I know the reality is more complicated, but it's always jarring to read a "company X had a great! quarter, is firing 20% of employees" headline. Very dystopian.
It seems like these two facts should at least go out in different press releases on different days.
For Shopify, does anyone know whether the 20% figure includes the people leaving with the sale of SFN to Flexport?
Edit: just heard in the earnings call that the 20% headcount reduction does _not_ include the logistics teams going to Flexport.
The headline is to pitch possible future investors that Shopify will prioritize investor returns over anything else (as ordained by the Prophets of capitalism)
If Shopify can deliver its software with less people, that’s better for society.
Put it this way - would you like to be paid to mow a lawn using scissors? I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.
"Bullshit jobs" [1] are a suboptimal and implicit mean to deliver on UBI without superficially changing the rules of capitalism. For exhibit 2, I'll bring in the US military and its economic impact on the midwest.
The US military is not capitalism. That’s socialism - a job and industry fully dependent on the government and thus is a politically created career.
Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless. If that is happening it would certainly be because a government regulator required someone to sit there twiddling thumbs.
> Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless
And yet if you spend any time in any large corporation, you'll find countless examples of these, including in the tech industry. Don't you have any friend working for Google/Meta/${big tech co}?
Bullshit jobs can and definitely exist with capitalism: any successful and large business is filled with them.
They may exist for a while but when push comes to shove, they will be eliminated. The government is the one with the real problem - there are bureaucrats who gladly do nothing all day every day, or even actively harm industry, and they can never be fired and exist as barnacles.
I don't think we should be interested in the "asymptotic theoretical limit" of capitalism which is never reached. Let's discuss "capitalism in practice", not "capitalism in theory". If things self-correct in a time frame longer than your own lifespan, do you think it's an ideal scenario? I personally don't.
I don't see the government forcing Google to pay thousands of highly qualified workers to fill in BS jobs. This is a natural consequence of being a very successful business: complacency, empire building, etc all decorellated from economic incentives.
People spend decades with BS jobs in a very capitalist society.
Note that I've never argued that a socialist alternative is any better or that the government isn't filled with BS jobs either.
I just observe that the problem manifests itself regardless.
> no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless
The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical and convince people to pay a lot of money for them, a capitalist will gladly pay for everything from digging to shipping of those rocks.
From a common sense perspective that activity is useless because it's purely wasting resources with no useful effect.
From a capitalist perspective the activity is not useless as it brings profit.
Do more with less and less until you do everything with nothing....
The answer to your question is it depends, and is one of the big things that has people worried about AI and automation rapidly improving over time. If things like wealth redistribution don't occur in a highly automated society you end up with big problems really quick.
You are falling into the trap of the Luddites. As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them. Otherwise why not pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, forever?
straw man analogy. yes, if your end goal is something crazy and unthinkable like functional society with less crime and full of happy, mentally healthy non stressed people. only then keeping people employed even if in some cases it is not the most ruthlessly financially effective thing to do can be desirable
Not saying downsizing does not make sense, but its a stretch to say that its a service to our society to downsize one's company.
> As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them
This more sounds like a trap mindset to me to be honest. Its associating some sort of morality to what is just regular part of running a business. Companies do what's best for the company and its investors first and foremost.
> Are you suggesting that all corporations actions are based on morality?
I believe the suggestion is that they certainly should be based in some moral system. Corporations are a convenient fiction we use to shield the actual humans from the effects of the actions they collectively take.
You are falling into the meta-trap of misunderstanding the Luddites.
The Luddites weren't idiots, nor they were against progress. They revolted because the way the new technology was applied was destroying their specialization, and in many cases, destroying their lives.
The promise of "reallocating skilled workers to new areas" is bullshit at the individual level. What's being reallocated is the new generation, the kids that grow to specialize in the new area instead of the old one. The specialists from the old area aren't being transferred along with rank and pay. They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age, their living costs, their families and other dependents. Even the kids of those "reallocated" old-timers aren't going to partake fully in the newly opened fields of work - they'll be weighed down by the fallout of their families suddenly dropping a level or two on the living standards ladder.
The Luddites rebelled because their lives were being destroyed. And the people who did the destruction? They didn't give two damns about what society will get out of it. They did it only because they saw a way to cut costs down and increase their own profits. You don't get to criticize Luddites for selfishness when the other side was just as selfish, if not more.
