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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 l

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...
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Is interviewing a skill for tech questions given how most companies do it? As everywhere I have worked (and virtually all of my technical interviews), the interviewer gets a packet, runs the candidate through the packet, writes down the answers, and then moves on to the next one. I have heard "I have no idea, so I will let you assume that" or some variation of that so many times whenever I ask a question outside the clarifying ones available in the packet. Tech interviews just seem like exam proctors.
    - pc86 5y ago
      This is true, except we're usually not given a packet. :)
    - lrem 5y ago
      I've been an interviewer in Google for quite a few years now. I know my favourite question inside-out, implemented it in a couple languages, know the theory behind the advanced follow-ups for theorists, know the realities of running this down to the wire level for applied folk... I always answer "sure, let's assume that" when the interviewee suggests a clarification. Just makes for a smoother interview flow. If what they suggested is out of bounds of reason (say, round trip time to the moon in 10ms), I'll just note that in the report.
      - MattGaiser 5y ago
        Impressive. I have far more often encountered an interviewer also seeing the question for the first time.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    > Interviewing is a minefield of legal stuff that can easily blow up into he said/she said lawsuits. As someone with experience in the EU but mostly Canada, organizations with 150 employees and 150k employees, can someone put this into perspective for me please? It's this mostly an American thing? I've never had any issues like this or even any exposure to things like that happening around me.
- ajford 5y ago
  Especially if your employer is hiring for a similar role or for someone who will be working closely with the team/department you're in. It makes sense to ensure a good interpersonal/intrateam fit. A "domain expert" is far more useful in a hiring team than another HR rep or someone from an entirely different scope.
MattGaiser 5y ago
The key thing for me is that he seemed to specialize as a frontend but ended up as a full stack with a slight backend bias. If you want to be a frontend, ending up full stack with a bias for backend is not optimal.
- eberkund 5y ago
  Most companies I have worked at have many more backend devs than they do frontend devs. There may be an issue with the number of jobs and number of applicants not being equal for both roles.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Well yes, but I would not be happy as a frontend dev scammed into working backend due to recruiters not finding enough other people.
    - astura 5y ago
      ERB templates ARE frontend,he just lacks the knowledge and experience to know that. Shows why he wasn't hired as a senior engineer.
- norman784 5y ago
  I want to disagree with you, he seemed to specialize in JS, in his post he mentioned that almost 50% of the time he worked in erb that's the rails template to produce html, or the "new fancy" term that JS developers call server side rendering. So frontend is focused on whatever produces something visible to the user, most of the time html, others can be jsx or whatever the frontend template is being used. I think this shows why he was not hired as senior, he's lack of experience/knowledge in the area.
capableweb 5y ago
> Point they said this: "This practice suggests that perhaps the company is scaling faster than resources safely allow." I haven't read through the full post myself yet, but that point is specifically around recruiting and hiring, where the following two statements supports what they are saying: > The recruiters seemed frazzled and disorganized. Shopify scaled their engineering department pretty aggressively in 2021 and I wonder if the recruiting department was understaffed to meet this need. It wasn't uncommon to ask a question and to wait two weeks for a response. > Engineers can become interviewers inside of their first six months at the company. In my experience, people who only have 6 months of experience of a company doesn't really (yet) have the culture down 100% or have the "insides" of the company internalized, especially if joining a company during the time it's increasing headcount a lot, really fast. Seems a bit weird to ask those folks with small amount of inside experience to interview others to join it. > 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. It seems, from my understanding, that the author left Shopify because they learned they don't really care about eCommerce in reality, in addition to not learning new frontend stuff.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >In my experience, people who only have 6 months of experience of a company doesn't really (yet) have the culture down 100% or have the "insides" of the company internalized, especially if joining a company during the time it's increasing headcount a lot, really fast. Seems a bit weird to ask those folks with small amount of inside experience to interview others to join it. Why? If it's a structured technical interview then the goal isn't cultural vetting aside from the a-hole factor. There's separate behavioral interviews for that at most companies. Given some training a senior engineer should be able to run technical interviews pretty quickly.
forgingahead 5y ago
I read your comment before the article, went in ready to shake my fist at the clouds and exclaim "kids these days!", but....it's not? He was hired into a role ostensibly to do front-end, which he wanted to do, but he was coding mainly in Ruby instead. Now, I love Ruby, and I got excited seeing his code "time spent" metric that Ruby was at the top, but I can understand why he would want to focus on his area of comfort. I also have mistakenly hired and dealt with many whiny, entitled, head-in-the-clouds/reddit-roleplay programmers who certainly need a good kick in the pants and a right sacking, but if I had hired someone to do X and instead deployed them to do Y, I can't be surprised if they want to leave to actually do X somewhere else. He probably could have definitely "learned something" as you say, but he himself admits he doesn't care about e-commerce, so in this case nothing was really lost. Yes, "safely scaling" is a silly comment to make, but otherwise it comes across as fairly positive towards Shopify.
- treis 5y ago
  Editing erb files isn't exactly doing Ruby and pretty firmly within the realm of a front end dev. The author sounds like they want to specifically be a React dev.
- boringg 5y ago
  I'd agree that maybe the fit wasn't right (from both sides) - I would argue that there is a lack of experience that is coming through his post on how to resolve and read the situation. To me it reads as someone who has limited experience in working for large companies and expects that company to work around their wants or alternatively they don't yet know how to advocate for themselves in a company. 5 months at a large organization ... you are barely done on-boarding let alone diving into a real project.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, while I'm not a particular fan of the mindset of moving on the moment something happens that annoys you, in this case it really does make sense. If you show up at a job and the work really isn't what you expected for some reason or another, it's not unreasonable to just cut your losses and move on. You don't have appreciable investment at that point and there's not a lot of incentive to change the environment to make it a better fit.
Glyptodon 5y ago
The other side of it is that if someone is really attached to being an expert at front end and feels skill atrophying then maybe it really isn't a fit. I can relate to that because I've moved from full stack to more or less back end because keeping up with front end while only touching it every few months is just not very enjoyable. That said, if that's the central issue definitely a lot of the points raised are overblown.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I don't think the author's skills were atrophying, but they may have been stuck at a certain level. I have Thoughts about that. On the one side: I get it. As a developer you want to - and the industry expect you to - keep learning, always be on the increase, etc. But on the other hand, when you think about it, once the main architecture is put down and the main issues are solved, most software engineering jobs are just repeating the same trick over and over again, copy / paste / edit some names, done. The last part is where you want to end up at as a company, basically; build features end to end in a reasonable time. But it's not what most developers want, they want new challenges, they want to stay in the problem solving domain. I think as a developer you need to accept that a big chunk of your job, and what your employer wants you to do, is kinda boring. It's not solving new problems, it's extending the functionality of an application using existing solutions. And if you're hired as a front-end developer or whatever, the hiring company may not want you for what you can become, but what you already are. And honestly, just trying to find decent developers that don't need to learn your stack is already difficult enough.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > But on the other hand, when you think about it, once the main architecture is put down and the main issues are solved, most software engineering jobs are just repeating the same trick over and over again, copy / paste / edit some names, done. I don't know. I think it gets less and less true as you get away from web development. The fundamentals stay the same but how they intersect with what you are doing can vary widely. If you want to, you can encounter domain knowledge intersecting with the problems you are trying to solve, different architectures for complexe systems coming with their own set of constraints, different project structures, different ways to deal with end users requirements. I think they are plenty of opportunities to do boring things and plenty to do interesting things.
