18 ms·

Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his

Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers. My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".

ferguess_k 1y ago
Actually the investment banking industry seems to be doing this for ages. And if people think about it, it's actually not too different from Leetcoding.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
BoGoToTo 1y ago
I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already taken."
- JohnFen 1y ago
  That's genuinely astonishing in its degree of ignorance.
  - flappyeagle 1y ago
    Why? It’s the same thing DHH says. He’s never going to have a better idea than rails and basecamp. Tobi is the same with Shopify
    - remich 1y ago
      There's a difference between having the humility to admit that you might not be able to hit another home run, and between claiming that "all the good ideas are taken." At best, the latter is an admission of a lack of a desire to even try anymore, at worst it shows a stunning lack of curiosity and creativity.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      To assert that "all the good ideas are taken" is ridiculous on its face. How can anyone possibly know that? How can anyone even know that the number of possible good ideas is finite? It's a thing that has been said by various people throughout history and it has always been a ludicrous assertion before. Why does he think it's different now? If what he meant was "I'm out of good ideas", that's different, of course.
- sulam 1y ago
  That sounds too dumb to be true. As in, is there some missing context that this quote was forklifted from?
  - BoGoToTo 1y ago
    Nope, it was just a QA town hall at the old Ottawa office. I think everyone was pretty confused by the remark.
ysavir 1y ago
> My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal hiring process with? A game of LoL?
- mjburgess 1y ago
  Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend, eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very accomplished artists, and the like. So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence. I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.
  - glitchc 1y ago
    Wait, you expect a concert pianist to be a good software developer... on average? Most of the time? Not at all?
    - DrillShopper 1y ago
      They can't possibly be worse than half of my coworkers
    - mjburgess 1y ago
      I expect a concert pianist who's applying for a software developer position to be worthy of an initial consideration. I know a software developer who could well be a concert pianist, for example. Ie., that pool of people who overlap, in that overlap, are probably extraordinarily talented.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      Yes! Well specifically someone who is a concert pianist and then who also set out to be a software developer. The ability to get very good at a difficult thing is highly correlated to being able to get very good at another really difficult thing. Case in point I have a friend who is a top 32 magic player in NA. She recently, not even a year ago recently, made it her goal to become a chess grandmaster and she's already 2000 ELO. You could argue that maybe some skills transfer but it's pretty shaky reasoning.
ed 1y ago
Counterpoint: externally, at least, Shopify seems to be a well run organization and that has to come from somewhere. (Parter for about 8 years.)
- pera 1y ago
  Not from my point of view: Last year I paid for a product from a shop that was using Shopify, you would think that given that this was a one time transaction, once the payment has been processed they wouldn't keep storing your PII forever but guess what? A couple of months ago I was going to buy a product from a totally unrelated shop also using Shopify and as soon as I typed my email address they sent me an OTP to my phone to autocomplete all my personal details. So paying for a product equals to creating an account with Shopify. This is incredibly shady and I wonder if it's even legal here in Europe.
  - blahaj 1y ago
    You could do a GDPR request for the data they have on you. I would be curious what they save. Keep us updated if you want to.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - bcrosby95 1y ago
    I think it's shady to use cross-shop information unless the customer explicitly opts into it. But shopify isn't just a payment processing service. It's a full blown ecommerce suite. Do you think there's an online store out there that gets rid of all PII once an order is paid for, or even after its fulfilled? We've had people try to return/replace things (or even credit card disputes) years after they bought it. How exactly would that work if we got rid of all information about their order shortly after they made it?
  - OJFord 1y ago
    You may have thought you were saving your details with that shop (or not realised at all of course) but yes this is a recentish feature I think, at least I haven't noticed it for long, branded 'Shop pay' iirc. As for legality in the EU/UK, it's just like everything else, on some level they technically asked for consent and you gave it, but yes, dark patterns abound.
spacemadness 1y ago
That is one of the stupidest things I’ve read all day, and that’s saying something. Why are so many tech CEOs this childish?
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  Dinner party economics.
- rchaud 1y ago
  They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years before even making a single penny in profit. At some point that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to shake.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a different environment.
skrebbel 1y ago
Another counterpoint, he's been a pretty pro-nuance voice for a long time, very un-Elon like. Eg I still frequently quote some of this thread to people: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html My favorite part: > I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not. > For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company. Obviously, as I'm replying to someone with first-hand Shopify experience, which I don't have, take all this as you wish. I only know the Twitter Tobi. (and I think his "AI first" memo is ridiculous, to the point that I struggle to imagine that the same person wrote this twitter thread)
- hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
  2019 public-facing Tobi is probably the least insane version. He has gotten worse and more egocentric (and more explicitly right-wing) since then. Early (pre IPO) Shopify had a pretty toxic internal culture with a lot of drinking and sexual harassment. I was lucky to be there around the post-IPO, pre-pandemic era when there was a bit of structure and the techbros were getting reigned in a bit. Once the pandemic hit I think he just lost his mind.
  - remich 1y ago
    Feels like the "loses mind during COVID" is a common thread in the VC class. Wonder why.
    - daveguy 1y ago
      Because so many of them are spoiled brats that can't deal with even the thought of putting others before themselves? Just guessing. Effective Altruism is a hell of a drug.
    - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
      I think it messed up a lot of us, but it's more visible in VC and founder types.
oldpersonintx 1y ago
[dead]
kunzhi 1y ago
I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement. I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around. What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.
- rchaud 1y ago
  The PC term for this is "founder mode".
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I've heard it called "Seagull Management." A manager swoops in unannounced, shits all over and disrupts everything, and then swoops out while the rank and file have to deal with the mess.
    - ohgr 1y ago
      Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has generated more ROI than his initiatives would have. Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss every fucking time. His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a wanker.
    - mathgladiator 1y ago
      And that is the rank and file's job. Chaos is important for breaking organizational bones.
      - psunavy03 1y ago
        And there's the bootlicking take of the day.
tschellenbach 1y ago
When I watch Messi play I think his technique is sloppy to be honest.
dkkergoog 1y ago
[dead]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
guywithahat 1y ago
Well having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ, and so you could make the argument that to be good (like professionally good) at video games means you're exceptionally intelligent. I certainly wouldn't list it in the list as you've described though.
- cadamsdotcom 1y ago
  That statement, “ having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ”, is fascinating. Care to share the evidence you’d use to back it up?
  - guywithahat 1y ago
    Yeah, the first (and most famous) studies were done by Ian Deary in the 80's and 90's, where he would have subjects perform simple tasks (such as checking how quickly you can cover a light with your finger), and he found a correlation with reaction time, which grew stronger as the task became more complex. There are more recent, higher quality studies, but Deary did a lot of the early work and is who I'm most familiar with since his work was mentioned in the bell curve. Should be enough info for you to google it
    - grotted 1y ago
      The Bell Curve has been widely debunked. A quick glance at the Wikipedia article gets you countless citations and counter arguments. For the lazy, here’s a fun video summarizing them: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?feature=shared https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?feature=shared
      - guywithahat 1y ago
        The bell curve is not debunked, it basically follows the NYLS, which is a multi decade, highly respected study. The book is one of the most respected surveys of the field. There are people who claim the whole field of intelligence research is “debunked”, but we give them the same level of respect as people who claim the moon landing has been “debunked”.
dismalaf 1y ago
Dunno, Shopify is the second largest Canadian corporation, in a country ruled by a bunch of monopolies enforced by the government. Only RBC, a 161 year old bank, is worth more. Tobi's doing something right.
85392_school 1y ago
The "skip the line" page: https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-48ce-aaca-10e1e18294e4 https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-...
- jnatz 1y ago
  the irony in this page being poorly formatted on mobile with unintentional horizontal scroll
TZubiri 1y ago
The skip the line concept sounds interesting. I'm interviewing and some companies telling me they schedule an interview in 2 weeks feels like a light rejection / recognition that the skill has abundant offer. It reminds me of the time I wanted to go out with a girl and she scheduled a date with me in 2 weeks, not a good outlook. I was happy to have a date so I just counted the days. When this happened with another girl I was less invested in, I told her to forget it, and she literally removed the guy she was seeing that week to go out with me. I think that when the queue is too long, the solution is to cut the line or find another one (or participate in a meat market as a commodity amongst 100 for a low probablity of advancing for a low salary)
TZubiri 1y ago
It does say Top 100, and implies competitive gaming. You made it sounds stupid. But being Top 100 in something with a huge global competitive base is not of useless or easy. If you are offered a kid who spends 16 hrs per day competing and studying to be the best at something, and they can channel that energy at your company (with probably a shitty salary) wouldn't you take it?
Kalabasa 1y ago
Shopify has an esports team called Shopify Rebellion
medhir 1y ago
on the topic of hiring - the “life story” interview left a particularly bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t click with the recruiter because she kept hounding me about why I didn’t finish college. Felt totally put on the spot in the most discouraging way, the whole thing seemed like a formal way to discriminate against those that don’t fit their in-group. definitely felt a bit cult-ish overall.

