21 ms·

I Quit Shopify After Five Months

• perlgeek 5y ago
  Wow, five interviews. Is that common? Unless it was clearly communicated from the very beginning, after the third I'd say: give me the job or put me on your do-not-contact-again list.
  • endtime 5y ago
    Yes, it's standard to have an initial screen and then a day of five interviews (e.g. 3 coding, one system design, one behavioral).
    • jon-wood 5y ago
      I really don't get how this has become the standard, on the team I hire for we do two interviews - one introductory conversation, and a technical interview. After that we're either going to hire you or we aren't, it really doesn't take much more than that to get an idea of whether somebody knows what they're doing or not. The trend for running multiple multi-day interviews is a waste of the candidates time, and its even more of a waste of your teams time because for every candidate they're now having to take out hours on end to go through the motions of interviewing. I find it painful getting 20 minutes into a 90 minute interview and knowing that the candidate isn't going to be getting a job, I can't imagine having to string that along for a full day.
      • endtime 5y ago
        I think the idea is that a candidate might have a bad interview or not click with a given interviewer, and so doing a few interviews averages this effect out a bit. At least at Google, every interviewer has their history and overall calibration tracked, where the calibration is, I believe, something to do with how much your scores match the other interviewers' scores. This is probably fairer overall, albeit more expensive for the company and the candidate.
• calypso 5y ago
  I was at shopify for 5+ years and recently left. AMA
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  This is shocking
• skrebbel 5y ago
  tl;dr I wanted to do more frontend work but they made me mostly write Ruby. They're nice though.
  • ushakov 5y ago
    imho, they should have expected that, since Shopify is a known Ruby shop edit: this wasn't meant to insult OP, sorry
    • aeonflux 5y ago
      It's not a 3 man company, you know. If they are interviewed and hired as Frontend (React) Developer in organization of that scale, they might expect to actually do what they are qualified to do.
    • skrebbel 5y ago
      You make it sound like the author did something wrong. Accepting a job and finding after 5 months that, for whatever reason, it's not your thing is pretty OK is it? Better to quit quick than stick around unhappy.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • lkxijlewlf 5y ago
      > imho, they should have expected that, since Shopify is a known Ruby shop Why is there always the tendency to blame the person and NOT the company?
      • inopinatus 5y ago
        Such a tendency is not on display here. This is like accepting a job at NASA and assuming you’re going into space.
    • krageon 5y ago
      > known If you apply for a role that is explained to you, what does it matter what the company mostly does? If I apply to a rail maintenance company as a programmer, should I expect to maintain rail? No.
• ushakov 5y ago
  the funniest and saddest of all is this though: > My hunch with those companies was that it wouldn't have been a major issue if I was video-ing in from the State Penitentiary (due to murder charges) as long as I solved the algorithms correctly the OP clearly has some skills to his name and even academic background, yet they'd like him to solve coding puzzles i could get $100k freelance contract only after 1 meeting and bit of paperwork, but tech bros won't accept me cause i don't do puzzles
  • KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
    Sounds like you're bringing in a bit of your personal gripes there as the OP didn't say the other companies wouldn't accept him...
    • ushakov 5y ago
      yes, this part speaks to me on personal level
  • lozenge 5y ago
    He didn't mention whether he could or could not do coding puzzles. But if you are accepted purely on coding puzzles, then your colleagues also were. Meaning, they might be difficult to work with (such as: overconfidence, always criticising the code they didn't write, shaming people in large meetings, repeatedly overpromising, or other bad behaviours). Sadly, Shopify's care and interest in his individuality didn't extend past the interview stage, as he was given work that shouldn't be expected from a front end focused developer.
    • mattmcknight 5y ago
      > Being stuck handling backend or infrastructure when the job was supposed to be "front end development" is not acceptable Editing HTML templates (ERB) is front end development.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    > we <must> ask algorithm questions to ensure engineers can think properly I thought that described today's interviewing zeitgeist, pretty well. In my experience, absolutely no one even glanced at the dozens of open-source repos (for finished, documented, tested products), or the hundreds of pages of writing I have amassed, over the years, which ahem, are actual artifacts of lots of my "proper" thinking. I've only practiced a few Codility exercises, a few years ago, when I was still interested in working with someone else. Otherwise, I never practice leetcode. As I am quite aware that many, many people practice these types of things, for hours every day (I strongly suspect while being paid by their current employers), I just consider that a wash. If this is a requirement, then I'll never get hired, and I might as well give up (I can actually do reasonably well, at these kinds of things -mostly-, as they are usually basic commonsense exercises, but I won't ever have the rote efficiency of a practiced leetcoder). Since I don't actually need the work, I accepted that this is just the way things are, and withdrew from consideration. Too bad. I suspect that some companies that I would have enjoyed working at, and that I could have been a valuable IC at, are maybe having to deal with less-than-ideal workers.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  Am I reading correctly that the reason is basically that he didn't get to enough frontend/JS work, even though being hired in a frontend role? And maybe realized he was kind of bored with ecommerce after all too.
  • duxup 5y ago
    That’s how I read it. It just wasn’t the work he expected / wanted.
  • rootsudo 5y ago
    Why is that bad? It's his blog, writing about himself for his feelings? It wasn't per se a large org issue, or such - or a "scandal" that is so commercialized into #movements today. He just didn't like the work, expected more, didn't get a good offer (it was downgraded from his perspective) and in the end didn't think it was worth his time to stay. That's a reasonable decision to make. Many people stay for the branding but hate the product. I stayed as companies not liking the work, or the brand but just for the money and opportunity on my resume. The people made it fun too, for a while but once the people change and the work becomes work work, it's time to go and I did.
    • joshcsimmons 5y ago
      Accurately put! Not trying to portray Shopify in a negative light at all. I just learned something about myself through the experience and thought it might be helpful for other devs.
    • dymk 5y ago
      It's fine for him, I just don't get why this is on the front page of HN. If somebody submits an article titled "I quit <High Paying Thing> after <Short Period of Time>", I expect there to be drama. He didn't like the backend work? Okay, that's actually quite fortunate for him, he can just quit and move on, but I'm here for Real Developers of Beverly Hills.
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      I don't think it's bad! I posted my comment before the comment thread become full of people telling the OP they are wrong or bad, which I find very bizarre! I did think the OP was not super clear about why they actually left, so I took a shot at summarizing what I think I got from it, to see if other readers shared my reading.