For hundreds of thousands of years, pre-historic man became very skilled at cutting rocks in order to make stone age tools. Generations upon generations of early humans learned, worked on, and passed down to their children the way to perfectly smash rocks against each other in order to cut them into pointy shapes. In this way they made arrow heads, knives, axes, and so on. It's hard to believe, but this primitive technology was revolutionary.
When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless - it had been superseded by new technology.
I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around. If one person can make 1000 shoes a day while a cobbler can only make 5, this is great for society.
This is why we live in skyscrapers rather than huts. This is why I don't pay people to cut my grass with scissors.
> For hundreds of thousands of years, pre-historic man became very skilled at cutting rocks in order to make stone age tools....When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless
Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.
Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.
This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.
> I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around.
You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.
You are honestly arguing that if I create a better widget factory, I need to pay everyone else who owns the means of producing widgets in inferior ways some of my money?
Directly? Maybe not. But no man is an island, and no one's factory is a continent either. Your widget factory wasn't created by you ex nihilo, it's built on the labor and skills of people in your community, it is possible for it to exist and be profitable thanks to the larger society being what it is and generating wealth it does. It's in your interest to care that the society supporting you thrives, and if your factory is threatening to damage it, then even if you're 100% selfish, you owe it to yourself and your children to help mitigate it somehow.
No this article was about layoffs. The employee-employer relationship is very different the one between competing companies. If you have created a better widget factory and need 90% less staff, I do think you have some responsibility to those employees that are no longer needed.
The changes were over hundreds if not thousands of years. Everyone had time to adapt. Here the people are just discarded.
I'm not saying we should keep inefficient work. The society hopefuly adapts and creates a safety net for upcoming changes. I'm pissimist, so I think more pain is coming and no way are we going to be allowed to have a repeat of 1917 in Russia. Just more rejects, outcasts and general misery.
This is actually a great description of a fascinating topic to ponder further.
Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.
Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.
But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.
A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.
One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.
I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.
>They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age
the alternative to this is gerontocracy and stagnation. We actually have a real world example of this, Japan. Seniority as a leading principle and the inability to fire in the name of social stability sounds great on a 10 year time horizon and appears empathetic, on a 50 year time horizon you are going to be poor compared to an economy that accepts (but ideally cushions) the fallout that comes with economic churn. In 1990 Japan's economy was 50% as large as the American economy. Today it's 19%.
Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.
> Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.
We really should aim for both. That the society as a whole is better off when it receives the benefits of creative destruction, it also has a moral obligation to make sure the "destruction" part is only shifting labor and expertise allocation - destroying ephemeral constructs like companies and brands, not actual lives.
It is a moral issue first and foremost, but we can't be burying our heads in the sand here and pretending we didn't know - the issue carries with it a real threat of those whose lives get destroyed rising up to tear down the civilization that crushed it. It's in everyone's self-interest to be on the side of the Luddites.
> I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.
Right, but that's not the actual dichotomy. First, if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
Second, realistically the dichotomy, in the short to medium term, is will these people be employed in a skilled job, or will they be unemployed? You might say, that's not Shopify's problem. But let's not pretend unemployed people is "better for society".
> this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy
Are you assuming they'd be put onto the existing projects (which may slow down delivery, yes) rather than doing new projects in parallel (which will not and will in fact let them deliver more because there are more projects)?
you're simply doubling down on the fallacy. doing more projects does not mean you're delivering more. code is not value. there needs to be clear demand for what is being produced and management needs to have effective leadership to make sure the right people are doing the right things. all of which require effort. in lieu of that, it's better to lay people off from the company's perspective. if and when they understand the scope of the problem and the demand is there they will hire more people. that's more or less how to economy works.
You are assuming that there is an infinite number of people that can be added to Shopify’s payroll that will increase the product’s usefulness and increase revenue enough to justify their hiring.
The company leadership doesn’t believe that. There is a line where adding more people will not justify enough revenue increase, and that’s up to the company leaders to decide.
It’s worse for the people laid off, but ultimately wouldn’t they want to do something useful? In a new job they will be wanted. At Shopify they are not wanted.
You're not taking into account that "deliver more" isn't an infinite type of thing that can happen. There is a threshold with market/product fit where "more" doesn't mean more revenue and benefit to shareholders.
