Shopify Engineering Reviews

Pros

Great WLB, interesting projects & people

Cons

It's not a 4-day work week company

Pros

- There are so many technical problems to solve that you will always be able to tackle something interesting - Shopify is mostly full of really great supportive people. You will very easily find people that will be your friends for life and while it is hard to find a good job, it is harder to find a good team. I think in Shopify, this is more common. - Shopify does have lots of room to learn and grow as a developer (unless you’re a FED)

Cons

To work at Shopify, you have to be okay with the fact that part of your paycheck will come from gun paraphernalia and far-right propaganda merchandise shops who use that money to fuel their ambitions, all while at the same time having leadership give 1-hour conference talks about how commerce and Shopify are morally good and that Shopify is good for society. Which I am sure for a lot of people is fine, and may start off fine as well, but it can also get very tiring over time as you see one thing and then leadership tells you another. Here are some of my main feelings about this company. - It is always very obvious when leadership decides to not address something that they don’t like, which they often do, and often about very important things like compensation or attrition. Usually, they will not be able to answer questions and dodge them, and then suddenly every single person in leadership suddenly has the exact same answer about how this new change that you think is negative, is actually positive. Compensation is actually the best in the industry (when it proveably is not) - Backward promotion. I suppose these are common but still a criticism. To get promotions or raise, you will have had to do the job for a year or more already. This is a good way to underpay high-performing people. - Work-life balance is not real. especially if you are a manager. Directors and senior staff will message at any time of day. They will say that balance is important and they spent all of “Mental Health Month” talking about this but then go on to push harder deadlines for Unite, an annual conference hosted by Shopify. They say the R&R days (4 day work week) should not make your work more but the deadlines stay the same. - Constantly shifting organization structure and constant release of new useless terminology. Often getting the sense that leadership uses this as an excuse to explain what work that they are doing. Sometimes their announcements of reorgs or new words to describe the work we already do, have a feeling of being made up on the spot and always end on a note of work in progress. This adds to the feeling of instability because they want us to use what they have come up with on a day-to-day basis but it could change at any moment. It also always make you feel as much f you are a pawn or resource to be moved around without regard to building community and relationships. (Which causes managers to use this as a reason to not promote or give raises) - Pretending to be open when in fact at AMAs, the hardest questions are skipped over to the extent that they have made a team build tools to filter out questions that are too hard and report employees to HR if they asked questions that leadership doesn’t like or seems too critical. The same team built tools into slack, to direct report any employee to HR which almost immediately killed all slack discussions that were in any way critical of the company, even good-faith criticism. - Leadership lacks accountability and refuses to listen to feedback. Usually, when asked for accountability, they will say something along the lines that the conversation has become unproductive and wasting company time. This will often just result in slack channels being changed to read-only, forcing the conversation into other channels. - When I joined the company, they marked themselves as a hacker culture. Everything was hackable, including the company itself. So often we had discussions about what the company could do better and how it could be better. Currently, Shopify has a culture of constantly telling its employees that if you don’t like what the company does, then you should leave. This position was used for remote working as well. They are hostile and gaslighting to employees who have dissenting opinions or criticism. - Most of the good culture that Shopify still retains is from the people they have hired in the past and good lower-level managers having great connections with their small teams. The company as a whole is seemingly doing nothing to support everyone other than half-assed mental health statements and talking about a future where they will fly the whole company to central points once a year. This is odd because in the same breath they will mention how environmentally conscious they are. - Criticisms of the company are cast as direct attacks on C-levels, who are surrounded by cult-like people who think they can do no wrong. Echo chamber at the top to the extent that it seems obvious that there is a house clearing of any dissenting directors or C-levels. - C-level execs are highly involved but are not highly informed. They will often say incorrect things, very confidently. - Leadership has a poor opinion of UX and front-end, as displayed in the past by CEO comments on Twitter and the fact that the UX role was eliminated from Shopify. It has taken years of advocacy to get front-end developers paid nearly the same amount as backends. Leadership will often go on tirades about how no one should write javascript at all, even though javascript powers a lot of what the company does now. - Work is not appreciated across teams, highly competitive and if the team did not create it, they will just create their own and try to destroy the other. - Very strong not-built-here mentality where Shopify tends to rebuild things that already have solutions. - I would feel bad for Tobi if he was not often rudely opinionated and surrounded by people who will protect him at any time. I get that he has a hard position where he is expected to run a company but still looks like (or still wants to be) highly connected to the technical aspects of dev however it is clear that he cannot. And that is completely fine. However, when he reads an article or tries something out in his spare time, he tries to push people to use things in order to feel relevant but it is clear that he has not used the technology in a sustained way. If he only brought items up as a suggestion of something he is interested in rather than something he is telling technical team that they should already be using, these would be taken a lot better, however, because of the way he approaches items like this, he wastes massive amounts of time as teams are constantly consumed with building up a case to tell him in a fully data-driven way an answer they could have just told him at the start. I mean, there has been enough coverage of Tobi tornadoes, I don’t need to re-hash. - Managers have very little feedback loop. There is no way in Shopify to evaluate a bad manager who is causing their employees to have a bad experience. It is common for ICs to talk about who is a good lead and who is not because the only hope is to avoid the bad ones. Managers are mostly evaluated by the work their team produces and their ability to explain those things in meetings. So when managers are deliberately not promoting or doing terrible things like punitive PIPs, there is no hope for those ICs except to change teams. - Hiring has no feedback loop. There are many people who participate in interviews that are very pretentious and biased but there is no way to tell how well interviewers are performing. We hire with committees so everyone needs to come to an agreement to combat bias but if the whole committee is full of bad interviewers then it is doing nothing for bias. I was trained years ago, which was reading a few documents and shadowing two interviews, and then nothing ever since. - Shopify hires with a pretty strong requirement of using TDD however in practice, I would say a small minority of the people at Shopify actually practice true TDD, which just seems hypocritical. - New hires often get paid more that tenured staff, with very reserved raises. Which is fine if you were just hired, that will only sting a few years in. - Promotions are really a popularity contest. The loudest, most visible people get promoted the most, the quiet but highly productive people rarely get recognition.