• multiplegeorges 5y ago
  The insight around the "Life Story" interview round is good. It helps interviewees feel like they are being seen as whole people and, at least in the author's view, helps filter out jerks from a large org. Seems like something other large companies could/should adopt. Getting down-levelled through the interview process due to YOE, which is known before interviews even start, indicates some failures by the recruiters. Recruiters should've been able to set proper expectations up front. I bet being down-levelled and leaving within a year are very strongly correlated and cost the company a lot.
  • joshcsimmons 5y ago
    Yes - would like to see some stats on attrition among down leveled hires. I suspect you’re right.
  • taway99121 5y ago
    Posting anon for obvious reasons. It can get really bad. I joined a Series A startup. Me and all my peer engineering directors got down-leveled to entry-level titles within a month. Product Mangers, Sales People, others got up-leveled from Entry Level --> Manager --> Director --> Sr. Director. The company is on a dying breath, because these shenanigans caused so much acrimony. Who the fuck cares about a company that fucks you over a month into joining the company? Half the engineers were working on side projects and the company has basically died.
    • jack_riminton 5y ago
      What sort of CTO would allow this?
      • taway99121 5y ago
        two lessons learned 1. check linked in. if you a dozen of kids out of undergrad in Marketing/Product/Sales/Strategy/Finance with Director+ titles a year or two out of college....and others out of industry with entry level titles, RUN. There is obvious inequity. You wont be able to motivate people to work hard with such a setup. 2. avoid companies with split executive offices. Our engineering group was 95% on the East coast while the "business" office was in SF. CEO/CFO/CPO/CRO all in SF. CTO on east coast.
• martinpeck 5y ago
  > The reactions have ranged from shock to immediate understanding. The shock makes some sense (you were leaving after a short period of time), but where did their "immediate understanding" come from? It sounded like your main issue was that the work wasn't as advertised. Is that common for Shopify hires?
  • joshcsimmons 5y ago
    I don’t know that it was the main issue - but yes I think this is common with Shopify hires. I’ve seen a number of similar complaints on Blind’s Shopify board.
• Rebelgecko 5y ago
  >Does a year of experience at FANG == a year of experience at WITCH? What is WITCH?
  • gostsamo 5y ago
    https://www.which.co.uk/ https://www.which.co.uk/ edit: fixed url
    • __float 5y ago
      even with the "fixed" URL, this is not what the author meant. Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL.
      • gostsamo 5y ago
        Possible. I acted on a hunch thinking that it is a typo. He talks about non-tech roles and I made the connection with the e-commers -> consummer protection.
  • karanbhangui 5y ago
    I had to look this up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India.
    • fredophile 5y ago
      Disappointing. I was hoping it referred to working with someone like this [0]. [0] https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview
  • sebdufbeau 5y ago
    Might be wrong, but I think it's referring to Indian consulting companies (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• jmuguy 5y ago
  I do think its pretty weird to hire someone as a frontend dev and have them in Rails a bunch IF you were in models, controllers, and elsewhere a lot. If the majority of your work was in views, ERB or otherwise, I don't think its that strange. There's a sort of all or nothing aspect to how you handle the view layer in Rails, at least for a smaller code base. However, I'm sure Shopify is large enough that they have apps doing a little React, a little server rendered in ERB, and others that are fully React backed with an API, and probably some that don't have any JS framework at all.
  • ppeetteerr 5y ago
    Came here to say the same. Server-side rendered front-end is still front-end. Just because someone doesn't like the stack, doesn't mean it's incorrect. Sounds to me like this person was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the codebase and how little control they had and decided it was not for them. I don't blame them. eCommerce is tough. eCommerce on such a customizable platform must be like walking through a minefield.
  • johnatwork 5y ago
    Right, I'm a React dev, but currently I'm at a point in my project where I have to dip into Flask/Jinja2. It's not "fun" per se in the front-end part, but it's absolutely fine, and what's required for my work. I don't mind it at all, if anything I'm happy and curious about BE/Python and how that part works.
  • snemvalts 5y ago
    If I need to call Rails services and methods from ERB, then it isn't frontend :) It's comparative to hiring a front-end and putting them to work on .php files. It's so far back in the past, that it becomes degrading, and you start feeling regression in front-end skills.
    • powersurge360 5y ago
      Web dev seems to be headed in three directions imo: 1) The old style, where the server owns the routing but can cede control over html to the frontend for discreet applications. Always cedes control of JS and CSS to the frontend. 2) A fully separated frontend and backend application that talks to one another over REST or GraphQL 3) A very javascript-light frontend that uses a technology like LiveWire, LiveView, or Hotwire to render on the server but push reactively to the frontend I think any is fine and each have their merits. I imagine that #3 is the one that is most likely to supersede #1 as it's a direct evolution. But I would think that it's a bit gatekeeping to tell someone whose whole job is HTML templates, javascript, and CSS that they are No True Frontender.
• vlttnv 5y ago
  > What does the unit "year of experience" represent, and is it comparable across domains? In my opinion, "years of experience" should not be disqualified as one of multiple evaluation tools for skill. I think it signifies that you have had the opportunity to go through a variety of situations, challenges, projects etc. and you have accumulated knowledge and experience that cannot be learned by reading tutorials or working on side projects. From personal experience and by talking to and working with other much more experienced engineers than me, I have noticed that some of the most important knowledge is obtained just by working on something for a longer amount of time. Obviously, there are many exceptions to this rule, there are engineers with years and years of experience that are just bad at what they do. What I am trying to say is that this tool for evaluation should not be discarded.
  • endofreach 5y ago
    This is exactly it. This guy is just ignorant. He wanted this job, hoping it would „make him a better developer“. But was shocked they consider a senior dev someone who had many jobs that made him a better developer. WTF? Soon we need Senior+ and Senior++ levels, if anyone can be senior. The seniors i have seen, in my decade of programming, scare the shit out of me and make me feel like i just hello worlded into programming.
• xibalba 5y ago
  > downleveled from senior to mid ... because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs ... I was disappointed in Shopify for using such a reductive metric to determine levelling I'm confused by this. Isn't this a pretty sensible reason to be downleveled. I don't think a company would care about your years of experience as, say, a lawn mower. In terms of experience, wouldn't years spent front end coding received almost all the weight? Sure, your years mowing lawns may have been rewarding and may have helped you build good communication skills or something, but surely we don't expect companies to bump you to senior on that basis?