I think this is something all companies struggle with: at some point you may achieve product/market maturity but the people that could determine this are fundamentally in conflict with ever communicating this because they or their peers would be out of work at that employer. In my opinion, this is when internal politics start to become more prevalent because its human nature to protect your well being/source of money.
To put it another way, you believe that a welfare maximizing equilibrium can not only be achieved in principle, but is routinely achieved in practice with minimal friction?
This is difficult to believe. I think everyone sees signs all around them of foolish decisions by firm principals that hamper consumer and worker welfare even in the short term, to say nothing of the effect of various kinds of hysteresis on the long term development path of economies (e.g. detaching people from the labor market in a manner that undermines their health, currency of their skills, etc.)
Companies aren't limited to one software product. They often are, but they don't have to be.
How many software products has Google released over the years, which they're able to do so because they have a massive number of employees? More employees will allow for more products.
Whether it would be prudent or profitable to tackle more products is another story, but we're already talking about hypotheticals with 'infinite employees' here.
I do think there is room for 20% of its employees to work on other products that could integrate well with their vision and still be within the ecommerce realm. But that doesn't juice up their stock price right away.
Starting rather recently and suddenly, don’t you think? The company leadership did apparently believe that each and every time they made a hire. And I bet a lot of the people laid off today were hired fairly recently.
> if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more
That is assuming everyone contributes in a meaningful way. That might not be the case for various reasons:
- Incompetence / lazyness
- You feel productive, but you impact is actually really low ("I am preparing an alignment meeting")
- You are working on a product / component that generates little to no revenue/interest (Hello "metaverse" team from Facebook)
- Your skill are not highly required at the moment and don't seem to be required in a short/mid term; someone else surely needs you more.
Sometimes, doing more is not necessarily the right thing. 37 signals is famously known to have far enough revenues to hire a ton of guys and probably launch many new products. Yet, they choose to remain at a fixed headcount for now and return the profits to their shareholders. They do not hesitate to let people / fire them if they feel the need to despite their profits. Why can't Shopify follow the same strategy; albeit at a different headcount ?
I have no idea of their exact numbers. But The CEO publicly said they generate tens of millions of profits every year [1]. This is for a company of around 30 to 40 employees.
The fallacy is that organizations as a whole can only do so many different things efficiently. Capital allocation becomes less efficient if a single hierarchically structured entity has to decide on how and where to invest its capital, compared to the alternative of free market competition for capital (as usual ceteris paribus).
On the contrary it is useful to distill an idea into its essence in order to make a point. This is a logical argument, and is the same technique any teacher uses when trying to begin with base principles.
It’s tough when you have no counter argument, which is why you resort to arguing against the method rather than thinking of something intelligent.
Landscaping is a perfect example of how an individual can instantaneously create value in the economy. Banks can create currency, but individuals can magically create value.
How? Decide you want your yard to look different. On a whim. Just decide you want a hill over there with a ring of bushes on top. Congratulations, you have created demand. Pay a local crew to have it done, money flows into the economy, everybody eats.
For greater effect, manufacture a cultural preference so that entire country clubs of people at a time decide that all hills need bonzai trees at their crest -- have all the clubbers pay all the landscaping crews.
Actually the good path, according to abovementioned prophets of capitalism, would be a new player undercutting the incumbent by being able to deliver comparably with less people. An incumbent so unchallenged that they can increase revenue while cutting staff is the economic equivalent of a bad code smell. Perhaps not that market outright failing, but clearly not working quite as advertised.
A restaurant can get away with giving everyone crappy part time work IF the restaurant knows that on demand it can request people to work more hours/extra days. It sounds like an efficient way to run in a grad school sense. But what happens when people start saying no or get sick? The restaurant is closed at odd times, people are inconvenienced and just start going somewhere else, has opportunity costs because it has to pass on that last minute phone in order from an office catering lunch because it's minimally staffed (to be market efficient). Cutting to absolute minimum viable is a horrific concept if you are building a business. You lose your best people, you have a ton of opportunity costs, and you basically give up on growth, productivity goes down as your remaining people have to do way more context switching.
If you are running a zombie company and just squeezing the last bits out it might be considered running a business I guess?