PrancingPony 5y ago
Exactly... They could have just been patient and stuck it out a bit longer. Companies who go through such quick growth don't have time to update their methods as quickly.
time_to_smile 5y ago
I don't think this an issue of ego so much as wildly overestimating the difference in quality in code and practices between big name companies and smaller or lesser well known companies. I find this is a misunderstanding that many people (myself included at one point) have, especially if they come from a non-traditional path and have only worked as smaller companies. In the post he mentions that he took a lower pay and level than he expected in order to increase his skills. He was willing to learn, but made the naive mistake in thinking that big names are where the big skills are. One thing I always found interesting is if you list off all of the developers you respect the most, and then look where they work it's a pretty good mix of FAANG and small companies you've never heard of.
hinkley 5y ago
The thing is you never really know. I was pretty far into my career before I realized for instance that the concept of a 'mutual breakup' can apply to a work relationship as well. I describe one former employer as doing me the favor of laying me off. I was miserable and we both knew it. We had achieved a compromise in coding philosophy that left both of us frustrated and I should have left a year earlier. There are places you will never fit in, no matter how much you learn or push them to 'improve'. I would say "I no longer treat a job as a 'project'" but I'm actively slipping into that right now because I finally found a wedge I could shove into our Gordion Knot. This will probably be my mic drop because it's definitely time for me to move on.
- tombert 5y ago
  My first job after I moved away from my parents when I was 21 was at a convention company, ostensibly as a "Jr Java Developer". This turned out to be flatly untrue; I could count on one hand the number of lines of Java code I actually touched at that company, and when there was code to be written, it was in ColdFusion of all languages. Most of my time was spent being stuck designing nametags, and I cannot put into words the level of hatred I had for that job, but I was afraid to quit because I had just gotten an apartment and didn't have the direct parental support that I had previously. They ended up firing me after my manager ended up overhearing me calling them a "moron who didn't know anything" [1], and I was sad at first, but the next morning I was happy, maybe even elated, because it was the first weekday that I didn't have to back to that awful job. They had done me a favor firing me, I'm honestly grateful they did. I would never have quit because of fear of being homeless, but I managed to bounce back fairly quick into a better (and luckily higher-paying job. TL;DR, I completely agree that a firing can be a "mutual breakup". [1] To be fair to me a little, while my choice of words in hindsight was bad, I honestly did not know she heard me until after I said it. I felt like an asshole immediately after, but I also didn't apologize because it wasn't like I didn't mean it.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > I also didn't apologize because it wasn't like I didn't mean it. Oof. What does "meaning it" have to do with an apology being warranted? If I feel bad enough about calling someone a moron within earshot that I feel like an asshole, I'm going to apologize. This only wouldn't apply if I felt such animosity that I wanted them to feel bad. I can't imagine not apologizing in the situation you described.
xivzgrev 5y ago
I can see that, but he also said he was told this was a front end position, and it seemed like majority of his work was not. What I didn’t see him touch on was how much did he talk with his manager about this? If the role isn’t what he signed up for, that’s definitely worth a discussion for both sides to try to better align the fit.
- norman784 5y ago
  I would argue that erb is frontend, but is server side rendered, isn't what he expected, he seems to expected to work purely in javascript, this seems that he things that frontend is only javascript/react, that demonstrates why he was not hired as senior, he lacks of knowledge/experience.
Ansil849 5y ago
The post does come off as a touch arrogant, but I believe the core issue was that the role was misadvertised: > I was hired as a frontend developer, which turned out to be misleading. [...] In order to triage this, I worked on a number of frontend projects in my spare time at a pace that was admittedly draining. The author thought they were going to be doing frontend, but a significant portion of their work was not. So they quit. That seems extremely reasonable.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  He was still doing frontend. He didn't think of it that way because modern view perverted the meaning beyond all recognition
  - pc86 5y ago
    Exactly. FTA: > Most of the "frontend work" I saw was via Rails ERB templates [puke emoji]. Okay, so ridiculous stack/language bias aside, he's doing frontend, but it's not the frontend he wants. He wants to be writing JavaScript. Which is fine, but he's implying Shopify messed up when it seems he just didn't have a clear understanding of what the role entailed and what the tech was he'd be working with.
    - Ansil849 5y ago
      > he's implying Shopify messed up when it seems he just didn't have a clear understanding of what the role entailed and what the tech was he'd be working with. It seems extremely improbable to me that at no point in the hiring process, starting from the job advertisement on down, was this ever stated.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        This can happen (speaking from personal experience). For a big/growing company you're interviewing for a position that's open in several teams which all can have different stacks. Which team you end up with depends on some internal priority.
draw_down 5y ago
pnathan 5y ago
Unfortunately, this is also my take. I would also note that ERB hacking is still front end work. I also note that startups don't really have the kind of fixed & linear work paths that more mature companies have. I'm kinda bummed for the guy, it sounds like he really needs an industry mentor to talk things over with to help manage reality expectations.
gregjor 5y ago
That was my take too. With 40+ years experience in software development and system administration, I don't know what to make of someone with obviously limited experience expecting to get a "senior" title or to pick and choose what they will or will not work on -- based on the programming language involved. That the author tracked time spent in each language, worried about the meaningless job title, but then decided that maybe they aren't interested in e-commerce (Shopify's core business) shows a junior-level attitude. When I studied photography I wanted to use new lenses, cameras, flashes, light meters, film. My teacher, a professional photographer, told me one day that amateur photographers obsess about equipment. Professionals think about lighting and composition. That stuck with me. Junior programmers obsess over languages and tools. Senior programmers think about architecture, data structures, team cohesion, requirements, business value. I'm sympathetic to younger programmers who enter the job market faced with the stupid algorithm-oriented interviews, which are a kind of hazing ritual performed by people with such poor people skills and confidence in their own judgment that they fall back on pointless whiteboard tests that give the interview process the veneer of rational objectivity. Instead that kind of process just insures that everyone who gets hired has the same personality (or lack of). A lesson to take away from this experience: The interview and hiring process may look like a serious attempt to find the one perfect candidate for an amazing job. Actually larger companies tend to hire lots of people who look promising, ignoring their work experience and desired career path, and just sift out the people who don't fit or can't produce. That's not new either. I started my career as a junior, hired along with more than 50 other juniors, assigned two mentors and allowed to sink or swim. Three months later only 15 of that group were left. Later in my career I mostly got hired through word-of-mouth and referrals, sometimes I was the only candidate for a job that wasn't even advertised, and usually I didn't go through HR at all. If you're still going through a funnel to get a job you are almost by definition not senior. Note to the author: Almost every place I have worked in four decades, with a couple of horrible exceptions, let me run errands, take care of my kids, take as much PTO I needed, asked me to take time off if I was sick, and generally showed a lot of flexibility with what's called work-life balance. Only badly-managed groups and companies don't do that, and it's not a new thing. Given the ever-increasing demand for skilled programmers companies are forced to bend over backwards to attract and keep good people, so a manager who wants to keep their team will accommodate.
