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Lessons from six months at Shopify
- soared 6y agoEvidently publicly drinking the kool aid is the 7th lesson op learned. There are maybe 3 actual lessons, and quite a few “Shopify is so great” lessons. Separately, I cannot possibly imagine an internal podcast is anything but awful.
- baxtr 6y agoWhy would you say that? I think an internal podcast is just another communication tool. The natural extension of an internal blog
- scollet 6y agoI don't get it. Is it an update? A dissemination? A directive? Just for funsies? I worked at a place with an internal podcast and never had time to listen during work hours and doubted I would learn anything I didn't from trusted water cooler comrades. I just get Heaven's Gate vibes with an updated medium, honestly.
- erhk 6y agoHow is an internal podcast the most effective communication tool? What advantages are there to a doc or a recorded meeting?
- swyx 6y agoclassic Hacker news move to hate the idea of something on sight without having tried it
- chiph 6y agoOne of the main duties of executives is communication to employees, to make sure that everyone is swimming in the same direction. For a small firm, Friday afternoon beer bashes work. For a mid-sized firm, those usually slip to monthly events and the beer quality drops.. For a large firm getting everyone into the same room for a meeting isn't possible any more - either because they're remote (especially so these days) or there just isn't a room large enough. So something like a podcast or a Teams meeting becomes the best way to communicate with everyone.
- Aeolun 6y agoMy company can still get it’s entire HQ into one room by renting the ballroom of a large hotel. The beer is average, and it happens only twice a year, but the worst part is that the executives are talking mostly air. I think they’re good people, but I can’t say I’m interested in what they’re showing me. Last time they were talking about remodelling the office to be more ‘open’, and I asked if anyone had given any consideration to how easy it would be to focus there? Nobody had.
- kaelig 6y agoWe have 20 internal podcasts, and they're actually really good, especially the Context podcast mentioned by OP.
- mssundaram 6y agoShould it really take so long to become effective at an organization? I understand it is different at a larger organization, but that still sounds incredibly inefficient?
- Waterluvian 6y agoIf you have this luxury: don't accept a job unless they have a concrete problem in mind for you to solve. Beware generic always hiring listings for Kingdom building at large companies.
- booi 6y agodisagree. When there's more to do and less direction, I think there's more opportunity to play a bigger part
- colordrops 6y agoHorseshoe instance. These are two very different situations with similar hiring criteria.
- quickthrower2 6y agoInteresting. What does horseshoe instance mean?
- np_tedious 6y agoI think they meant this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory But tbh I don't entirely see how it applies here
- berkes 6y agoCurrently exactly there. Was hired to fill a real and actual 'gap between engineering and business'. As senior with decades of experience. Turns out the team I'm working in (not above) really does not like change (i.e does not accept been-there-done-that-failed, as valid argument to do things different), looks down on 'business', often even on 'users' (technical pureness above everything else, above working software even) and most of all hates me for pointing out problems. I'm still trying to find ways to fill my original 'problem' for which I came on board, but am also close to giving up, due to the negative energy all this is costing me. So: good advice. But be certain the 'problem' you're hired for, is actually something that people want to solve.
- sushshshsh 6y agoThis is a good post because it details to me how horribly broken Shopify's process and culture are. Here's why: If your software company revolves around getting a director or VP to say "you are allowed to do x technical thing", then your company has already lost. Here's what you need to do instead so you don't waste developer salaries and be outcompeted by better companies: Every dev is allowed to spin up their own service. Teams can self organize and self govern around business problems they feel like solving. The best teams are the ones that produce the services that product owners rely on the most to get things done. If you have a culture that involves saying no to dev ideas by default, it's only a matter of time until you lose.
- akiselev 6y ago> Every dev is allowed to spin up their own service. Teams can self organize and self govern around business problems they feel like solving. The best teams are the ones that produce the services that product owners rely on the most to get things done. Can't emphasize this enough. The only way to tackle complexity in tech organizations is by introducing at least one degree of freedom for innovation per employee. Where would Uber be without three thousand microservices for three thousand engineers?
- di4na 6y agoMaking a profit.
- inopinatus 6y agoMost of this seemed like feel-good fluff, but the last one was interesting to me. At AWS I often heard one phrase echoing around: “There’s no compression algorithm for experience”, and without unpacking† all the consequences and corollaries (for they are many) the idea of acquiring management experience by proxy through games, whether to build customer empathy or because it’s cheaper than an MBA, was not amongst them. Nevertheless if I look through all the games that’ve engaged me to completion, over the years, most of them are basically management games. Even ones that didn’t purport to be, like Shadows of Mordor or Fallout 4, in hindsight had something to teach on topics from organisational change management to implementation of strategy. I’m still waiting for a AAA title that requires inferential analysis of financial statements. After all, as Ben Affleck demonstrates in The Accountant, there’s nothing quite so satisfying as explaining discrepancies in a receivables footnote via a thorough analysis of quarterly EBITDA reporting. The closest approach I’ve experienced in a game, both cognitively and emotionally speaking, is probably completing the Challenge in “The Witness”. I live in hope. †(sorry)
- di4na 6y agoCheck eve online trading ;)
- multjoy 6y agoSpreadsheets... in SPAAAAAAAACE
- inopinatus 6y agoLet the record show that I'm burned-out veteran of the Great Northern War and its aftershocks, and haven't played Eve since 2012. My kit is mostly in 5ZXX-K but I left my heart in Tenal. No you can't have my stuff. In my opinion it is not a game, though. Eve:Online is a job.