It’ll be a very confusing day for you when you grow up and have just one direct report, and you’ll need to face the reality of them calling you “management” on snarky Hacker News comments.
Why the downvote? This comment is spot on. Anyone thinking otherwise is delusional. To see Toby’s give in to investors wholly saddens me.
When Bezos was still at the helm of Amazon in the 2000s, the investors demanded a profit (and a dividend?). Not giving in, he kept reinvesting any earnings back in the business for years to come.
The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
Still, seeing the same response across all companies in every industry is bizarre. This gives more credence to the big-three-index-funds-control-most-companies theory[1].
> When Bezos was still at the helm of Amazon in the 2000s, the investors demanded a profit (and a dividend?). Not giving in, he kept reinvesting any earnings back in the business for years to come.
Lots of differences. #1 is Amazon was not losing tons of money. They were also doing something novel and building physical infrastructure. Investing in an online retail business when there were few others (none at Amazon scale) is far different than investing in one with tons of competitors and low barrier to entry.
>The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
People have always like more money than less money.
Almost no one is going to agree with you here. Hacker News is filled with “temporarily embarrassed billionaires” who all think their shitty little app or the fact that they know some obscure useless programming language think will make them rich one day.
Why are you even here? It sounds like you have contempt for almost everyone here. This place was made for entrepreneurs and hackers, hence it focuses on curiosity. You seem to have none of that.
I have contempt for the shortsighted fools that are deluded enough to fuck over everyone and themselves for a .000000000001% chance of making it big. Go play the lottery loser.
That's such a vague statement that you might as well have said nothing. How does "fuck over everyone else" jive with your hate on languages like Rust and Elixir? How does that jive with startups, many of the people who have worked in startups made a killing over time, but there's certainly plenty of people who got pennies.
Anyway, I'd encourage you to step back and examine your rage. It seems misplaced.
US recessions and bear markets happen most of the time because of mass psychosis, not because of some underlying cause. There can be a trigger, yes, but it's generally not that big of a deal. The government also plays a role in triggering these recessions, so that they can pop the bubbles before it's too late.
Yes, there can be recessions causes by world wars, worldwide droughts, pandemics and other cataclysmic events, but usually it's not the case for US.
Enough people losing their jobs, cutting spending habits, will create that mass psychosis.
Tech is a small part of the economy, but cities like Seattle that have built restaurants and services catering to the tech crowd will see further fallout. There was this idea that Seattle would be this next big metropolitan area, but tech implants have found it’s not for them after a few years
The idea that emotional investors moving large amounts of money can single-handedly cause recessions is naive, even if it is comforting. The world has been using ZIRP for a long time. This policy has led to overinflated stock prices and a significant number of worthless loans held by regional banks, now collapsing at a rate similar to the 2008 crisis. When equity assets lose value, companies buoyed by those previous values have to reduce their spending because they would not be able to raise enough money by selling those assets, and they'd otherwise end up underwater or going bankrupt.
They are terrified that workers might finally be getting fed up with the status quo and demanding higher salaries and better work/life balance, so they have to collude to conduct layoffs and feed the surplus pool of labor to hopefully force down salaries. This is capitalism 101 baby.
The ZIRP discourse is a bit facile, but there’s a lot of truth to it, and a lot of tech companies have been kept afloat solely by historically-low WACC and a frothy IPO market; due to their inability or unwillingness to impose financial discipline commensurate with their revenue we have a bunch of companies that are, functionally, unprofitable at any scale. Rough times for good folks, unfortunately.
> Shopify to cut 20% of its workforce, beats an already/comparatively-to-history reduced/calibrated quarterly revenue estimates for the current economic landscape
Well yeah, cutting workforce seems like it only has upside to these companies. Expenses go down, profit margin and share price go up.
What're the workers gonna do? Protest? Strike? Hah. No, the remaining employees will pick up the extra responsibility and thank the employer for continuing to employ them.
I don't think its a pure upside. Anyone wanting a job would join one of these layoff companies, of course, but anyone already in a job is going to be a bit more hesitant. I right now would not accept a role with a lot of these layoff companies, too risky.
I don't think that bad smell subsides that quick for everyone.
They're going to work for other firms, who have also simultaneously laid off staff. They will accept lower wages. Salaries will be permanently anchored lower, improving the cost structure of US software across the industry.