suyash 5y ago
it's the classic tale of junior eng thinking of themselves as senior :P
Osiris 5y ago
I welcome the challenge to be forced into learning new things that are outside of my expertise. I'm a backend dev and a few years ago the company pivoted and put almost all the engineering team on building a new React app. I'd never done React. It took me some time to learn it, and I'm still bad at making things look pretty. The skill will be valuable when I look for another job. Now I can apply for Full Stack positions and not just the backend positions.
- colmvp 5y ago
  While I enjoy learning stuff that's out of my expertise, I do worry about whether or not being a generalist is more of a hindrance as both the backend and frontend have a LOT of ways one could expand their mastery. There is a bit of zero-sum in this as the hours I spent outside of work learning Go/Rust/Postgres for more understanding of the backend could've been spent on diving deeper into frontend things like performance optimization and web accessibility.
deeviant 5y ago
I would have to agree. It even starts with "I have answered this many times since announcing my departure. The reactions have ranged from shock to immediate understanding." Ah, wait, so in the author's head there is some huge crowd of people (other than maybe family?) who feel the most burning question in the universe is why the Author decided to leave? I have been at my company for 8 years. From a startup through a successful acquisition. I know every executive and senior engineer on a personal basis and am friends with most. If I left, I might get a pizza party and card wishing me well. There would be no scuttlebutt on why I'm leaving.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's quite fair. When I left my job of 3.5 years I did field a lot of questions about why I was leaving and where I was going, but I wouldn't have described that as people "feel[ing] the most burning question in the universe is why [I] decided to leave". (Also, when I came back two months later I faced a lot of questions as to what the hell happened to bring me back so fast. But that's a different story!)
astura 5y ago
I legitimately laughed out loud at this: >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. This guy worked there for FIVE FRIGGIN MONTHS! OMG! If your coding skills are degrading so quickly maybe you aren't actually a senior engineer? For reference, during the economic crash of 2008-2009 I was out of (software) work for six months. I didn't write a line of code during that time. I was a Jr engineer at the time. My coding skills were absolutely fine. I wonder what sort of interview questions one can ask to filter out people like this? My current company has strict minimum experience requirements for hired senior engineers (not promoted ones). I don't think that's unusual...
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > If your coding skills are degrading so quickly maybe you aren't actually a senior engineer? I dunno, people are different. I tend to forget what I had for lunch that day, let alone skills that I haven't touched in six months. I just tried to play piano last night for the first time in a year and I was just a mess of hands not knowing what the hell to do.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  > I wonder what sort of interview questions one can ask to filter out people like this? I specifically ask what people's technology preferences are and what they don't want to work with, then follow up with why. If they into these technologies for hype based reasons- or seem overly negative or dismissive of other technologies without solid reasoning, I gather that they are the equivalent of a fashion victim or a superfan of some pop group. These people can be extremely annoying to have around, as they try to steer every discussion into one about why their preferred technology is not being used to solve every problem. This guy is so far gone he doesn't consider HTML templates to be front end development. A complete zombie for his chosen religion.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  He's probably trying to outperform what you were capable of in 2008 and also remain in a position to advise on the latest tooling. He seems anxious but I think anxious people still make valuable contributions alongside those of us who are calmer.
jrochkind1 5y ago
In fact you aren't getting downvoted -- this is a very popular opinion in this thread and you are currently the top comment with most of the discussion being on this point. I think it was just someone sharing their experience. Which I find super useful, and people rarely do. While it can be nit-picked, I didn't think they said anything off the wall. Pointing out there might be some consequences for work experience of how quickly they have scaled is not off the wall -- you maybe even agree you just don't think it's worth critisizing or even mentioning, but what is worth mentioning is something reasonable people can disagree on. The downside of lots of criticism of someone who shares their experience like this... is it discourages it. People do it so infrequently that I'd rather support people who do and encourage it, by making sure any feedback is constructive and supportive and charitable. Instead, I suspect at this point the OP is thinking "Well, THAT was a mistake, next time I won't share my experience."
- joshcsimmons 5y ago
  Thanks for putting this in perspective - a lot of very dramatic takes in the comments. I am imperfect and finding my way, just like we all are. Glad you found it useful!
ryanmercer 5y ago
>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. This was also my takeaway. I think, in general, younger people feel more entitled and have no idea how things really work. They want you to cater to them, rarely want to put in the effort, and want big money for it and think they are an expert that knows more than anyone that's been doing a given job for any worthwhile amount of time. Just a quick glance at /r/antiwork and /r/overemployed are a good cursory look at this sort of mentality. Similarly go look at YouTube videos of 'day in the life' type content for data analysts/data scientists, you get a lot of "I wake up, check emails, go ride my bike for an hour, look at emails, cook a fancy breakfast, look at emails, go CrossFit/shower/cook lunch/take my kid to the wherever for 2 hours, I then hop on a meeting for an hour, then I run a python script, then I cook dinner for my partner and eat it, play some video games, and go to bed. I enjoy my 6-figure income".
Bombthecat 5y ago
I feel like that shopify is in something like a bubble.. Everyone! Can open a shop and be profitable! Now everyone aby his dog is opening a shopify.. It's like the thinking that everyone can be an influencer.. At least Youtube and Instagram are basically free.. So, i feel like this bubble will burst in a few years when they all realise, that they don't even make 20 dollars in profits..
joshcsimmons 5y ago
I'm confused - did you read the article? If so I think you misunderstood my reason for leaving. Yes I was unhappy with the FE/BE split of work but ultimately I left because I don't think I want to work in eCommerce anymore. And yes, of course I think highly of myself, I'm a confident person, I've accomplished a lot and I intend to accomplish a lot more.
- boringg 5y ago
  I did - and there are some pretty constructive comments on here (and some less so). I noticed this was your first post on HN so I hope the attention hasn't been to overwhelming and you are able to pull some constructive value from it (I hope you like candor). Lions share of comments are that your attitude that comes through in your post is more junior than senior for a megacap tech company, 5 months is very short at a large company to get situated and don't underestimate working with good people. Also the role interviewed isn't always the role delivered - especially at fast growing organizations but, if you are capable of navigating a large company there are typically roles more suitable. It takes experience and confidence to probably navigate large companies effectively. At the end of the day if the fit isn't the right fit then make a move. I wish you the best of luck on your journey - given your confidence and strive to learn it sounds like you will land somewhere quickly and hopefully more fitted.