ferguess_k 1y ago

Actually the investment banking industry seems to be doing this for ages. And if people think about it, it's actually not too different from Leetcoding.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

BoGoToTo 1y ago

I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already taken."

JohnFen 1y ago
That's genuinely astonishing in its degree of ignorance.
- flappyeagle 1y ago
  Why? It’s the same thing DHH says. He’s never going to have a better idea than rails and basecamp. Tobi is the same with Shopify
  - remich 1y ago
    There's a difference between having the humility to admit that you might not be able to hit another home run, and between claiming that "all the good ideas are taken." At best, the latter is an admission of a lack of a desire to even try anymore, at worst it shows a stunning lack of curiosity and creativity.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    To assert that "all the good ideas are taken" is ridiculous on its face. How can anyone possibly know that? How can anyone even know that the number of possible good ideas is finite? It's a thing that has been said by various people throughout history and it has always been a ludicrous assertion before. Why does he think it's different now? If what he meant was "I'm out of good ideas", that's different, of course.
sulam 1y ago
That sounds too dumb to be true. As in, is there some missing context that this quote was forklifted from?
- BoGoToTo 1y ago
  Nope, it was just a QA town hall at the old Ottawa office. I think everyone was pretty confused by the remark.

ysavir 1y ago

> My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal hiring process with? A game of LoL?

mjburgess 1y ago
Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend, eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very accomplished artists, and the like. So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence. I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.
- glitchc 1y ago
  Wait, you expect a concert pianist to be a good software developer... on average? Most of the time? Not at all?
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    They can't possibly be worse than half of my coworkers
  - mjburgess 1y ago
    I expect a concert pianist who's applying for a software developer position to be worthy of an initial consideration. I know a software developer who could well be a concert pianist, for example. Ie., that pool of people who overlap, in that overlap, are probably extraordinarily talented.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Yes! Well specifically someone who is a concert pianist and then who also set out to be a software developer. The ability to get very good at a difficult thing is highly correlated to being able to get very good at another really difficult thing. Case in point I have a friend who is a top 32 magic player in NA. She recently, not even a year ago recently, made it her goal to become a chess grandmaster and she's already 2000 ELO. You could argue that maybe some skills transfer but it's pretty shaky reasoning.

ed 1y ago

Counterpoint: externally, at least, Shopify seems to be a well run organization and that has to come from somewhere. (Parter for about 8 years.)

pera 1y ago
Not from my point of view: Last year I paid for a product from a shop that was using Shopify, you would think that given that this was a one time transaction, once the payment has been processed they wouldn't keep storing your PII forever but guess what? A couple of months ago I was going to buy a product from a totally unrelated shop also using Shopify and as soon as I typed my email address they sent me an OTP to my phone to autocomplete all my personal details. So paying for a product equals to creating an account with Shopify. This is incredibly shady and I wonder if it's even legal here in Europe.
- blahaj 1y ago
  You could do a GDPR request for the data they have on you. I would be curious what they save. Keep us updated if you want to.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bcrosby95 1y ago
  I think it's shady to use cross-shop information unless the customer explicitly opts into it. But shopify isn't just a payment processing service. It's a full blown ecommerce suite. Do you think there's an online store out there that gets rid of all PII once an order is paid for, or even after its fulfilled? We've had people try to return/replace things (or even credit card disputes) years after they bought it. How exactly would that work if we got rid of all information about their order shortly after they made it?
- OJFord 1y ago
  You may have thought you were saving your details with that shop (or not realised at all of course) but yes this is a recentish feature I think, at least I haven't noticed it for long, branded 'Shop pay' iirc. As for legality in the EU/UK, it's just like everything else, on some level they technically asked for consent and you gave it, but yes, dark patterns abound.

spacemadness 1y ago

That is one of the stupidest things I’ve read all day, and that’s saying something. Why are so many tech CEOs this childish?

MarcelOlsz 1y ago
Dinner party economics.
rchaud 1y ago
They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years before even making a single penny in profit. At some point that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to shake.
colechristensen 1y ago
Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a different environment.

