am: Meeting with my manager happens
11:00am: I'm mid-slack-message with my team trying to coordinate a quick goodbye zoom chat when my laptop is remote-wiped and all access was cut off.
I totally understand why you'd do that and don't really fault them, but it certainly was a bummer. If you can safely do otherwise, it's a really nice gesture.
Right now I can't access any Slack channels, I can't access Google Drive/Docs, I can't send an email to an external address. I can only DM people and email people in the company.
In about 15 minutes I'll be shut out entirely.
As far as such things go it seems like a reasonable balance of humane consideration and legal prudence.
It sucks because I really liked the company. I liked the culture. I liked the leadership style. I liked the mission. I genuinely think that company is doing good for the world, and making money in the process.
The challenge now is that the leadership have burned a lot of trust with the employees. They repeatedly said no more layoffs were coming, but with this move they all benefitted financially quite well- the stock is up 25%.
The move deeply undermines the company culture that they worked so hard to build. I hope Tobi has a plan for how to repair that damage.
This was a job I looked forward to each morning. It was just a fun place to work full of talented people and a great culture. There were exciting projects in the works and I wanted to keep being a part of them. My time was cut short and it's disappointing to say the least.
They tried to hire people who care and that showed in the daily interactions. It's in stark contrast to today's actions and I won't be so trusting again.
Best of luck to you!
I was around for layoffs last year and I found it very surprising that nobody made more noise about the fact that executives never shared the hard numbers they used to make their layoff decisions. I'll be very curious to hear chatter over the coming weeks around how they rationalize these layoffs.
If nothing else, stock prices tell a pretty cynical story.
You can't be serious... What good those bunch of [censored] could possibly do?
As a merchant - worst decision ever was made to work with them. Wasted tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. Everything is bad - tech, support, "dedicated manager", API, plainly everything is horrible.
good for the world... Seriously?
This is a cut throat game of capitalism, you do know that right? He's going to be rewarded for making these cuts. There is no downside for the winners.
Hope.....unfortunately that's not how the game is played. Unions, worker protections, and taxes on the wealthy those are real actionable goals.
Tobi has never given me the impression that he's a sociopath. It's part of why I wanted to work for Shopify. I used to joke that "'Shopify is the no assholes company.' 'But what about Kaz?' 'It's the no assholeS company- we're allowed one!'". But honestly, even my view on Kaz softened up over time.
Either the leadership at Shopify are genuinely nice people trying their best, or they are way better than the Amazon leadership at hiding their sociopathy. But either way, it felt nicer working for them.
The CEOs / Executives are literally appointed by the board who in turn are voted in by shareholders. It is their job to increase the share price.
The world is better of with efficient capital deployment.
So, I don't understand how the smartest people in this world don't understand the fundamental working of capital markets.
Note: it's the same shareholders that have allowed to get $200-$300k TCs when smart people around the world toil the same as you for $60k. So, you can't have it both ways
This is a meme that needs to die.
> The world is better of with efficient capital deployment.
Even if this were true, rising share prices don't necessarily indicate efficient deployment. Chasing short-term share price increases often incentivises behaviour detrimental to company in the long-term.
Shame - Shopify is a fun place where I've learned a ton. We were just getting a cool Data product off the ground.
Well, if anybody's got a need for a Staff/Lead Data Engineer (Remote EST) with experience in Scala (+cats/fs2), Python, go who has spent the last 10+ years building Data Products on BI, then Hadoop, then GCP (+ the Apache Zoo, lately namely Kafka/Iceberg/Beam), my email is in my profile. :)
Have a great day!
Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
I see you're assigning this failure to reaganomics, are you then ready to assign all the successes to reaganomics too? i.e. The US became the largest exporter of IT and software, the US corporations put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, with US online companies being 90% of the top companies in the world.
Are you going to say that this is due to reaganomics too? Or only bad things get attributed to it?
Shopify is a Canadian company, not that it matters for my question.
If AI really kills as many jobs as predicted, we will definitely have to rethink society. It doesn't really make sense that a technology that improves overall productivity of society ends up making large segments of the population suffer. We need to find a way to have everybody benefit from progress and not just a few at the top.