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...
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Is interviewing a skill for tech questions given how most companies do it? As everywhere I have worked (and virtually all of my technical interviews), the interviewer gets a packet, runs the candidate through the packet, writes down the answers, and then moves on to the next one. I have heard "I have no idea, so I will let you assume that" or some variation of that so many times whenever I ask a question outside the clarifying ones available in the packet. Tech interviews just seem like exam proctors.
  - pc86 5y ago
    This is true, except we're usually not given a packet. :)
  - lrem 5y ago
    I've been an interviewer in Google for quite a few years now. I know my favourite question inside-out, implemented it in a couple languages, know the theory behind the advanced follow-ups for theorists, know the realities of running this down to the wire level for applied folk... I always answer "sure, let's assume that" when the interviewee suggests a clarification. Just makes for a smoother interview flow. If what they suggested is out of bounds of reason (say, round trip time to the moon in 10ms), I'll just note that in the report.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      Impressive. I have far more often encountered an interviewer also seeing the question for the first time.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  > Interviewing is a minefield of legal stuff that can easily blow up into he said/she said lawsuits. As someone with experience in the EU but mostly Canada, organizations with 150 employees and 150k employees, can someone put this into perspective for me please? It's this mostly an American thing? I've never had any issues like this or even any exposure to things like that happening around me.
ajford 5y ago
Especially if your employer is hiring for a similar role or for someone who will be working closely with the team/department you're in. It makes sense to ensure a good interpersonal/intrateam fit. A "domain expert" is far more useful in a hiring team than another HR rep or someone from an entirely different scope.