  • dijit 5y ago
    Being downleveled for "years of experience" is obviously silly. There's a common adage: You can have 10 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 10 times. -- I don't know the author, and it's possible that Shopify used this as an excuse because the authors talents did not meet expectations or claims: but "years of work experience" is a very poor marker for ability and experience, since years are not equal between people or roles.
    • xibalba 5y ago
      > obviously silly No. You've drifted into believing your opinions are facts. Reasonable people can disagree. Having hired many people, I understand that everything in the hiring process, no matter how well calibrated and tightly looped, are rough heuristics for how well a person will do in a role. So years of experience in the relevant activity gets at least equal weight to responses to relevant technical questions, coding challenges, etc. Yes, FAANG experience carries extra weight in opening the door because FAANGs are known to set high bars and have (overly) intense filtering. Etc. Etc.
      • dijit 5y ago
        > No. You've drifted into believing your opinions are facts. Fair enough. I've also hired "many" people (many in my case being about 12, so that may not be "many" by other definitions). I think it's fine to disagree, maybe my overall sentiment was much too strict, but let me just say that in my experience years != years, even people in the same roles at the same company can have wildly different experience levels from the same years of being there. This isn't really accidental either, a good example was.. me.. actually, I had a colleague who had the same number of years experience and for all intents and purposes we actually matched super well in our abilities and mentalities. However, we worked together for 7 years, on the same projects, same deadlines, same tech, same responsibility. That man knows far more about influxdb than I possibly can: despite both of us having "7 years influxdb" on our resumes. I know more about postgresql than he likely ever will, but we both have "7 years postgresql" on our resumes. Aptitude is one thing, attitude is another, and at the end of the day: the only thing that works is to set your standard and see if people hit it. For me, senior means that you're able to teach, are self motivated, can speak at a high level to leads or directors and understand business need, regardless of technical competence in specific technologies or years experience. If you hit that bar, you get the title, if you don't, you don't.
• thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  I've had two dev jobs in my career that wound up being very different than advertised, the best I can tell is that companies will say pretty much whatever you want to hear as a candidate, but when it comes time to solidify a product roadmap, you have to be flexible. In one case, I was hired as a back end services engineer and wound up working almost exclusively on a React SPA. In another case, I was also hired on as a back end services engineer and my team was asked to take over development of a native mobile app even though only one out of my four teammates had any iOS experience (I had none). It took our team two months to ship anything meaningful (a talented mobile team could've knocked it out in a sprint) and then it was immediately back to web work. In the second case, I got the sense that leadership didn't really grasp how costly the context switching was for us due to not having much collective experience working in mobile (not to mention the rude awakening of having to deal with iOS dev dependencies).
  • hysan 5y ago
    > In the second case, I got the sense that leadership didn't really grasp how costly the context switching was for us due to not having much collective experience working in mobile (not to mention the rude awakening of having to deal with iOS dev dependencies). This is something I’m dealing with in my current job. I would love to hear how people have been successful at conveying this to leadership.
    • thr0wawayf00 5y ago
      I started asking my boss to commit me to 6 months on a new stack if that's what they really needed me to do, making the argument that it takes at least a month to really become productive and several more to internalize the concepts. He understood and agreed that the constant context switching didn't make much sense because it slowed us down, but he couldn't make any promises. Things didn't change and I left a few months later when I got a better offer.
    • rkeene2 5y ago
      In the past I've explained this as a comparison of Costs and Outcomes. The total cost of the plan, and the outcomes (mostly as benefits). In the GP's example it could have been, for example, the cost in time for the existing to develop the iOS application, the opportunity cost that's being given up by causing schedule slippages, and the discretionary effort of staff based on doing unfavorable work for the benefits of reducing management complexity, upskilling existing staff, and gaining a wider variety of experience within the team. Alternatives such as using a supplier to build the iOS have their own costs and outcomes. For example, cost in terms of capital dollars, a technical person still needs to invest time in finding the correct supplier, a technical person still needs to invest time into creating the specification to build upon (even if you find a supplier which can do agile and incremental delivery/iteration), and management overhead for managing the team and/or relationship with the supplier. Further, since the product is something that needs to be maintained (presumably), a maintenance plan of some sort will need to be put into place, and for the benefit of getting it done more quickly, a better product by developers interested and competent in the domain the total cost will likely be lower, and other projects will slip less. There's also the advantage that if management has to put in capital dollars then they are more likely to take the project seriously and fund its maintenance and reward those involved, especially if that's accounted for up front.
• draw_down 5y ago
• vsareto 5y ago
  >Engineers can become interviewers inside of their first six months at the company I started this after 1 month at a company and it sucks. I think it makes sense for leads/managers to do interviews quickly after joining if they were hired to build a team, but seniors are sometimes not team leads at companies. Key reasons why this will make your new employee uncomfortable: - They probably don't know the company very well. You're intentionally choosing someone who doesn't know the company to represent the company. That's going to make them uncomfortable and it appears to be a bad decision on the company's part - If you hired someone primarily for coding, you're throwing interviews in along with learning the code base and company and other teams - If you didn't tell them they'd be interviewing soon after joining (they didn't tell me), your company appears deceptive
  • _odey 5y ago
    At a previous employer I had people that we just hire be our +1 and shadow the interview process, if they wanted to of course. They really appreciated this since it showed them that there was no hidden conspiracy in the process, we were giving everbody that applied the same opportunities to be accepted, and we showed then that throughout the process we were actually trying to find a fit for a person within the company instead of trying to find reasons to reject them. This also gave the new candidate the chance to aks the new hire questions related to their own interview process and first impressions in the company and eased the tension a bit. If they wanted to carry on and participate in interviewing the next session we would let them lead the challenge, with me shadowing, to gain confidence and experience, and later on, if they still wanted to carry on, they would be fully qualified to do interviews just like other members of their team (unless of course they really weren't capable, but that never happened). So I would say the approach really matters when discussing things like this. For us it was a positive.
• alksjdalkj 5y ago
  > Work-life balance at Shopify is unparalleled. Work is synchronous-ish but it's super easy to run out for some afternoon errands or a quick workout. Shopify is pretty visionary here - turns out happy and healthy employees do better work than ones that are chained to a desk all day Is this really that unusual? I feel like most places I've worked, as long as I made it to meetings nobody cared if I stepped out for an hour to run errands or something.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    A lot of it depends on how much you are willing to extract it from the company.
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    It’s not unusual at all. It would actually be more strange in 2022 if a tech company was trying to micromanage every hour of every day of each tech employee.