Acting like they are civil institutions tasked with upholding the social fabric is absurd.
There are (very limited) lawful structures that try to make this happen, but much more is down to culture. In many (most?) countries it is considered shameful if a company prioritises shareholder value above everything else. I honestly believe the US is an exception in this regard. Unfortunately US culture is taking over.
- And now to go on a complete tangent: In the second part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy, The Dark Forest, institutions are described that have both an operational officer and a political officer. The navy has an Admiral that decides the strategy, and a political officer that makes sure the Navy does the right thing. The same is then applied to companies. - I wonder if this is a model to apply to a capitalist society: Where you have a CEO doing their regular thing, but also a political officer making sure society is not disadvantaged. Hard to pull off without falling into totalitarianism I guess.
Don't like how they do it? Create your own company and run it how you want.... We live in a world where you can do that.
I definitely agree in situations where the company is doing poorly. If a company has found a way to become more efficient then bosses probably do deserve bonuses.
Management doesn't care about you, so anything that is about your comfort and well being is a scam.
Because some highly paid people lost their jobs we need a new vision for society? Sure, it sucks to be laid off but you talk as if there's mass unemployment and droves of people suddenly living in squalor. Don't be so dramatic.
In Jan/Feb posted the exact same job (an additional position) and got over 300 resumes including from ex-FAANG folks who we generally don't see applying).
Something sure has changed imo, and I also personally do believe things are about to get much, much worse for many people.
"safety" stocks like AAPL are at or near all-time highs
real estate has budged slightly, but a rounding error off of the gains made in the last few years
even employment...tech hiring is getting hit but lots of other employers in retail, food & beverage are reporting record hiring and even wage increases
if there is a "crash", it hasn't happened yet
you may just end up with a sucky decade of stagflation...you are poorer every day, but just not dramatically so
The other headline is that LLM and ChatGPT is reshaping the tech landscape. Tech companies are laying off engineers so they can hire AI/LLM engineers to compete with ChatGPT. Based on my limited knowledge, OpenAI is head and shoulders above everyone else. Google's Bard is a distant second.
QoL for most Americans will continue to drop to match USA's precipitous decline in geopolitical status, but even Russia rebounded after just a couple decades. Hey, we got a bunch of O&G as well.
Good people. Very few assholes. The mission feels good, like it's not a net negative on the planet. Lot of churn internally, but often handled in a positive way.
I'm fortunate that I've got a decent nest egg set aside, and I can afford to spend the rest of the summer just being with my wife and daughter. It sucks that it's happened but I'm not worried about the future (yet).
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
Yeah, not as bad as the CEO laying off 900 people via zoom, and then plying for sympathies at how hard this decision is for him to do.
our entire economy is out of whack in so many areas.
>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
Ok, can we consider this in your compensation discussions this year? That you mindlessly followed the crowd and left your company structurally weak? Or do we think you're going to shoot for record compensation this year?
That said: where do I sign up for 16 weeks of severance pay?
The cruel irony is that having Shopify on your resume will open a lot of doors and likely result in a shorter job search than those laid off from lower-profile companies with less severance.
For point of comparison, my no-name series-D gave us a little over two weeks… and I’m unfortunately still looking 20 weeks later.
What're the workers gonna do? Protest? Strike? Hah. No, the remaining employees will pick up the extra responsibility and thank the employer for continuing to employ them.
They're going to work for other firms, who have also simultaneously laid off staff. They will accept lower wages. Salaries will be permanently anchored lower, improving the cost structure of US software across the industry.
It's an effective coordinated move by firms against labor.
Interesting side effect here is that in order for staff to avoid a layoff, the benchmark is not whether they produce output in excess of the risk-free return -- it's whether their worth is greater than the long-term benefit of paying each new hire 30% less.
I don't think that bad smell subsides that quick for everyone.
Know of a relatively well known brand that laid off a large chunk of it's tech staff and most / all the others are looking for routes out the door
Chunk of the tech leadership that took over after the original tech leadership was laid off have already found new roles
Growth also goes down, which means more firings and rinse and repeat.