- abledon 6y agoThis comment kinda makes me want to program a game where you do taxes...
- smabie 6y agoMan shopify sounds like a really shitty place to work. Your first 6 months are about learning how to get people to say yes to things? Besides that I don't care at all about their business (and I don't take jobs in which I don't care about the business), no thank you.
- tracer4201 6y agoI work at one of the big companies that many would say is at the forefront of innovation in our industry. If you’re young in your career with scope limited to your own team, then I agree getting people to say yes is a red flag. If you have broader scope across teams and organizations, you’ll quickly realize that different managers and directors have their own priorities. While yes, at the end of the day they might be working towards the same goals, it turns out that they have different ideas on how to reach those goals. They all have their own biases —- it could be as simple as one team wants to use X to solve Y and another team wants to use Z. Convincing people to listen and follow your ideas or deliver on your timeline can be very problems.
- hyko 6y agoSounds like if I bought this company I’d only want the trademark.
- hacknat 6y agoI’ve worked with a number of ex-Shopify employees and they all loved it. It sounds like it’s an intense experience, but they are willing to let people make very long bets. Also I can’t agree with point 5 enough. It really is true that the biggest (by volume at least) customers of software are software.
- yashap 6y agoYikes, this post gave me really, really bad vibes about Shopify. Maybe that’s unfair, but wow, that is a seriously pretentious post. It’s hard to imagine anything screaming “out of touch, incompetent execs” more than that. He makes it sound like a place where success means mastering office politics, not actually improving the product and growing the company.
- jariel 6y agoFunny I read exactly the opposite. The advice is probably good for any large organization, having worked at very successful startups with a few hundred people and mega-corps ... you absolutely have to understand how the decision making works if you want to get anything done. FYI 'politics' is not bad, it's just all the bits that are unspoken about the operating nature of a company. That is literally the one thing which I wish I had understood when venturing into a much bigger company. In fact, what he should really say is 'I wish Shopify would formalize' the nature of how decisions are made etc.. Edit: I think younger people with less familiarity about the 'real nature' of large organizations might possibly misread that because it's sometimes hard to understand how some companies work, and it's easy to be cynical (frankly, many companies are 'political' in a bad way). In reality - this 'advice' is the revelation that anyone in middle management makes when they get into their 30's. Everything is making sausage, nothing is obvious except in hindsight, getting anything done is kind of hard, the company has limited ability to innovate on the margins, and social organizations are made of people, which means 'it's political' that doesn't mean it's bad, it just means you have to think about it differently. Middle management is hard, especially for those in staff positions without 'direct power' and are not high enough up to have meaningful legitimate authority for the scope of a project.
- jimduk 6y agoAgreed. It might (or might not) be lovely if personalities and culture and power and ways of learning didn't come into things, and everything was truly meritocratic/anarchist/optimised or whatever, but this is not the human condition, and never has been. Much better to understand the working reality and either live with it or try to change it from a position of understanding. This is what culture and history teach, whether its Xenophon or Succession. Slightly off-topic generalisation, but maybe one of the reasons hackers disdain good management consultants, is that the latter are experts at understanding "the bits that are unspoken about the operating nature of a company", whereas the former see this as unnecessary overhead to doing what they want to do.
- mkl95 6y agoThis post makes it look like Shopify's leadership is authoritarian and patronising. I don't know their turnover numbers but companies like this suit very specific people, and some developers run away when they get a chance.
- nilkn 6y agoThe article touches on this, but their turnover is probably low because there aren’t many other places for engineers to go in Canada. I’ve worked at a place that had a similar sort of “artificial retention” due to a lack of local competition for talent, and curiously that place also had a very top-down and controlling executive team. It was still a great workplace but I was mystified on more than one occasion by how much time I had to spend getting permission from folks 2-3 layers above me in the organization.
- alexashka 6y agoExcuse me, what does this guy actually do besides being mr trying extremely hard to impress my bosses? These are not lessons, these are random thoughts. Shopify's website is starting to compete with Stripe for 'what am I even looking at'? I can always tell when sane engineers have completely lost control of a company and useless marketing and buzz-word-gurus have taken over. The cycle is complete when a company claims they're using 'AI' or 'machine learning' to help your business. Is Shopify there yet? I can't be bothered to click through their random offerings to find out.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago>Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done I vomited a bit into my mouth.