skrebbel 1y ago

Another counterpoint, he's been a pretty pro-nuance voice for a long time, very un-Elon like. Eg I still frequently quote some of this thread to people: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html My favorite part: > I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not. > For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company. Obviously, as I'm replying to someone with first-hand Shopify experience, which I don't have, take all this as you wish. I only know the Twitter Tobi. (and I think his "AI first" memo is ridiculous, to the point that I struggle to imagine that the same person wrote this twitter thread)

hbsbsbsndk 1y ago
2019 public-facing Tobi is probably the least insane version. He has gotten worse and more egocentric (and more explicitly right-wing) since then. Early (pre IPO) Shopify had a pretty toxic internal culture with a lot of drinking and sexual harassment. I was lucky to be there around the post-IPO, pre-pandemic era when there was a bit of structure and the techbros were getting reigned in a bit. Once the pandemic hit I think he just lost his mind.
- remich 1y ago
  Feels like the "loses mind during COVID" is a common thread in the VC class. Wonder why.
  - daveguy 1y ago
    Because so many of them are spoiled brats that can't deal with even the thought of putting others before themselves? Just guessing. Effective Altruism is a hell of a drug.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    I think it messed up a lot of us, but it's more visible in VC and founder types.

oldpersonintx 1y ago

[dead]

kunzhi 1y ago

I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement. I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around. What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.

rchaud 1y ago
The PC term for this is "founder mode".
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I've heard it called "Seagull Management." A manager swoops in unannounced, shits all over and disrupts everything, and then swoops out while the rank and file have to deal with the mess.
  - ohgr 1y ago
    Got one of them. I ignore him most of the time. This has generated more ROI than his initiatives would have. Evidenced by the teams who do them generating a loss every fucking time. His nickname, which he wasn't worked out, is the first half of a sexual lubricant brand because he's such a wanker.
  - mathgladiator 1y ago
    And that is the rank and file's job. Chaos is important for breaking organizational bones.
    - psunavy03 1y ago
      And there's the bootlicking take of the day.

tschellenbach 1y ago

When I watch Messi play I think his technique is sloppy to be honest.

dkkergoog 1y ago

[dead]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

guywithahat 1y ago

Well having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ, and so you could make the argument that to be good (like professionally good) at video games means you're exceptionally intelligent. I certainly wouldn't list it in the list as you've described though.

cadamsdotcom 1y ago
That statement, “ having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ”, is fascinating. Care to share the evidence you’d use to back it up?
- guywithahat 1y ago
  Yeah, the first (and most famous) studies were done by Ian Deary in the 80's and 90's, where he would have subjects perform simple tasks (such as checking how quickly you can cover a light with your finger), and he found a correlation with reaction time, which grew stronger as the task became more complex. There are more recent, higher quality studies, but Deary did a lot of the early work and is who I'm most familiar with since his work was mentioned in the bell curve. Should be enough info for you to google it
  - grotted 1y ago
    The Bell Curve has been widely debunked. A quick glance at the Wikipedia article gets you countless citations and counter arguments. For the lazy, here’s a fun video summarizing them: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?feature=shared https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?feature=shared
    - guywithahat 1y ago
      The bell curve is not debunked, it basically follows the NYLS, which is a multi decade, highly respected study. The book is one of the most respected surveys of the field. There are people who claim the whole field of intelligence research is “debunked”, but we give them the same level of respect as people who claim the moon landing has been “debunked”.

dismalaf 1y ago

Dunno, Shopify is the second largest Canadian corporation, in a country ruled by a bunch of monopolies enforced by the government. Only RBC, a 161 year old bank, is worth more. Tobi's doing something right.

85392_school 1y ago

The "skip the line" page: https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-48ce-aaca-10e1e18294e4 https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-...

jnatz 1y ago
the irony in this page being poorly formatted on mobile with unintentional horizontal scroll

TZubiri 1y ago

The skip the line concept sounds interesting. I'm interviewing and some companies telling me they schedule an interview in 2 weeks feels like a light rejection / recognition that the skill has abundant offer. It reminds me of the time I wanted to go out with a girl and she scheduled a date with me in 2 weeks, not a good outlook. I was happy to have a date so I just counted the days. When this happened with another girl I was less invested in, I told her to forget it, and she literally removed the guy she was seeing that week to go out with me. I think that when the queue is too long, the solution is to cut the line or find another one (or participate in a meat market as a commodity amongst 100 for a low probablity of advancing for a low salary)

TZubiri 1y ago

It does say Top 100, and implies competitive gaming. You made it sounds stupid. But being Top 100 in something with a huge global competitive base is not of useless or easy. If you are offered a kid who spends 16 hrs per day competing and studying to be the best at something, and they can channel that energy at your company (with probably a shitty salary) wouldn't you take it?

Kalabasa 1y ago

Shopify has an esports team called Shopify Rebellion

medhir 1y ago

on the topic of hiring - the “life story” interview left a particularly bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t click with the recruiter because she kept hounding me about why I didn’t finish college. Felt totally put on the spot in the most discouraging way, the whole thing seemed like a formal way to discriminate against those that don’t fit their in-group. definitely felt a bit cult-ish overall.