    • MattGaiser 5y ago
      It need not be micromanage, but could rather just be stuffing your day so full that you have no choice but to work continuously.
    • aiisjustanif 5y ago
      Go try Amazon and many companies aren’t “Tech” companies.
  • altdataseller 5y ago
    Sounds like table stakes to me in 2022. If any company tried to micro-manage me, I would be out in a second
    • aiisjustanif 5y ago
      That would majority of company in the Fortune 500 and dependent on your job function in IT.
• prea 5y ago
  At every company I've worked at where I stayed for a bit, I eventually had to work on languages and stacks that I wasn't technically hired for/had interest in. At the very beginning I found this very hard, also wanting to quit/actually quitting. I've come to accept that this is actually pretty normal. The benefits to my career from working on a bunch of different stuff I didn't pick have been substantial. Caveat: I probably wouldn't take the switcharoo at the very beginning either...if I'm told I'll work on A but actually get B, this is likely a sign of some important things not working well at the org.
  • thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    It's fine when the context switching is managed properly. It's not OK when a company asks a team to spend a month working on a rails service, followed by a month of working on a native app, followed by a month of working on a web front end, which I have experienced. You wind up exhausting yourself trying to pick up new technologies that you wind up forgetting because you're not given enough time to deeply learn the concepts.
  • protomyth 5y ago
    I've had two companies that switched technology between recruiting me and the start of my employment. It was a bit irritating, but provided an interesting way to learn something new on someone else's dime. I've also been at a place where I was not allowed to program in C, but had to do all the code reviews for the people programming in C. The "logic" was that since I was doing the code reviews, I shouldn't program in C since no one would review my code. I sometimes wonder about how I encounter these situations a bit too often.
    • chihuahua 5y ago
      That sounds very strange. Your code would be reviewed by the other people writing C code. Were those other people much less experienced than you?
      • protomyth 5y ago
• sequoia 5y ago
  > Shopify has a Life Story round. Due to developers' insistence on rebranding everything, this is just a cutesy title for a work history interview. When I interviewed at Shopify, naïve as I was (or perhaps just overly-literal, as engineers are wont to be), I thought they actually wanted my life-story in the "Life Story" interview. I told of how I have a non-traditional background for CS, how I had children early and how it influenced my life, how I moved my family to a farm as a work-trade after being laid off from my first full time programming job. The interviewer (recruiter I think) kept steering thus: "oh wow! So then after that, what was your next job?" and "interesting! And what kind of programming languages did you use at that job?" It took me a minute to realize she just wanted me to recite my CV. I found the Shopify folks to be very cordial and the interview was a positive experience overall even though it did not result in an offer. This was about 5 years ago.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    I made the same mistake in the Life Story interview. I thought it was about why I became a dev. Except I only realized that about 15 minutes in.
    • ma2rten 5y ago
      Sounds like it's ripe for (creating the perception of) discrimination.
      • evilduck 5y ago
        The intent could very well be to get people to volunteer information you otherwise can’t directly ask. “Life story” is such an odd way to label it if they just want to know your career path to date.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
    • Nullinker 5y ago
      Communication goes both ways. It is a very reasonable assumption that a life story is about your whole life, not just your education and professional career. The recruiters should explain what they mean if they are redefining terms, especially since people regularly interpret it differently.
• cletus 5y ago
  I had to comment on this: > it was because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs. This is almost certainly not the case. It was likely due to the answers given in the soft skills interview that belied a lack of experience. The author further confirmed this view (for me) by talking so much about their technical skills becoming rusty. That's actually the natural state at Senior+ levels as you should be spending a lot of your time on influence: code reviews, mentoring more junior people, figuring out requirements and so on. You may be able to get by at a purely technical person at Senior but you're going to be fighting forces pulling you away from that to some degree. Here's the way I like to think about it based on the Google/FB levelling ladder and what you're responsible for: - L3 (college grad): Task. You are given a task to do and need to deliver it. Example: fix an issue with Javascript timeouts on an auto-complete box; - L4 (PhD or 1-3 years of experience): Feature. You will be responsible for delivering a feature. This requires more autonomy and self-direction and breaking down a feature into tasks. Example: add a user settings and preferences panel. - L5 (Senior): Project. This is where you start to work more across different teams. Example: ship rewind for Live videos from backend requirements to UI. - L6 (Team). This is where responsibility shifts. Instead of being told what to do, you should be telling your management chain what they should be doing. This also includes larger projects but often includes forecasting, risk analysis, tracking and so on. On this scale, the author comes across to me with a very L4 mindset so it sounds like they were correctly levelled. What's more, putting them in as L5 could be setting them up for failure. I didn't see in the post how much and what experience the author had but it does matter how much is as an engineer and even how much is in a big tech company. It matters. Here's an example of how this matters: the author didn't like doing so much in Rails (ERB). I haven't worked at Shopify so I may off base here but it sounds like Shopify uses a similar distinction that Facebook does. FB largely categorizes people as product (Product Generalists) or infra (Systems Generalists). There are strictly UI engineers but they're less common than product engineers. There are also specialists. product engineers will deal with everything from the UI (HTML/JS/CSS) down to the storage layer and can include things like providing APIs. As an FB product engineer you may never touch JS. Or you may do it 80% of the time. It varies. But the point is that this dividing line is deeper than a lot of traditional FE engineers might be used to. That's not necessarily good or bad. But it may be different.
  • 5y ago
• monkeybutton 5y ago
  The impression I get of Shopify is that they hire more than they need and churn out the less successful in the first year. This is only a second hand observation though since I don't work there.
• jack_riminton 5y ago
  This is mildly interesting but I'm not sure why its so high on HN, is it because people don't often write about such experiences with companies like this?
  • fknorangesite 5y ago
    Yeah given how high it made it I was expecting a more interesting conclusion than "Eh, not as much js as I'd thought there'd be."
    • jack_riminton 5y ago
      And to be honest, if you know anything about Shopify you'd know they're a famously Rails-heavy stack. Thus working on erb templates is pretty much guaranteed. Although apparently this wasn't 'interesting' enough
• nixgeek 5y ago
  While I’m generally cautious that “Years of Experience” isn’t a great reason to downlevel, I also wouldn’t expect someone to be a “Senior” after graduating (even with a PhD, and even if it were in Computer Science or a closely related field) in ~2 years either. https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcsimmons https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshcsimmons doesn’t mention graduation year and seems to try to pass off the UC Irvine time as professional experience rather than academic, but other social profiles like Quora say “Graduated 2019” after doing a PhD in Music Composition & Music Technology. I’m sorry to hear Shopify wasn’t the experience you wanted.
