Shopify Reviews

Cons

Layoffs, no transparency, long hours

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.

Cons

- Work there 4 years and you'll be in the top 10% of the company who have been there the longest. The (for legal reasons) "possible" reason? At 5 years they dangle in front of you a 5 week paid sabbatical. Expect to not be there for long, sometimes only months. - "Compensation changes are coming!"™ - C-level exec's have very short sighted goals that change at least once daily, and everything is an emergency. Communication of these goals is extremely poor which leads middle managers guessing what C-level's want, always leading to "disappointing" results. - Cult levels of toxic positivity throughout the company. - If they say something won't happen, it will. - Expect Emergency HR all hand meetings over unused slack emoji's or the use of emoji's incorrectly, a wonderful use of everyone's time. - The CEO is in favour of a 996 style working environment. - Rolling silent layoffs

Cons

Since the layoffs the company is becomign one of grind culture. We pride ourselves so much as building a 100yr company but now we are churning trough employees and making them work for 3 or 4 of their colleagues that were let go early in the year. Like any big company this varies per team. The grind is real if you work under our COO.

Cons

- Change at an unreasonable rate. It isn’t fast pivots, things can change hugely on a weekly, daily, or in some cases hourly basis - Publicly promoting and highlighting professional growth resources and opportunities when most resources are developed by someone in the role who is creating the resource to build their own skills. Training provided is purely focused on infodump courses which are often irrelevant by the time you finish them. (Sometimes they are updated while you’re halfway through) - Compensation doesn’t come close to matching even starting support roles for other organizations. - Leadership has been shifting from coaching based and habit building to data driven performance management with too many metrics to ever find a balance. - AI: no matter what your role is, it’s consistently made clear that if possible, your role would be done by GPT. - Leadership will treat you like an adult only when you are being told to do something better, but will make massive adjustments to your role and then try and gaslight you by saying that was always the plan.

Cons

The experience of onboarding was quick and support advisors are expected to understand Shopify's entire platform and need to act fast to address merchant inquiries when the majority of them require reaching out to other teams for support. Expectations are unreasonable, managing 3 chats simultaneously. Big emphasis on making this job a part of your culture and "lifestyle" and to be loyal to them even outside of work hours.

Cons

Leadership can push hard for features and not prioritizing building for the long term while putting dev health in jeopardy (overworking on deadlines) but i guess that’s kinda normal. What do you expect different from saas company ?

Cons

The culture varies greatly from team to team and in my experience, the culture and how work gets done in the business that the company advertised, trained, and on-boarded people into was non-existent, and questioning the disconnect was not received well.

Cons

Leadership is disorganized and chaotic. They just scream “thrive on change”, and then constantly change directions without ever letting new features breathe. There used to be room to voice concerns, but they shut it all down now so all you hear is the exec team who are completely out of touch. The logistics team was so poorly run I can’t put words to it.

Cons

It is increasingly difficult to move around in the company.