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

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).