  • ozim 5y ago
    Yeah looking at OP linkedin it seems that he might be more of "regular dev" or "midlevel dev" than a senior. Bad part was they interviewed and hired him as a senior and then downgraded.
    • nixgeek 5y ago
      I read this as the posting was for Senior and the offer extended was at a lower level, that’s not uncommon — Amazon particularly is somewhat famous for down-levels happening in interview debriefs. I don’t think Josh started as a Senior and then got demoted, the post explicitly says the $ was less than desired (due to the offer being made at the lower level).
  • snotrockets 5y ago
    PhD really depends on the lab/advisor. Some would let you have experience that directly translates, some won't
  • mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > I also wouldn’t expect someone to be a “Senior” after graduating (even with a PhD, and even if it were in Computer Science or a closely related field) in ~2 years either. I suppose it depends on your org. Where I work "senior" is the second level up, where the first level is given to new hires fresh out of college (mostly master's, some bachelor's). If someone comes in with a PhD in a related field -- though perhaps not a completely unrelated one like music composition -- I'd be surprised for them not be a senior or even a lead (the third level up). The researcher positions that require a PhD tend to be advertised as leads in my experience. I was originally hired as a senior data scientist although I had minimal relevant work experience, but I had worked in an arguably related field (mostly ETL) for 5 years after bailing out of a PhD program (all but dissertation in economics).
• pjmlp 5y ago
  From my point of view SSR is still frontend, maybe not the kind of workflow the author was expecting, but still is producing HTML, CS and eventually some JS down to the browser.
  • snemvalts 5y ago
    The logic etc that you're writing in the templates is in the backend language though? And it's all run on the backend.
    • tomnipotent 5y ago
      > And it's all run on the backend. It's run server-side. That doesn't mean it's not front-end.
    • pjmlp 5y ago
      It is produced on the backend, consumed on the client.
  • kypro 5y ago
    Perhaps I'm just old (31), but when I started web developed this was frontend development.
    • notpachet 5y ago
      > Perhaps I'm just old (31) You're not.
• dgb23 5y ago
  > but I felt the months ticking by and my frontend skills degrading I don't doubt the author, but this specific statement seems off to me in a general sense. Sure, you can get rusty with a specific set of tools, but picking them up at a later stage should not be too much of a hassle. _Should_ is the keyword here. Do others feel this way? Am I misinterpreting this?
  • pantulis 5y ago
    I felt the same. "Months ticking" is like the OP is having some kind of career angst, or maybe I am out of the Silicon Valley rat race and world-class engineers think that way.
  • lstamour 5y ago
    No, that line stood out to me too. I felt like that clearly expressed the lack of experience and maturity the author has with programming. Over the short term it is definitely possible to have a skill set degrade in a particular language or framework, but over the long term, this becomes normal and you tend to apply what you learn in one place to another place, despite using different technologies. And HTML in a browser is always frontend, regardless of tech…
  • dceddia 5y ago
    As a React developer who can also sling Rails + ERB, they're very different skillsets, even though they're both broadly "frontend". I can see why someone who's trying to make a career as a React developer would see a primiarily-ERB role as a detour. And maybe in their next round of interviews, people would question how good they are at React if they spent the last X years doing mainly ERB/HTML with only sprinkles of React. "I see you don't have a lot of recent React experience..." And yeah, I agree - a person can get rusty with some tools and pick them up again just fine. The trouble isn't whether you (the interviewee) believes that, it's more about convincing the person on the other side of the table. The perception in JS-land is that things change Very Fast™ and that skills quickly go obsolete. (Disregarding that if you zoom out, React hasn't changed majorly in 4 years and it's been the dominant choice for 6+ – the perception of fast-paced change is definitely a thing)
  • 5y ago
• speedgoose 5y ago
  > There is even a bit of a stigma about working while sick - if you do so, your coworkers will urge you to just take a day and rest up instead. Pretty cool and pretty rare. I feel like it’s not acceptable anymore to go to work while being sick since the Covid-19. I would be upset if I see a sick coworker at work.
  • gkoberger 5y ago
    They're referring to Slack, and encouraging sick coworkers to take time off. We do this too, because a lot of people feel like "I'm sick, but I'm just sitting at home anyway, I might as well take this meeting".
    • Dave3of5 5y ago
      I've always felt this for my entire working career which is about 20 years now (16 dev and 4 retail). Sick workers productivity was close to 0 in almost all instances. For Retail that meant they were not on the checkouts but out on the shop floor goofing around and ignoring customers. They could also be in the toilets for hours at a time which meant that the other employees would be picking up slack for them rather than them being off and having to get someone to cover for them. In terms of dev they would be in the office but only there in person. If you had a meeting they would make seemingly random decisions. If they are programming at their desk their code would be buggy and could take up to 10 times as long for them to write. I'd rather be able to explain that a feature was late as one of the devs was ill rather than they came in and tried to work whilst being ill and failed. Being ill and taking time to recover is part of doing business. Companies should factor this into their plans. Not doing so is a company issue not an issue with an employee being sick. I mean no-one wants to be ill it's not really your choice. I'm not enjoying myself being ill, it sucks. Going to work draws this process out and makes your fellow co-workers sick. I've always taken time off when I'm ill and I will continue to do so and so should everyone else. P.S. I include Mental illness in this as well. If you're having a bad day / week / month mentally TAKE SOME TIME OFF!
• oneepic 5y ago
  Fist bump to quitting early. I am leaving a company after only 3 months (Edit-- I also will not plan on working for several more months!). My parents (both in their 50's, who are used to the idea of working all the way from 22 to 65 years old in your life) do not like it one bit. But then again, as Americans we all have some weird hardcore norms about work. That attitude is slowly changing I think. Funny enough, I had a bit of the opposite happen in the interview -- I was upleveled due to my performance, and the money was awesome. Just had a lot of reasons for feeling unfulfilled.
  • joshcsimmons 5y ago
    Good for you. A lot of commenters getting hung up on the mechanics of the process. There’s a lot of cultural norms about what to do in this situation but at the end of the day you’re the one the one that has to live with your decisions.