It's an effective coordinated move by firms against labor.
Interesting side effect here is that in order for staff to avoid a layoff, the benchmark is not whether they produce output in excess of the risk-free return -- it's whether their worth is greater than the long-term benefit of paying each new hire 30% less.
> We legally need the work laptop back, but we’ll help pay for a new one to replace it.
What law? I’m not criticizing Spotify at all for this decision, I’m just genuinely curious. A few other companies recently are giving away the laptops so I’m wondering what is different here.
They're likely speaking of their liability should a employee's laptop, containing sensitive information, ever be stolen or re-sold (or simply, left in the hands of an ex-employee with a grudge.)
It would be difficult for a IT department to guarantee, for sure without replacing the internals of the device, that the device doesn't contain sensitive information. Probably easier from an inventory and IT security perspective to just capture every device than try and coordinate with individuals to reformat, etc.
(for the same reason, some companies outright destroy old devices instead of reselling.)
I think it's actually a really easy guarantee on modern laptops from a technical standpoint, but that doesn't matter if there's a compliance requirement or contract they signed with major customers.
There are a lot of customer requirements around mobile device management and the like that arguably don't make a lot of difference for any employee wanting to work around them. But they're there so companies need to follow them.
I know that Macs can give that level of assurance. One click from the MDM can brick the machine out to the point where it cannot even be booted from external media without a code, and another trashes the encryption keys and does a factory reset.
That's bizarre or just shoddy IT. Every major platform has remote wipe and self destruct capabilities, control over full disk encryption, etc. I guess they let people bring their own devices and just not follow solid IT practices?
Well, to properly erase (multiple overwrites and erase) I suppose IT would need to get the computer back for a while so it can fully complete without the employee removing the IT tool which can handle this removal.
Secondly, would you want to have a computer which your previous employer can wipe your disk at any time?
So all in all probably a good thing for both parties.
If it's full disk encrypted then wiping and rewiping doesn't matter as much. As soon as the keys are trashed the data might as well be all zeros. Remote wipe is the whole point, it's not a goodbye gift to the employee... it's protecting company secrets. Wipe it and tell people to trash the machine as e-waste or send it back, it doesn't matter anymore.
Which is why you have short lived (less than a week) certs that have to be renewed only by access to the corporate network before you can even power on and unlock the machine's drive encryption.
I think it is not about specific law targeting laptops, but they might be legally obligated to protect their IP and business secrets i.e. source code, credentials and the documentation etc on the company owned devices.
If they give away the laptop, it will be difficult to guarantee and verify that the data is wiped out entirely within whatever time frame they are aiming for. So, they want their property back.
Being in a layoff cycle at one of the biggies they scraped all of our laptops and refused to sell or give them away, with the reason being that it's too complicated to come up with the proper process to do that properly.
Lol… it will have to be the slowest of slow news cycles before wasteful corporate IT gets any press. To the average person it’s information about paint drying.
This is especially true for Apple laptops, where the transfer of ownership is complicated (to protect against theft). I saw Lenovos and Dells being recycled in corporate settings but never Macs.
Not sure if it's the case with Shopify, but at big companies I've seen agreements with regulatory bodies and court legal holds that require the company certify that it's retained every scrap of employee data so that it's available for discovery later. The company can try to do this by uploading the entire contents of the laptop/phone to the cloud periodically, but they still don't retain 100% unless they do it once more at the very end and then hand the blank device back to the former employee. With layoffs involving thousands of partially-remote employees, that may not be logistically feasible and cheaper to just buy everyone a new device.
I don't know why people even care about that. I go out of my way to not use my work laptop for personal work/projects/etc. Especially considering the amount they value the laptop at (which may be inflated) is deducted from your severance payment
From my experience, not many people set boundaries between work and personal tasks and the number of people who have personal software projects outside work is tiny.
I too am guilty of using work laptop for personal work like shopping etc couple of times.
Personal anecdote:
one of my colleagues was recently discussing about replacing his 6 year old laptop that he rarely uses, one of our architects commented : "I don't understand why anyone would need a personal laptop at home. We can use our work laptop for anything that our mobile can't do". I was surprised to hear that from an architect and even more surprised to see many others nod in agreement.