Pros

Shopify is well run for a company this size. The quality of the people is generally quite high, and obviously it's a big company so things may be different in other areas, and depends a lot on who you report to, but in general they don't tolerate BS. Much. Again, it's a big company. I personally think this owes a lot to the leadership of Tobi. He's thoughtful and contrarian, not afraid to shake things up and especially to reinvent things from first principles, which doesn't always work but sometimes it really does, and most importantly it means "because that's how it has always been done" isn't how they make important decisions. Sometimes people get frustrated by him being involved in the details of their thing. Or maybe cancelling their thing. It happens, but personally I think it makes the company better overall because one of the things that makes Shopify successful is being run by a product-oriented CEO, and especially one who is a founder and so has the political capital within the company to do big and possibly controversial things. Whether you generally like decisions that get made at Shopify or not, you'll find that they're generally made thoughtfully (at least the big ones, made by senior leadership), and you'll be able to learn a lot.

Cons

Shopify used to have a very bottom-up culture, in the 201x's. But this changed slowly with "missions" and the creation of the Core group. This isn't necessarily bad, Shopify can really ship effectively, which I liked a lot. And it works well when the PMs and leadership of your area really understands what the right direction is. But Core is very large, there are many layers of management, and sometimes they don't push back or question enough to properly get aligned with their leadership and end up just passing down orders. To put it in perspective, Shopify is probably a lot less bad at this than many big companies, and the large ones that are less top-down also often don't get much done which can be worse.

Pros

Interesting challenges Great colleagues Decent pay

Cons

Erratic leadership Low trust between employees and leadership

Pros

An interesting project, highly educated people and true professionals, great benefits and salary.

Cons

Double standards: the company always talks about how it values its employees, but at the same time, it easily fires them during staff cuts or if they had to return to Ukraine (that's how I got fired, simply because the company did not want to take risks, despite the fact that I devoted four years of my life to this company). Career growth: it is very difficult to move up the career ladder, there is a lot of competition and a constant internal struggle for promotions. If initially you did not agree on good wage conditions, then it will be very difficult to change anything and get an increase.