  • jon-wood 5y ago
    If I'm reviewing a CV I'm not going to ding someone for leaving a job a few months in, but I am going to be asking some carefully worded questions about why you left to work out whether you left of your own accord, or you were asked to leave before the probation period ended and the company were stuck with you on a three month notice period. (Its possible the US market is different in this regard, where as far as I'm aware everyone is on 2 week notice periods all the time)
    • throwaway6532 5y ago
      I'm in the process of leaving a company after 6 months at the moment and I know I'm going to probably get this question forever now, but end of the day I have my reasons, and I think they're valid and will likely be judged as such. I think going in to any other job I'm equally as motivated as any interviewer to not have it happen again given how painful an experience this has been. In my case I wouldn't necessarily say it was bait and switch, but I wasn't made aware of something that would have led me to turn down the offer had I known about it beforehand as I knew it wouldn't be a good fit, but I also didn't think to ask because I was making assumptions based on all my pre-covid experiences. I guess I learned a lesson there.
• karmakaze 5y ago
  I'm really sorry to about how this played out for you. I can see some similarity to the bumps I faced when I joined Shopify. > I don't doubt that more frontend work was coming down the pipeline for my team - even greenfield work - but I felt the months ticking by and my frontend skills degrading. In order to triage this, I worked on a number of frontend projects in my spare time at a pace that was admittedly draining. With me, it wasn't so much that I wasn't learning at the start, it was that I wasn't really working on meaty/challenging tasks/projects. This was several years ago. It took a while probably more than a year after having shipped a major feature from beginning to end with a team to understand what 'scale' means at Shopify. Normally when we think scale, we think users, servers, requests/sec. Shopify scale is more like shipping via ocean tanker vs 1-day delivery drone. Imagine my shock finding myself accidentally (that's another story) at Shopify coming from a series of startups and missing the pace of work. To be clear, I didn't ship anything part of a whole project in my first 5 months either. I think this got dealt with in my case, because my attempts to make faster/greater impact was conflicting with established process standards. This was fortunate as it led to discussions about mindset. It was still hard to internalize: we design, build, and ship the right thing, only when it's ready, to millions of customers. It only makes sense if you think about it in a year+ timeframe. > I asked myself the question, "Am I becoming a better frontend developer through this experience?" and the answer was of course no. These things are complex though and I could see how maybe six months or a year from various points I might be working on some exciting frontend work. This line of self-questioning mutated into, "Do I care about eCommerce?" It was a question I never had the bravery to ask myself before. I've worked almost exclusively in eCommerce of one form or another since I started working in tech. I began to wonder if it might be time to try something different. When I started I didn't even know what Shopify was really, only that they made web storefronts like many other website/checkout product/companies. As I worked there I realized that there's a big difference. Shopify's storefront/checkout is only the tip of the platform, the rest you can't see are the parts used by the merchants. I did also think, is this the place for me? My asking was about the tech stack. I only had one Rails job before and it wasn't my cup of tea. I did stick it out though, for the reasons of working with great people, both peers and management. One thing I didn't take for granted was that Shopify is a good company. Perhaps I didn't start interested in Commerce (no 'e' Shopify does Retail too, the team I started on :-), but I did understand that trade, in particular international trade, and also at all levels and not just megacorps, can actually make the world better. I think getting and shipping international orders is a pretty eye-opening moment for merchants. Eventually I also got to work on very challenging technical problems, which do regardless of tech stack. > Everything on the surface was good for me at Shopify and I want to take some space to recognize that. I'm sorry that this didn't work out. I do agree that there are layers, but also that there are more than two layers. DM me for anything.
• pxue 5y ago
  Years of experience may not be a direct indicator of how you work as an individual contributor, but it is a very good indicator of softer skills such as handling workplace conflicts and mentoring junior devs. As a senior dev it's on you to communicate and voice what you want out of the job. 6 month is the perfect time to pull aside your manager and ask/talk about your path of success. Of course, leaving isn't a bad solution, but you should also realize there are other solutions. And being a senior dev means being able to weigh the tradeoffs and figure out the best path forward. However, the author failed to mention or reflect on the alternative solutions in the post.
• martopix 5y ago
  > Despite all of these things, my heart said it was time to do something different. That's not for hippy-dippy reasons either. Whenever I reject a gut feeling in my life, my body refuses to work properly which for me usually manifests as insomnia or weight gain. I know people that live like this, sometimes for decades, sometimes never realizing they're rejecting a part of themselves. It's not somewhere you want to end up. Uhhh I've been like this in academia for a while and can't seem to make up my mind...
  • ikrenji 5y ago
    i quit after six years in a phd program... my only regret is not doing it sooner
    • mrtranscendence 5y ago
      Oh god yes. I too quit a PhD program after six years and massive student loan debt. I'd have so much more wealth right now if I'd left with a master's (1.5 years!) that it's not the slightest bit funny.
• time_to_smile 5y ago
  The big takeaway in this post is this section > I will always optimize career decisions based on a position's potential to improve my ability as a developer. I will optimize for this over title, benefits, and pay. I believed that working at Shopify would make me a better frontend developer. Having spent the early part of my career working at small startups, I once took a job at a big, well known but not FAANG company with similar expectations of improving my skills and was similarly disappointed in a major way. Shopify is (or at least was) going through a massive hiring boom. Companies experiencing this kind of rapid growth are rarely a good place to hone your skills. Funnily enough some of my coworkers from that same disappointing BigCo ended up there. If you want to enhance your skills it's better to work on smaller team, ideally in a less rapid growth environment, where all the members of the team have some serious dev experience (look for teams that have a few people that are active in OSS). Good software/problem solving simply doesn't happen in a rapid growth environment where you are rushing to meet some quarterly KPI and recruiting is working to bring in as many devs as possible as fast as possible. Software is always messy so people that only work on small teams tend to think "this code is a mess, I bet it's not like this at a real company!" only to find that most larger companies are even worse, use more legacy tools, and have byzantine systems that are perpetually feel ready to collapse, and on average have less talented developers (it is incredibly easy to hide in a larger company).
• boringg 5y ago
  After reading this, and downvote me because maybe I'm old or something, but I read this and it sounded like someone who thought very highly of themselves, has limited work experience, has limited experience in technology but expects the company to work around their needs. Naively this individual decided (rightly or wrongly) that after 5 months he couldn't possibly learn anything from working at a company like this and bounced. Point they said this: "This practice suggests that perhaps the company is scaling faster than resources safely allow." If you do any research at all about Shopify their growth over the last two years has been unreal - their whole operation has been scaling rapidly - infrastructure, people and HR. Of course some of their systems are overly stressed. What does scaling faster than resources "safely" allow even mean?