- Alienating marketplace partners by trying to absorb their functionality - Trying to break into the logistics space - Failing to develop and make headway into the Enterprise space.
Shopify needs a reality check and new leadership if they want to continue being relevant
plenty relevant. more surprised when i don’t see a store use shopify at this point
Most recent layoffs have been framed around needing to focus the company due to economic and market headwinds. This reads like AI has transformed the mission.
What does "A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible" mean here?
I guess their idea of AI is someone using the ChatGPT API. Good luck if they think they will "hack" some revolutionary AI together with a cowboy hacker culture.
I think this is what is meant here[1]. Not copilot, but the idea is the same.
It is interesting, because 'prompt engineering' is being discussed in the same context. In the video, you will note several interesting bugs generated by GPT. Is it not exciting to see all those bugs in the next few years?
What law? I’m not criticizing Spotify at all for this decision, I’m just genuinely curious. A few other companies recently are giving away the laptops so I’m wondering what is different here.
It would be difficult for a IT department to guarantee, for sure without replacing the internals of the device, that the device doesn't contain sensitive information. Probably easier from an inventory and IT security perspective to just capture every device than try and coordinate with individuals to reformat, etc.
(for the same reason, some companies outright destroy old devices instead of reselling.)
If they give away the laptop, it will be difficult to guarantee and verify that the data is wiped out entirely within whatever time frame they are aiming for. So, they want their property back.
Lots of possible reasons.
On one hand, it was really nice having a fulfillment partner directly related to the webstore. It gave a sense of harmony for future growth of services. From a stock perspective, it was a money suck, but hey, look at Amazon.
On the other hand, the Shopify web platform feels a little neglected and I hope this will allow them to re-focus. From a stock perspective, maybe this will help get their immediate finances in order.
They've made some solid improvements and additions, but there are a lot of little things that need attention. One of my quibbles is that you can't make private or unlisted products. They're either visible to everyone, or disabled. There are a lot of people asking for that feature, and it's not a hard one to implement. There are a lot of things like this that probably wouldn't take a lot of resources to implement but would significantly improve the merchant experience.
Most of these companies have 1-2 areas generating 90%+ of the revenue. They are the rich VC giving unprofitable teams money to find PMF. When those teams can't find profitability faster in this environment, the VC rightfully stops the funding.
Some people will/have moved to the profitable teams, but you can't just double or triple their size and expect their income to grow accordingly
Looking at it from their perspective, I would have made the choice to lay me off (or fire me). The reality is that I just did not get enough meaningful project work. I talked to my manager frequently and it was always something "just around the corner". My manager went on parental leave 3 months after I started. Pretty much everybody took most of December off. Our division did a re-org which shook everything up, wasted more time. I didn't get any meaningful projects until the start of February, my 6th month of employment at Shopify. I was doing really well there, felt good about my work and my contribution, whereas I'd been floundering for 6 months with impostor syndrome and existential crisis.
But it was just too late. I got the axe. I don't feel too personally bad about it, although I hate interviewing and have performance anxiety when it comes to technical interviewing stuff. I want to take time off to rest but I'm afraid I'll use all my savings up and still not have a job.
I wasn't there long enough to really know for certain, but I feel like part of the problem is the monolithic nature of the codebase. Getting projects greenlit required a bunch of political wrangling and convincing of the senior leadership team by the product folks. Things just moved really slowly. The "Get Shit Done" (I kid you not, that's what they call it) process of shipping projects seemed interesting but nobody really followed the documented process. I got the feeling it was a lot of back channel conversations, gate keeping by higher up folks, with people every step of the chain asking themselves, "Will this decision make me look more impactful in my upcoming review?". Kinda feels like the way I imagine the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union operated.
I don't know. I have a lot of feelings about all of it, I'm personally really sad because I feel like I really had something to offer, something to contribute, but I spent most of my time just fucking around. Scale that up to a company the size of Shopify and it's just a tragic waste of human potential. But they will just pat themselves on the back, congratulating themselves on "making difficult decisions".