Pros

The work is interesting The people are really smart and good to work with

Cons

There are a lot of decisions around process and communications made by the senior leadership team which creates confusion and churn

Pros

People are nice, focus on tech

Cons

Pay is not good compare to similar companies

Pros

- team communication is high - lots of room for growth - really interesting projects - culture allows you to really see the impact you have

Cons

- more communication from departments (HR/executive) Honestly not really any cons when I worked there

Pros

- "We shouldn't let Tobi speak at earnings calls; mumbling, hard to listen to, rambling and completely incoherent" - Kaz is the world's biggest example of a kid who got bullied and then went on to bully everyone as an adult." - "Kaz is the worst human I've ever met in real life" - "Shopify is like a restaurant, appetizer is fake transparency (company culture), sprinkled with invisible openness. Entre is non-existent career growth, work 40% more for less pay, covered with illegal salary reductions and sauteed compensation wallet lies. Dessert is fired for PIP ice cream and frozen promos." - "Switching to Meta workplace over slack is the single worst move the company could have done, erasing millions of dollars of insider intel overnight and destroying company culture. Almost worse than Kaz closing all meetings yet his calendar has the most meetings in the company." - "Shopify is replacing support with thousands of BPO vendors from Philippines, India and Greece, wherever they can find the cheapest labor. The tickets I get from taskus VA's are so bad, it takes a whole team to fix their mistakes." - "why is Shopify not donating money to Turkey/Syria? They use Ukraine as a clout piece in team meetings, but it took them months to even support that cause. Leadership doesn't care, they only love virtue signalling" - "Are you quiet quitting? I'm acting my wage. Why get 40% better if there's no raises?" - "I'm quiet quitting because they didn't pay me what was owed, lying about comp raises, freezing promos and raises while still sending their leadership teams out to expensive international bursts." - "8 managers in 1 year" - Are execs trying to tank the company, or is the air that thin up there?" - The future of support is dead, run away" - "Shopify is replacing support with the cheapest alternative it can find leaving zero opportunity for actual support staff with increased workload, decreased pay and compensation. Wake up and get moving, this ship is like the Titanic and there's no rafts left for you" - "get rid of Kaz" - "stop censoring us" - I have zero trust in Shopify" - "Kaz is a true succubus draining control of the company away from Tobi drip by drip" - "Kaz is rude to people for no reason. Chaos monkey is how he operates daily, letting his fortune go to his head because he's not a pleasant person" - "Kaz is a goober without a leadership bone in his body. He makes decisions purely based on clout and doesn't care about anyone else. His personal values do not match Shopify of old and he's slowly but effectively dismantling company culture" - "I just fell down the rabbit hole of Kaz and his wife's twitter...wow. They really are hateful people" - I hear a lot of people on blind about how kaz is a horrible exec. drink every time he over uses the F-word to appear cool in company meetings. He started playing beethoven thinking he discovered it"

Cons

- "Being a woman at Shopify is terrible" - 123 comments from women at Shopify lamenting how terrible the work culture is filled with toxic males and "lack of opportunity, casual misogyny, smugness from incompetent dudes, bullying and lack of consequences" - "As someone who has raised issues with HR, with evidence, with support from coworkers, I can tell you they don't do anything about problems that don't affect the company" - The amount of pre-levelled up men I have to work with is maddening, and now with promos being frozen, any kind of rectifying the issue is a no-go" - "in support, many women need to change their names to a male or gender neutral name to prevent gendered merchant abuse...because I couldn't take being asked if I was single, asked my age, called a C word, having guys threaten to harm themselves, starve themselves if payments weren't taken off hold. A risk specialist once laughed at me when I suggested to use a female name saying 'kick them off shopify payments and sign it with Amy? Yea Right" - "being an employee at Shopify is terrible. It's literally the worst place I've ever worked as a woman. Gave my notice last week, such a weight lifted." - "Shopify used to be quick to promote people, especially at lower levels. We have a backlog of hundreds of people with frozen promos for the last 18 months." - "Shopify career page says: 'Increase your compensation as your positive impact on Shopify's mission grows' but this hasn't been true for years for anyone that didn't get a comp adjustment and its not true now for high performers who were promised a promo or raise." - "It wouldn't be so bad if they just came out and said 'we're cutting costs to please investors so we're freezing comp' but the lying and gaslighting is just so frustrating." - "can't wait to hear what cringe buzzword they vomit out to explain why people were promised promos won't actually be getting a promo" - "Shopify denied equal and fair compensation increases for all deserving staff and then turned around and gave that money to Mr. Beast." " Shopify gave me a forced PIP just to deny compensation raises as a cost-cutting measure."

Pros

Positive and supportive company culture and an opportunity for growth

Cons

High expectations due to the standards sets for the company it always pushes the employees to be overworked in order to meet up with the demands