  • gumby 5y ago
    I read it as “they said they were hiring for X and I wanted to do X, but actually all the work was Y”. (Which is not incompatible with your read, except perhaps in emphasis)
  • erulabs 5y ago
    Also, what suggested they were scaling "unsafely" was that he was asked to interview folks within a few months. Generally, if you're hired, and you're working out, and your coworkers like you, why wouldn't you immediately be trusted to vet new hires? This is more or less startup scaling 101 - strange the author didn't just say "hey, mind if I skip the interviews?". That usually works for me for _years_!
    • zhengyi13 5y ago
      Two immediate thoughts: 1) Interviewing is a minefield of legal stuff that can easily blow up into he said/she said lawsuits. At a minimum (well, assuming $Company is past a certain size), you'd probably want baseline training vetted by Legal to train new interviewers to avoid those sort of issues. 2) Interviewing is a skill, or really, multiple skills. Reasonable questions, learning how to explore the space around the question, knowing when to lead the candidate and when to shut up and when to drop the question and move on. Spend some time on training the interviewers. Spend some time on internal reflections on good questions, pooling potential questions and giving guidelines on good and not-so-good answers...
• monkeynotes 5y ago
  Personally I think quitting something that is amazing in so many ways but doesn't fulfil your front end needs after only 5m is something you may come to regret. Did you ask for a change of team / change of work focus? Did you bring up your issues with a manager? If you were on my team and an attrition risk due to not working in the tech you were hired for I'd have made sure that was changed. Five months is just about enough time to find your feet in a large org's codebase, I think having exposure to the Rails side is to your benefit, and given a bit more time you could have worked to resolve the other gripes. Shopify is a huge, profitable organization, with many, many, many opportunities for developers to do their best work. I find it hard to believe there isn't something fascinating there for anyone who likes writing code. Good luck in whatever you are doing now though, sounds like you have the talent for doing whatever you wish which is a great place to be in. FWIW I do not work for Shopify.
  • boringg 5y ago
    Agree with this - first job I had one of the senior members of the organization came over and said something along the lines of it will take 6 months to be a contribute just from understanding all the intricacies of the business/code etc.
  • capableweb 5y ago
    > Personally I think quitting something that is amazing in so many ways but doesn't fulfil your front end needs after only 5m is something you may come to regret. > Did you ask for a change of team / change of work focus? Did you bring up your issues with a manager? If you were on my team and an attrition risk due to not working in the tech you were hired for I'd have made sure that was changed. I'm not sure if I misunderstand the blogpost, or if you do, but I gather the author quit because they realize they didn't like eCommerce after all. At least that's the impression I get from this passage: > This line of self-questioning mutated into, "Do I care about eCommerce?" It was a question I never had the bravery to ask myself before. I've worked almost exclusively in eCommerce of one form or another since I started working in tech. I began to wonder if it might be time to try something different. So changing team or work focus probably wouldn't help the author, as the core theme of the company wasn't attractive.
• crackinmalackin 5y ago
  I had this almost exact same experience last year. I left the company only after six months. I definitely saw my front end skills take a big hit in those six months. I think the author here definitely made the right move. No shame in quitting, if it's not a good fit move on to the next thing.
• goat_whisperer 5y ago
  Why the vomit emoji after mentioning ERB templates? It's just HTML with ruby sprinkled throughout. If that's the best solution for the job, why use React or whatever flavor of the month JS framework instead?
  • mattmcknight 5y ago
    That really stood out to me as something that suggests this is a person I would not enjoy working with at all. The dislike for HTML templates is just a sign this author has a blind spot in their understanding of their role in the world. Rather than provide value, they are more interested in moral judgements of which technology is superior. React and Virtual DOM in general is just a workaround for browser limitations. To have bought into the hype and fandom around a technology like that is quite annoying. It's why I never hire anyone that is purely "front end" or "back end". While expertise in a particular technology is useful, understanding more of the stack is making him more valuable.
• purple_ferret 5y ago
  > I received bittersweet news in late August that I did get an offer but I'd be downleveled from senior to mid. The reasoning for this wasn't my performance in the technical interviews, it wasn't based on my answers to soft questions, and it wasn't that I had a bunch of non-CS experience, it was because I didn't have enough years of experience in tech-specific jobs. Looking at the Shopify Jobs page[0], I see they pretty much only list openings for Senior level positions. I think people are missing the tactic here (which a lot of companies seem to do) of only listing experienced positions to keep people with no experience from applying, but not necessarily only hiring for Senior positions. [0]https://www.shopify.com/careers/search https://www.shopify.com/careers/search
• Dave3of5 5y ago
  Good luck on whatever you do. You shouldn't feel the need to explain yourself but if it made you feel better then that's ok too. Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  I had one job where literally the first thing I did on my first day was give an interview. I hadn’t even signed up for the 401(k) yet and I’m vetting someone (admittedly for my team). “What’s it like working here?” “So far, this interview is going pretty well…”
• Ansil849 5y ago
  > I accepted. Despite the downlevelling, despite the fact that compensation was well below market, Shopify was a big step for me. I will always optimize career decisions based on a position's potential to improve my ability as a developer. I will optimize for this over title, benefits, and pay. Why is Shopify offering well below-market compensation? Also, this makes it sound like the author is "optimizing" for an internship, not a job. In a successful job role, you don't need to optimize for one of those factors over the others, you get most/all of them.
• tschellenbach 5y ago
  This: https://www.saastr.com/why-if-you-quit-every-year-you-wont-make-any-money/ https://www.saastr.com/why-if-you-quit-every-year-you-wont-m...