- d3nj4l 6y agoUnlike most people here, I liked this post, both for OP's ability to put his learnings into words (something I've learned I'm awful at) and the learnings in general. A lot of people are harping on the internal podcast/ learning about how your boss thinks, but I think that's actually good advice. Even in places with remarkably flat hierarchies, at the end of the day someone will have to settle ties, and knowing how those people think is a good practice to end unproductive discussions quickly. Besides, this isn't any different from having a director with creative vision at the helm of your project: you need to meet that person's vision, because that is really what matters. The podcast actually sounds great to me, because I'd prefer a slightly cringe-y "how do you do, fellow kids?" podcast over having zero or insufficient communication from leadership. It's not like people make decisions for no reason, and knowing how they think can help you appreciate what went into one without having a knee-jerk reaction.
- hohloma 6y agoThis! Agree completely and having worked in different companies, including huge enterprise, Shopify sounds like a great company to me based on this post! When a company grows it starts to function like an enterprise business and being aware of it and managing it is just great management and it sounds like that’s what Shopify is doing (long learning period expected, transparent leadership).
- chiefalchemist 6y ago> Long learning period True. But this is why Goliaths get run over by Davids. When it take half a year's salary to begin getting return, that's six months of high risk. And then when your product cycles are six to twelve months, you're slow and venerable. Full disclosure: I do some Shopify development. It's a love hate relationship. There are things that are great. But there are things where I stop and think "For Ford's sake??!!?? Really??" This article explains the excess of the latter.
- edmundsauto 6y agoWhen was the last time a David ran over Goliath because they moved faster?
- partyboat1586 6y agoReading this made me feel physically ill. I imagine many Shopify employees are suppressing violent urges on a daily basis.
- ajharrison 6y agoI worked at Shopify for a year and it was the worst year of my life. Woefully inept people work there who suck up and miss managements ass because they don’t want to lose their perks. Shopify is a mirage.
- Poiuytrewqlkj 6y agoI had the exact same experience. Got my shares and bailed.
- timvdalen 6y agoOnly partially related but here[1] is a recent episode from The Changelog about engineering at Shopify that I enjoyed. [1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/416 https://changelog.com/podcast/416
- chiefalchemist 6y ago> And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Translation? After 6 months with the company we'll find out if we should have offered you a position; and you'll find out if you should have accepted that offer? Certainly, there's go to be a better way? Also, going 6 months without feeling productive in some way, without feeling that you're contributing to the cause in some way feels like a big ask. Again, is there not a better way? Pardon the editorial but this sounds like a cult, not a 21st Century tech titan.
- umaar 6y agoSimilarly, I've written 28 lessons from working at Shazam as a web developer for 5 years, where I discuss how I made the most of my career there (hackdays, 1:1's, code reviews, drinking culture, deadlines, meetings, open source etc.). https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shazam-part-1/ https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-working-at-shaza...
- secondcoming 6y agoI'm not sure what this person thought they'd gain from writing an article like this about your current employer. It's all risk, no reward. Incredibly naive.
- draw_down 6y agoI used to expect new hires to take a month or two before shipping real work. I think it’s still good as a courtesy - starting a new job can take some adjustment - but new hires regularly start shipping real work in a couple weeks. This stuff where you’re supposed to be useless and confused for 6 whole months... that doesn’t seem good to me. Everything in our industry moves too fast for that, for one thing.
- pts_ 6y agoHow about Shopify suck up to me so that I can develop on their platform or buy their packages? I will pass on anyway.
- kevinmobrien 6y agoAs a CEO, this sounds like an incredibly broken company model. It’s obviously working in a lot of ways, but why would you make it so hard to get things done once you’re at scale?
- Poiuytrewqlkj 6y agoThe c levels are oblivious. They think the company is one thing when its the opposite. This is what adds the to head fuck of working there, you behave how the ceo recommends and you will get targeted for dismissal by your boss more than likely.
- lawwantsin17 6y agoGood post, but that advice about the first 6 months, learning how the top caste thinks. Is the grossest thing I've ever herd. Shopify must be as ridiculous to work in as their APIs are to use.
- abledon 6y agowhat don't you like about the APIs ? (genuinely curious!)
- xtiansimon 6y agoI'm reading various comments in defense and criticizing Shopify: kenrose: "I worked at Shopify in the past. Your assessment is incorrect. [...] Shopify has done a good job on defining clear interface boundaries between various parts of the monolith [...] they’ve invested significantly in developer tooling to make developers more efficient. It’s not perfect and there’s always more to do..." sushshshsh: "This is a good post because it details to me how horribly broken Shopify's process and culture are." In my work I'm exposed to many different online store and POS applications. Shopify is in a unique class. They have a diverse third-party apps community, and a documented API. For my needs, their app community allowed me to extend Shopify reporting to suit my firm's particular requirements. Other companies have their product and if their design doesn't fit your needs, is missing a feature in a report, or whatever, you're just SOL. I think it's worth noting these details when reading about this person's experience. There might be a hint of it from the article: "Working on [Operation HOPE] was the first time I’ve ever really interacted with an outside organization from inside Shopify." (as near as I can tell this program is a drive to put more stores on the platform, and not including US based black owned _developers_ in their App Store). Other comments here note the author does not identify their position (as developer), either.