The 16 weeks severance is nice though. Takes the edge off.
I agree with all the other comments criticizing the CEO's leadership of furiously hiring and now making massive cuts, but I think that is missing the context that the CEO does not answer to you or me, or to business professors, or to his employees. He answers to the board, which typically care about stock price and not much else. Today is a massive success in that regard.
Is this on top of the layoff they had a few months ago? That means Shopify is really about 30% smaller all told.
Am I reading this right that they decided they had too many managers, and are laying off some? They don't say it clearly in which direction they thought they were unbalanced, but I think that's the implication of "activities rather than crafter-driven outcomes", or just what is supposed to be the obvious answer when anyone says this is unbalanced?
> too many and you add heavy layers of process, approvals, meetings and… side quests (emphasis mine)
and
> A more fit for purpose Shopify centered on its main quest has less scope creep, fewer meetings, and more shipping great features for our merchants. (emphasis mine)
I don't understand the point of a statement like this. Why not just admit logistics turned out to be a sunk cost and you're abandoning it, rather than say "We actually killed it!"
Shipping is getting expensive across the board, which might be part of it.
Big part of what drove me off was that the software project management (at least for my team) felt like someone was mashing on the control panel, figuratively.
As a small-business Shopify merchant, I would appreciate more competition in the market.
Genuine question: Isn't it a pretty crowded space? Do not SquareSpace, Square, Wix all have variations of Shopify products/offerings?
Disclosure: my current employer
Then he says they're selling to Flexport, an act which doesn't sound like a "main quest" at all ... it sounds like it's a difficult side quest being offloaded to someone else.
For Shopify customers: What does this mean for shops using Shopify Fulfillment Network?
The bigger picture here is that Shopifys visions of becoming an aggregate Amazon and competing in this space are dwindling.
Sad as there is a real solution waiting here.
I know this sounds insensitive but I am slightly envious
Edit: am dumbass. plus one week per year of tenure as corrected below. Still not bad IMO
For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
I enjoyed working there, but especially the people I worked with. I will miss working with them.
Would imagine Shopify is taking a loss in offloading, but will prevent future hemorrhaging of cash from a business decision that clearly did not pay off like anticipated.
Unlike some people, I don't think this experiment was necessarily a bad one for Shopify. I would have to know inside info as to whether it made sense at the time to do, but barring that I would give the benefit of the doubt to Shopify to try, if the reward was high enough if they pulled it off...
It arose from the assumption that managers have finite amounts of time and energy to spend with their people and their jobs.
Analyzing British military leaders, Hamilton found that the leaders could not effectively control more than 3-6 people. These figures have been generally accepted as the "rule of thumb" for span of control ever since, at least in the military where the bulk of my management experience lies.
An organization that has nothing but fairly senior researchers working on separate projects might need little management. An organization with lots of more junior engineers working on something like a rocket (where every part depends on every other part) might need more overhead.
Unrelated, I think that we should stop calling workers individual contributors. I think "workers" is a more fitting description.
"Individual contributor" makes the worker seem smaller and less impactful, as if management is contributing in a way that's superior and bigger than the individual. In reality, only the workers work, and managers manage, doing less work the higher up on the ladder they go.
Don't believe me? Here's a list of CEOs that somehow managed to be CEO of multiple companies at once.
- Jack Dorsey
- Jeff Bezos
- Elon Musk
- Carlos Ghosn
And yet, my employer forbids me from having more than one day job.
Also there is benefit of flat orgs which comes with higher ratio in terms of meeting reduction and also communication efficiency both top down and bottom up.
The main quest / side quest analogy works so so well!
Expected: 'Shopify lays off 20%'
Actual: 'Shopify will be smaller by about 20%'
> don’t want to bury the lede: after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics;
Does that mean layoffs AND part of their company being sold off.
Or does it mean employees being reassigned because part of the company is being sold off?
Granted I don't know much about Shopify.
But when I read things on the face of it ... it sounds confusing.
See: twitter