On the one hand, having complete separation of work and personal electronics is a best practice. On the other hand, most of us don't carry two phones or two laptops when we travel on business.
If I were a senior government official or in some other high profile/sensitive role I'd probably be more conservative but it's pretty common to use some combination of personal and business-issued devices for everything.
It could be for be contractual reasons: for example, employees might have proprietary licensed third-party data or source code checked out in a local cache somewhere, and IT needs the laptop back to verifiably scrub the hard drive.
Shopify is a Canadian company, Canada has laws around if you do work on your own hardware vs company hardware being what classifies you as a contractor vs an employee. If I had to guess, I'd imagine the lawyers are worried employee classification based on hardware.
I recently negotiated terms on behalf of a group of laid off employees, and one item I pushed on was that they get to keep their laptop. The company said that wouldn't be possible for everyone, because many laptops were leased, and so were not the company's to give. In those cases, they would be given a different but equivalent device.
Quickly? They acquired 6 River Systems and announced the Shopify Fulfillment Network back in 2019. The were some pivots along the way (using 3rd party vs building out own warehouses) but it seems to me they've been at it for some time.
Last time I read a very reassuring and cogent letter by the CEO of Shopify about the layoffs . But at no point did the letter hint at further layoffs no less 20% which is huge. Wondering what the explanation is this time. I understand everyone has their worth and price but I fail to see how management and leadership at companies still have jobs and huge bonuses.
Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
Perhaps worth noting that management may care about employees, but management have bosses who require them to care more about them than they care about employees.
Agreed, all these people who make it seem that companies need to be some duty to employee everyone clearly hasn't seen how this has failed in many social leaning states.
Don't like how they do it? Create your own company and run it how you want.... We live in a world where you can do that.
The unspoken part in many of these layoffs, is that hiring people based on 5 back to back zooms, 50% leetcode, 50% STAR-method situational questions, means you have absolutely no idea how these people will actually work in the real world
The CEO isn't an all knowing entity. It's possible they made a judgement call and were wrong.
Would you prefer that companies be absolutely sure before they hire anyone to ensure layoffs never happen? It seems like the end result would be less hiring / more people without work.
OK, so now we're going to fire any CEO that lays off more than X% of the staff? The likely effect will be slower hiring, and less jobs in our economy. Is that desirable?
It is not so simplistically true. This is what Reaganomics will want you to believe. Examples abound of companies that did not prioritise shareholder returns over everything. Companies are organisations that operate within a society and therefore have a role to play to keep that society together.
There are (very limited) lawful structures that try to make this happen, but much more is down to culture. In many (most?) countries it is considered shameful if a company prioritises shareholder value above everything else. I honestly believe the US is an exception in this regard. Unfortunately US culture is taking over.
- And now to go on a complete tangent: In the second part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy, The Dark Forest, institutions are described that have both an operational officer and a political officer. The navy has an Admiral that decides the strategy, and a political officer that makes sure the Navy does the right thing. The same is then applied to companies. - I wonder if this is a model to apply to a capitalist society: Where you have a CEO doing their regular thing, but also a political officer making sure society is not disadvantaged. Hard to pull off without falling into totalitarianism I guess.
> I wonder if this is a model to apply to a capitalist society: Where you have a CEO doing their regular thing, but also a political officer making sure society is not disadvantaged. Hard to pull off without falling into totalitarianism I guess
It’s actually hilarious people still believe more political bureaucracy is the answer. Fortunately, US culture is taking over.
Companies are formed by shareholders to make money in some venture for the shareholders. People can pursue their social objectives through other types of organizations. Perhaps governments that impose regulations and taxes. I myself support moderate taxes and light regulations.
To the extent that companies focus on anything other than money for the owners, it is a failure by the owners to reign in the CEO. The CEO might want to get a fat paycheck for not much performance. The owners want to delegate everything to the CEO. After all, we’re all lazy humans.
You know what would make even more money for the owners? People having less rights. Say, working people for 12 hours a day and throw them out when they are no longer as productive as some arbitrary set goal.
So you would have no issue with owners lobbying to change the law so they make even more money, right? As you said, more money is the only goal.
What would you say if it's you who is worked to death? See, everybody thinks they will be an owner, a master if you will in this system. But it's more likely you would be another sla.... ahem... valued employee.