MattGaiser 5y ago

The key thing for me is that he seemed to specialize as a frontend but ended up as a full stack with a slight backend bias. If you want to be a frontend, ending up full stack with a bias for backend is not optimal.

eberkund 5y ago
Most companies I have worked at have many more backend devs than they do frontend devs. There may be an issue with the number of jobs and number of applicants not being equal for both roles.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Well yes, but I would not be happy as a frontend dev scammed into working backend due to recruiters not finding enough other people.
  - astura 5y ago
    ERB templates ARE frontend,he just lacks the knowledge and experience to know that. Shows why he wasn't hired as a senior engineer.
norman784 5y ago
I want to disagree with you, he seemed to specialize in JS, in his post he mentioned that almost 50% of the time he worked in erb that's the rails template to produce html, or the "new fancy" term that JS developers call server side rendering. So frontend is focused on whatever produces something visible to the user, most of the time html, others can be jsx or whatever the frontend template is being used. I think this shows why he was not hired as senior, he's lack of experience/knowledge in the area.

capableweb 5y ago

> Point they said this: "This practice suggests that perhaps the company is scaling faster than resources safely allow." I haven't read through the full post myself yet, but that point is specifically around recruiting and hiring, where the following two statements supports what they are saying: > The recruiters seemed frazzled and disorganized. Shopify scaled their engineering department pretty aggressively in 2021 and I wonder if the recruiting department was understaffed to meet this need. It wasn't uncommon to ask a question and to wait two weeks for a response. > Engineers can become interviewers inside of their first six months at the company. In my experience, people who only have 6 months of experience of a company doesn't really (yet) have the culture down 100% or have the "insides" of the company internalized, especially if joining a company during the time it's increasing headcount a lot, really fast. Seems a bit weird to ask those folks with small amount of inside experience to interview others to join it. > 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. It seems, from my understanding, that the author left Shopify because they learned they don't really care about eCommerce in reality, in addition to not learning new frontend stuff.

marcinzm 5y ago
>In my experience, people who only have 6 months of experience of a company doesn't really (yet) have the culture down 100% or have the "insides" of the company internalized, especially if joining a company during the time it's increasing headcount a lot, really fast. Seems a bit weird to ask those folks with small amount of inside experience to interview others to join it. Why? If it's a structured technical interview then the goal isn't cultural vetting aside from the a-hole factor. There's separate behavioral interviews for that at most companies. Given some training a senior engineer should be able to run technical interviews pretty quickly.

forgingahead 5y ago

I read your comment before the article, went in ready to shake my fist at the clouds and exclaim "kids these days!", but....it's not? He was hired into a role ostensibly to do front-end, which he wanted to do, but he was coding mainly in Ruby instead. Now, I love Ruby, and I got excited seeing his code "time spent" metric that Ruby was at the top, but I can understand why he would want to focus on his area of comfort. I also have mistakenly hired and dealt with many whiny, entitled, head-in-the-clouds/reddit-roleplay programmers who certainly need a good kick in the pants and a right sacking, but if I had hired someone to do X and instead deployed them to do Y, I can't be surprised if they want to leave to actually do X somewhere else. He probably could have definitely "learned something" as you say, but he himself admits he doesn't care about e-commerce, so in this case nothing was really lost. Yes, "safely scaling" is a silly comment to make, but otherwise it comes across as fairly positive towards Shopify.

treis 5y ago
Editing erb files isn't exactly doing Ruby and pretty firmly within the realm of a front end dev. The author sounds like they want to specifically be a React dev.
boringg 5y ago
I'd agree that maybe the fit wasn't right (from both sides) - I would argue that there is a lack of experience that is coming through his post on how to resolve and read the situation. To me it reads as someone who has limited experience in working for large companies and expects that company to work around their wants or alternatively they don't yet know how to advocate for themselves in a company. 5 months at a large organization ... you are barely done on-boarding let alone diving into a real project.
ghaff 5y ago
Yeah, while I'm not a particular fan of the mindset of moving on the moment something happens that annoys you, in this case it really does make sense. If you show up at a job and the work really isn't what you expected for some reason or another, it's not unreasonable to just cut your losses and move on. You don't have appreciable investment at that point and there's not a lot of incentive to change the environment to make it a better fit.