• motohagiography 5y ago
  > I accepted. Despite the downlevelling, despite the fact that compensation was well below market, Shopify was a big step for me. There are lots of good reasons to leave companies fast if they aren't a fit, but this statement was almost everything I needed to know. The author started the job feeling undervalued precisely because he didn't have negotiating skills on the comp package on the way in, and then had his feelings confirmed, possibly by presenting as someone who believes they are undervalued (which is as attractive to be around as it sounds) but also, shopify's HR reps saw the poor bargaining position and offered him even less (a downleveled position) and he still took it. (Note to recruiters and HR people, if you make people feel either over or undervalued on the way in, they're going to act that way, and then you're going to be mystified wondering why your culture is broken - but in this case the author left so much on the table, I'll direct this to him.) I'd posit the author left because his professional negotiating skills aren't mature, and in their current state, they're producing poor and disadvantaged deals and relationships. I'm not going to take it so far as to say that the author has that rare martyrly quirk that they seek out disadvantaged relationships because it keeps them feeling righteous and justified - but not setting and signalling boundaries on what you will personally accept, and then blaming others for offering you what you don't want is within sight of the horizon of that anti-pattern. I learned this in a much harder way, but even putting it charitably still feels like it has a hard edge. It's not intended that way. The implied expectation was that he was "senior," and good at what he does, and independent of what he might be able to do for the company, this by itself demands some kind of consideration. Like when someone says they have a master's degree and wants an extra 30% salary for it, but the degree is in some kind of theory. I interpret that the author may have been indexed on counterfactuals about reciprocity and value going into the negotiation. It's great to mature as a developer or a hacker, but after a point, there are also diminishing marginal returns on investing in those skills, and making big expensive sacrifices for those skills seems like a substitute for taking risks for success, and this doesn't have anywhere near the yield that reading a book on negotiations or sales wouldn't return in a few hours. Sure, get Shopify on your CV, become the best <foo> developer you can, I'd even love to work for them, and though I know I too moralize my own blindspots, in this case, I'd posit this was a negotiations failure between the author and the Shopify recruiters.
• throw_shopify 5y ago
  Shopify dev here. One thing I didn't see mentioned much of this was discussed with their lead? Shopify is very open to people moving around to find challenging work. And Shopify as an org has done a great job (from my vantage point) creating a culture where people give and receive feedback. So hopefully their lead would be open to that convo. I will also say though that some of what the author says rings true. Shopify gets you excited about the product problem, and less on the tech stack (is front end). The job becomes “how do I solve X for merchants” not “where can I find a cool React problem”. Sometimes solving X just requires Ruby work. And sometimes you’re excited to help merchants do X and care less about the tech it takes to do X. The downside to this decision is there’s somewhat of a bias towards being generalists over tech stack specialists. Not completely but it’s there. I personally have found lots of growth at Shopify. It maximizes mission, career growth and work life balance really aggressively. Shopify, honestly isn’t the place to maximize comp. It is a fun place to do great work and feeling like you’re having an impact.
• newshorts 5y ago
  This may have felt very uncommon to the author, but most of the things I read seems absolutely normal. Title inflation is real at smaller companies. You maybe a “executive staff engineering fellow” at a smaller shop but at the larger companies that’s equivalent to a mid level dev. I’d be curious to hear what the manager and team members thought of this move. Overall, the writing strikes me as someone who may have put the cart before the horse. I hope it works out for the author
• brailsafe 5y ago
  Over the course of the last 2 or 4 years I've had to reflect on what actually motivates me, and what my actual level of experience is, having been in and out of short sints numerous times over 10 years. I had to accept that I am probably not a senior developer yet, in most companies, despite having done it quite a while and set mt expectations for difficulty and salary accordingly, while I grow into that. I think that's what you probably need to do too. Sure, you may have a spiffy degree or whatever, but if I was dropping frontend to go into game programming, I wouldn't take it as an affront that I'd be back to junior status in that discipline. I also had to accept that tbh frontend skill building isn't that interesting or valuable, and I don't need to tie my ego into that. Systems in general working well and serving a purpose are far more challenging and interesting, whereas React is basically a commodity speedbump that helps serve some other goal. Every well-voted comment here implies you need a bit more humility, and I agree. Maybe you do have great skills, but it would probably have been worth sitting on that mid-level frontend job for a while and prove that, because if you do get a senior title at the next company, I feel like it would be basically just a lie, and represent at most what you'd have been doing anyway. Moving up from that mid-level would be much more impactful. On the other hand, I could be missing the fact the work opportunity provided could simply be so weak as to stall growth in general. Growing react skills is a trite endeavor, but if your work is so banal to the point of absurdity, ya it's fair to bail if you just can't see how you'll advance that. If you were hoping for a semblance of problem solving, but all you're doing is literally taking photoshop documents and writing html to show them, that's a tough thing to stick out
• sockaddr 5y ago
  This blog just seems like entry-level contrarian ramblings. Hardly HN-worthy IMO
• sequoia 5y ago
  tl;dr: 'I didn't want to work with Ruby on Rails and I realized I don't care about ecommerce.'
• dieselgate 5y ago
  Am glad I read this post, it is somewhat relevant to me but also thoughtful enough. I chuckled seeing the vomit emoji after the author mentioned ERB templating. "I will always optimize career decisions based on a position's potential to improve my ability as a developer. I will optimize for this over title, benefits, and pay." is a refreshing perspective to hear although I may not fully agree with it.
  • chihuahua 5y ago
    This might be a good strategy early in your career. Once you have some good experience on your resume, you can change priorities towards other things.
• darepublic 5y ago
  As a job hopping addict I guess I can sympathize. Maybe I am also too self centered as has been suggested about the author. Having worked at faangs and also with ex Shopify people, I am not thrilled with the life of a dev at these places. Get ready to churn and waste a lot of time. Get ready for multiple rewrite projects to be up in the air. Get ready for hypocrisy as older devs defend very legacy systems that were poorly written ostensibly in the name of reuse but mostly because they want their fingerprint to remain in the code. To me alot of what goes in these companies is highly inefficient if not down right pointless. But the salaried life is addicting and you can't easily come off it.
• worker767424 5y ago
  Heh. He was the submitter. From a green account.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• endofreach 5y ago
  Totally unrelated (wink): whatever happened to the term „script-kiddie“? Nowadays i only see ReactJS senior devs with 1+ years of experience.
• angarg12 5y ago
  I don't mean to be rude, but this post sounds pretty immature to me. How come when people get rejected or down-levelled for jobs, it's always the company that's wrong? I applied to Amazon with 4 YoE + PhD in CS and got offered a mid level position. I was pissed as well but accepted anyway. Oh boy was that the right decision. The first time I pushed a change to prod and broke our service for hundreds of thousands of customers, it dawned on me that I wasn't the hotshot I thought. That humbled me and made me less arrogant. Yes, I also had to do menial and dull tasks for a while. But this allowed me to learn, improve, and build my reputation. Now I'm leading a large and complex green field project in my team and I love it. I don't think it's unreasonable to not hand over the most critical or sexy projects to newcomers before they proved they can handle them. In retrospect this was the right career move for me, and I can honestly say I am a better engineer now than I was back then.
• fabiofzero 5y ago
  Work/life balance is great at Shopify because it's a Canadian company. This is a constant around here. I'm leaving a US-based company because, among other things, people still think being a workaholic is cool in the US.