Your first paragraph is a non-sequitur. Only in a coal mine with pickaxes do more hours equal more profit for me, the investor.
The richest countries all have strong rights, legally and also informally expected rights. The richest companies have confident people who have lots of options, not 12-hour-a-day slaves.
Because nowadays almost all money is made using the mind, so there’s a natural relationship between a higher human development index and my net worth. (I mean I’m a normal human with empathy who also enjoys other people doing well, but even a sociopath could see they’ll make more money in the US than in either a totalitarian state or a government-less state - North Korea vs Haiti).
But all that is besides the point. Companies are single-purpose entities. Like Unix programs - do one thing well. This is very hard, and goals should not be mixed. The one thing is making money for the shareholders by doing X.
For the type of worker protection you would argue for, you need other types of organizations like unions, governments, political parties, etc.
This is why you need capitalism and democracy to make a thriving society.
If AI really kills as many jobs as predicted, we will definitely have to rethink society. It doesn't really make sense that a technology that improves overall productivity of society ends up making large segments of the population suffer. We need to find a way to have everybody benefit from progress and not just a few at the top.
Unemployed disenfranchised highly intelligent highly motivated people is going to be very different than a bunch of unemployed McDonald’s workers. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens if nothing else.
> Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
Because some highly paid people lost their jobs we need a new vision for society? Sure, it sucks to be laid off but you talk as if there's mass unemployment and droves of people suddenly living in squalor. Don't be so dramatic.
>> I fail to see how management and leadership at companies still have jobs and huge bonuses
I definitely agree in situations where the company is doing poorly. If a company has found a way to become more efficient then bosses probably do deserve bonuses.
> Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
I see you're assigning this failure to reaganomics, are you then ready to assign all the successes to reaganomics too?
i.e. The US became the largest exporter of IT and software, the US corporations put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, with US online companies being 90% of the top companies in the world.
Are you going to say that this is due to reaganomics too? Or only bad things get attributed to it?
Shopify is a Canadian company, not that it matters for my question.
I think the larger challenge is competing with the broad business value that Shopify provides — Its not just payment processing, but also email marketing, theme and API services, a app marketplace, shipping integrations, etc.
Wix/Squarespace, at least last time I checked, treated e-commerce as an add-on to their core service (building websites.) Square is a payment processor which with an e-commerce add-on, but is heavily templated.
WooCommerce is free plus a $5 a month VPS if you want to do e-commerce yourself. If you want support + hosting + security features then pay for a SaaS.
WooCommerce was purchased by Automattic and since then it's been very difficult to implement without paying for SaaS components. Still possible, but no longer straightforward.
BigCommerce is up and coming and basically a "better" version of Shopify. Having managed multiple 7fig stores on Shopify, you're in a constant state of battle against the platform to have it do what you want.
> Shopify finds it useful to talk about the difference between main quests and side quests internally. The main quest of the company is its mission, the reason for the company to exist. Side quests are everything else.
The main quest / side quest analogy works so so well!
In my observation absolute statements about no layoffs are a strong indication of future layoffs in this economy. It's impossible to be certain in this economy so giving an absolute statement is basically a lie. Someone who is so brazen about lying to/deceiving their employees will have no qualms with doing layoffs. On the other hand someone who uses more careful language even if it costs them in the short term is someone who will have more qualms about layoffs.
I agree, but I think the sports analogy is even more on point when it comes to sports management giving a vote of confidence to coaches. You only ever have to say anything like that when there are questions.
Coaches and players... they talk about each other a lot.
I think this is actually a more astute analogy than you realize, because the only reason a coach would be asked that question in the first place is because there are questions about the player’s ability to perform—-as the sibling comment here notes.
Similarly, you don’t ask tech companies if they’re doing layoffs when the sector is booming.
That the question is even asked probably shoots the probability of benching/layoffs up to some ridiculous amount to begin with.
In sports or in Irish politics were the Taoiseach might have to state he has "full confidence" of whatever individual in his administration when there are "irregularities" that have come to light.
I mean, is there another part of that quote? Anytime I've been put on the spot for these types of statements it's always '...at this time.' Nothing in business is static. When the facts change the business has to change.
I was unfortunately affected by this (in the Data Organization).
Shame - Shopify is a fun place where I've learned a ton. We were just getting a cool Data product off the ground.