Glyptodon 5y ago

The other side of it is that if someone is really attached to being an expert at front end and feels skill atrophying then maybe it really isn't a fit. I can relate to that because I've moved from full stack to more or less back end because keeping up with front end while only touching it every few months is just not very enjoyable. That said, if that's the central issue definitely a lot of the points raised are overblown.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't think the author's skills were atrophying, but they may have been stuck at a certain level. I have Thoughts about that. On the one side: I get it. As a developer you want to - and the industry expect you to - keep learning, always be on the increase, etc. But on the other hand, when you think about it, once the main architecture is put down and the main issues are solved, most software engineering jobs are just repeating the same trick over and over again, copy / paste / edit some names, done. The last part is where you want to end up at as a company, basically; build features end to end in a reasonable time. But it's not what most developers want, they want new challenges, they want to stay in the problem solving domain. I think as a developer you need to accept that a big chunk of your job, and what your employer wants you to do, is kinda boring. It's not solving new problems, it's extending the functionality of an application using existing solutions. And if you're hired as a front-end developer or whatever, the hiring company may not want you for what you can become, but what you already are. And honestly, just trying to find decent developers that don't need to learn your stack is already difficult enough.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > But on the other hand, when you think about it, once the main architecture is put down and the main issues are solved, most software engineering jobs are just repeating the same trick over and over again, copy / paste / edit some names, done. I don't know. I think it gets less and less true as you get away from web development. The fundamentals stay the same but how they intersect with what you are doing can vary widely. If you want to, you can encounter domain knowledge intersecting with the problems you are trying to solve, different architectures for complexe systems coming with their own set of constraints, different project structures, different ways to deal with end users requirements. I think they are plenty of opportunities to do boring things and plenty to do interesting things.

PrancingPony 5y ago

Exactly... They could have just been patient and stuck it out a bit longer. Companies who go through such quick growth don't have time to update their methods as quickly.

time_to_smile 5y ago

I don't think this an issue of ego so much as wildly overestimating the difference in quality in code and practices between big name companies and smaller or lesser well known companies. I find this is a misunderstanding that many people (myself included at one point) have, especially if they come from a non-traditional path and have only worked as smaller companies. In the post he mentions that he took a lower pay and level than he expected in order to increase his skills. He was willing to learn, but made the naive mistake in thinking that big names are where the big skills are. One thing I always found interesting is if you list off all of the developers you respect the most, and then look where they work it's a pretty good mix of FAANG and small companies you've never heard of.

hinkley 5y ago

The thing is you never really know. I was pretty far into my career before I realized for instance that the concept of a 'mutual breakup' can apply to a work relationship as well. I describe one former employer as doing me the favor of laying me off. I was miserable and we both knew it. We had achieved a compromise in coding philosophy that left both of us frustrated and I should have left a year earlier. There are places you will never fit in, no matter how much you learn or push them to 'improve'. I would say "I no longer treat a job as a 'project'" but I'm actively slipping into that right now because I finally found a wedge I could shove into our Gordion Knot. This will probably be my mic drop because it's definitely time for me to move on.

tombert 5y ago
My first job after I moved away from my parents when I was 21 was at a convention company, ostensibly as a "Jr Java Developer". This turned out to be flatly untrue; I could count on one hand the number of lines of Java code I actually touched at that company, and when there was code to be written, it was in ColdFusion of all languages. Most of my time was spent being stuck designing nametags, and I cannot put into words the level of hatred I had for that job, but I was afraid to quit because I had just gotten an apartment and didn't have the direct parental support that I had previously. They ended up firing me after my manager ended up overhearing me calling them a "moron who didn't know anything" [1], and I was sad at first, but the next morning I was happy, maybe even elated, because it was the first weekday that I didn't have to back to that awful job. They had done me a favor firing me, I'm honestly grateful they did. I would never have quit because of fear of being homeless, but I managed to bounce back fairly quick into a better (and luckily higher-paying job. TL;DR, I completely agree that a firing can be a "mutual breakup". [1] To be fair to me a little, while my choice of words in hindsight was bad, I honestly did not know she heard me until after I said it. I felt like an asshole immediately after, but I also didn't apologize because it wasn't like I didn't mean it.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > I also didn't apologize because it wasn't like I didn't mean it. Oof. What does "meaning it" have to do with an apology being warranted? If I feel bad enough about calling someone a moron within earshot that I feel like an asshole, I'm going to apologize. This only wouldn't apply if I felt such animosity that I wanted them to feel bad. I can't imagine not apologizing in the situation you described.

xivzgrev 5y ago

I can see that, but he also said he was told this was a front end position, and it seemed like majority of his work was not. What I didn’t see him touch on was how much did he talk with his manager about this? If the role isn’t what he signed up for, that’s definitely worth a discussion for both sides to try to better align the fit.

norman784 5y ago
I would argue that erb is frontend, but is server side rendered, isn't what he expected, he seems to expected to work purely in javascript, this seems that he things that frontend is only javascript/react, that demonstrates why he was not hired as senior, he lacks of knowledge/experience.

Ansil849 5y ago

The post does come off as a touch arrogant, but I believe the core issue was that the role was misadvertised: > I was hired as a frontend developer, which turned out to be misleading. [...] In order to triage this, I worked on a number of frontend projects in my spare time at a pace that was admittedly draining. The author thought they were going to be doing frontend, but a significant portion of their work was not. So they quit. That seems extremely reasonable.

dmitriid 5y ago
He was still doing frontend. He didn't think of it that way because modern view perverted the meaning beyond all recognition
- pc86 5y ago
  Exactly. FTA: > Most of the "frontend work" I saw was via Rails ERB templates [puke emoji]. Okay, so ridiculous stack/language bias aside, he's doing frontend, but it's not the frontend he wants. He wants to be writing JavaScript. Which is fine, but he's implying Shopify messed up when it seems he just didn't have a clear understanding of what the role entailed and what the tech was he'd be working with.
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > he's implying Shopify messed up when it seems he just didn't have a clear understanding of what the role entailed and what the tech was he'd be working with. It seems extremely improbable to me that at no point in the hiring process, starting from the job advertisement on down, was this ever stated.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      This can happen (speaking from personal experience). For a big/growing company you're interviewing for a position that's open in several teams which all can have different stacks. Which team you end up with depends on some internal priority.

draw_down 5y ago

pnathan 5y ago

Unfortunately, this is also my take. I would also note that ERB hacking is still front end work. I also note that startups don't really have the kind of fixed & linear work paths that more mature companies have. I'm kinda bummed for the guy, it sounds like he really needs an industry mentor to talk things over with to help manage reality expectations.

gregjor 5y ago

That was my take too. With 40+ years experience in software development and system administration, I don't know what to make of someone with obviously limited experience expecting to get a "senior" title or to pick and choose what they will or will not work on -- based on the programming language involved. That the author tracked time spent in each language, worried about the meaningless job title, but then decided that maybe they aren't interested in e-commerce (Shopify's core business) shows a junior-level attitude. When I studied photography I wanted to use new lenses, cameras, flashes, light meters, film. My teacher, a professional photographer, told me one day that amateur photographers obsess about equipment. Professionals think about lighting and composition. That stuck with me. Junior programmers obsess over languages and tools. Senior programmers think about architecture, data structures, team cohesion, requirements, business value. I'm sympathetic to younger programmers who enter the job market faced with the stupid algorithm-oriented interviews, which are a kind of hazing ritual performed by people with such poor people skills and confidence in their own judgment that they fall back on pointless whiteboard tests that give the interview process the veneer of rational objectivity. Instead that kind of process just insures that everyone who gets hired has the same personality (or lack of). A lesson to take away from this experience: The interview and hiring process may look like a serious attempt to find the one perfect candidate for an amazing job. Actually larger companies tend to hire lots of people who look promising, ignoring their work experience and desired career path, and just sift out the people who don't fit or can't produce. That's not new either. I started my career as a junior, hired along with more than 50 other juniors, assigned two mentors and allowed to sink or swim. Three months later only 15 of that group were left. Later in my career I mostly got hired through word-of-mouth and referrals, sometimes I was the only candidate for a job that wasn't even advertised, and usually I didn't go through HR at all. If you're still going through a funnel to get a job you are almost by definition not senior. Note to the author: Almost every place I have worked in four decades, with a couple of horrible exceptions, let me run errands, take care of my kids, take as much PTO I needed, asked me to take time off if I was sick, and generally showed a lot of flexibility with what's called work-life balance. Only badly-managed groups and companies don't do that, and it's not a new thing. Given the ever-increasing demand for skilled programmers companies are forced to bend over backwards to attract and keep good people, so a manager who wants to keep their team will accommodate.

suyash 5y ago

it's the classic tale of junior eng thinking of themselves as senior :P

Osiris 5y ago

I welcome the challenge to be forced into learning new things that are outside of my expertise. I'm a backend dev and a few years ago the company pivoted and put almost all the engineering team on building a new React app. I'd never done React. It took me some time to learn it, and I'm still bad at making things look pretty. The skill will be valuable when I look for another job. Now I can apply for Full Stack positions and not just the backend positions.

colmvp 5y ago
While I enjoy learning stuff that's out of my expertise, I do worry about whether or not being a generalist is more of a hindrance as both the backend and frontend have a LOT of ways one could expand their mastery. There is a bit of zero-sum in this as the hours I spent outside of work learning Go/Rust/Postgres for more understanding of the backend could've been spent on diving deeper into frontend things like performance optimization and web accessibility.

deeviant 5y ago

I would have to agree. It even starts with "I have answered this many times since announcing my departure. The reactions have ranged from shock to immediate understanding." Ah, wait, so in the author's head there is some huge crowd of people (other than maybe family?) who feel the most burning question in the universe is why the Author decided to leave? I have been at my company for 8 years. From a startup through a successful acquisition. I know every executive and senior engineer on a personal basis and am friends with most. If I left, I might get a pizza party and card wishing me well. There would be no scuttlebutt on why I'm leaving.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
I'm not sure that's quite fair. When I left my job of 3.5 years I did field a lot of questions about why I was leaving and where I was going, but I wouldn't have described that as people "feel[ing] the most burning question in the universe is why [I] decided to leave". (Also, when I came back two months later I faced a lot of questions as to what the hell happened to bring me back so fast. But that's a different story!)

astura 5y ago

I legitimately laughed out loud at this: >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. This guy worked there for FIVE FRIGGIN MONTHS! OMG! If your coding skills are degrading so quickly maybe you aren't actually a senior engineer? For reference, during the economic crash of 2008-2009 I was out of (software) work for six months. I didn't write a line of code during that time. I was a Jr engineer at the time. My coding skills were absolutely fine. I wonder what sort of interview questions one can ask to filter out people like this? My current company has strict minimum experience requirements for hired senior engineers (not promoted ones). I don't think that's unusual...

mrtranscendence 5y ago
> If your coding skills are degrading so quickly maybe you aren't actually a senior engineer? I dunno, people are different. I tend to forget what I had for lunch that day, let alone skills that I haven't touched in six months. I just tried to play piano last night for the first time in a year and I was just a mess of hands not knowing what the hell to do.
mattmcknight 5y ago
> I wonder what sort of interview questions one can ask to filter out people like this? I specifically ask what people's technology preferences are and what they don't want to work with, then follow up with why. If they into these technologies for hype based reasons- or seem overly negative or dismissive of other technologies without solid reasoning, I gather that they are the equivalent of a fashion victim or a superfan of some pop group. These people can be extremely annoying to have around, as they try to steer every discussion into one about why their preferred technology is not being used to solve every problem. This guy is so far gone he doesn't consider HTML templates to be front end development. A complete zombie for his chosen religion.
1123581321 5y ago
He's probably trying to outperform what you were capable of in 2008 and also remain in a position to advise on the latest tooling. He seems anxious but I think anxious people still make valuable contributions alongside those of us who are calmer.

jrochkind1 5y ago

In fact you aren't getting downvoted -- this is a very popular opinion in this thread and you are currently the top comment with most of the discussion being on this point. I think it was just someone sharing their experience. Which I find super useful, and people rarely do. While it can be nit-picked, I didn't think they said anything off the wall. Pointing out there might be some consequences for work experience of how quickly they have scaled is not off the wall -- you maybe even agree you just don't think it's worth critisizing or even mentioning, but what is worth mentioning is something reasonable people can disagree on. The downside of lots of criticism of someone who shares their experience like this... is it discourages it. People do it so infrequently that I'd rather support people who do and encourage it, by making sure any feedback is constructive and supportive and charitable. Instead, I suspect at this point the OP is thinking "Well, THAT was a mistake, next time I won't share my experience."

joshcsimmons 5y ago
Thanks for putting this in perspective - a lot of very dramatic takes in the comments. I am imperfect and finding my way, just like we all are. Glad you found it useful!

ryanmercer 5y ago

>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. This was also my takeaway. I think, in general, younger people feel more entitled and have no idea how things really work. They want you to cater to them, rarely want to put in the effort, and want big money for it and think they are an expert that knows more than anyone that's been doing a given job for any worthwhile amount of time. Just a quick glance at /r/antiwork and /r/overemployed are a good cursory look at this sort of mentality. Similarly go look at YouTube videos of 'day in the life' type content for data analysts/data scientists, you get a lot of "I wake up, check emails, go ride my bike for an hour, look at emails, cook a fancy breakfast, look at emails, go CrossFit/shower/cook lunch/take my kid to the wherever for 2 hours, I then hop on a meeting for an hour, then I run a python script, then I cook dinner for my partner and eat it, play some video games, and go to bed. I enjoy my 6-figure income".

Bombthecat 5y ago

I feel like that shopify is in something like a bubble.. Everyone! Can open a shop and be profitable! Now everyone aby his dog is opening a shopify.. It's like the thinking that everyone can be an influencer.. At least Youtube and Instagram are basically free.. So, i feel like this bubble will burst in a few years when they all realise, that they don't even make 20 dollars in profits..

joshcsimmons 5y ago

I'm confused - did you read the article? If so I think you misunderstood my reason for leaving. Yes I was unhappy with the FE/BE split of work but ultimately I left because I don't think I want to work in eCommerce anymore. And yes, of course I think highly of myself, I'm a confident person, I've accomplished a lot and I intend to accomplish a lot more.

boringg 5y ago
I did - and there are some pretty constructive comments on here (and some less so). I noticed this was your first post on HN so I hope the attention hasn't been to overwhelming and you are able to pull some constructive value from it (I hope you like candor). Lions share of comments are that your attitude that comes through in your post is more junior than senior for a megacap tech company, 5 months is very short at a large company to get situated and don't underestimate working with good people. Also the role interviewed isn't always the role delivered - especially at fast growing organizations but, if you are capable of navigating a large company there are typically roles more suitable. It takes experience and confidence to probably navigate large companies effectively. At the end of the day if the fit isn't the right fit then make a move. I wish you the best of luck on your journey - given your confidence and strive to learn it sounds like you will land somewhere quickly and hopefully more fitted.