Well, if anybody's got a need for a Staff/Lead Data Engineer (Remote EST) with experience in Scala (+cats/fs2), Python, go who has spent the last 10+ years building Data Products on BI, then Hadoop, then GCP (+ the Apache Zoo, lately namely Kafka/Iceberg/Beam), my email is in my profile. :)
Hey, I just found your LinkedIn Profile and noticed that we studied at the same university - even the same degree! I've send you a request on LinkedIn, so maybe we could connect and have a chat?
I feel it depends on a lot of factors, such as how senior your ICs are, how interlinked their tasks are, how complex the domain is, how large the project is, what the rate of attrition is, how complex the organization’s established procedures are…
An organization that has nothing but fairly senior researchers working on separate projects might need little management. An organization with lots of more junior engineers working on something like a rocket (where every part depends on every other part) might need more overhead.
Regardless of what the healthy ratio is, managers are typically incentivized to add more managers between themselves and their reports. This creates the illusion that they are more senior and worth of a promotion to senior manager, director, VP, etc. so even if your company has a healthy ratio, there needs to be a force counteracting the natural desire of managers to grow their ranks.
I don't know about a minimum but I think 10 is a good upper limit.
Unrelated, I think that we should stop calling workers individual contributors. I think "workers" is a more fitting description.
"Individual contributor" makes the worker seem smaller and less impactful, as if management is contributing in a way that's superior and bigger than the individual. In reality, only the workers work, and managers manage, doing less work the higher up on the ladder they go.
Don't believe me? Here's a list of CEOs that somehow managed to be CEO of multiple companies at once.
- Jack Dorsey
- Jeff Bezos
- Elon Musk
- Carlos Ghosn
And yet, my employer forbids me from having more than one day job.
The concept of "span of control," sometimes called the management ratio, is the number of direct reports controlled directly by a leader or a manager. The concept was developed in the UK by Sir Ian Hamilton in his book The Soul and Body of an Army, in the 1920s.
It arose from the assumption that managers have finite amounts of time and energy to spend with their people and their jobs.
Analyzing British military leaders, Hamilton found that the leaders could not effectively control more than 3-6 people. These figures have been generally accepted as the "rule of thumb" for span of control ever since, at least in the military where the bulk of my management experience lies.
Research that I have seen hints that people who were in I shaped teams (i.e. single person reporting to a manager) and V shaped teams (2 people reporting to a manager) were much unhappier than larger teams.
Similarly, somewhere close to 10 is when the there is just not enough 'managing' or mentorship happening. I have seen that work only in cases where most of the ICs are senior/staff level and are effectively self-managing.
It varies depending on the specifics, but I’ve seen 1:7 work well across multiple industries. Anything routine enough to need less oversight is automated, and anything needing more oversight is either cutting edge research or isn’t hiring experienced enough staff.
Depends on what the role of manager is. Lots of orgs push their best talent into management so they are also expected to do IC and also manage. My belief is there should be a separate but with equal pay track for ICs and you push your best ICs into that track. Ratios between of one manager to 10 to 20 ICs.
Also there is benefit of flat orgs which comes with higher ratio in terms of meeting reduction and also communication efficiency both top down and bottom up.
I'll tell you a personal anecdote about Shopify and why I dislike the company.
Back in 2019, I was contacted by Shopify for a job opportunity. After acing multiple remote interviews, their recruiter couldn't contain their excitement. They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Imagine my surprise when, after enduring a 15-hour economy class flight with barely any time to recover, I received a call from the recruiter. They casually informed me that the team had decided to put me through five grueling back-to-back interviews, including a whiteboard session and a pair programming assignment. Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided.
What followed was an unmitigated disaster. The first interview bombarded me with ecommerce questions, completely unrelated to my field of expertise. The pair programming session was a nightmare, as I was handed a barely functional laptop that delayed the start by 20 minutes, and then given just 30 minutes to complete the task without any assistance.
Bear in mind, I was already physically and mentally drained from the arduous journey.
While the remaining interviews were passable, they were nothing to brag about. After being sent home with the promise of a call, I received a cold rejection a week later, citing a lack of experience based on the onsite interviews.
Looking back, I'm grateful I didn't sacrifice everything for a company with a track record of questionable practices and frequent layoffs.
That is absolutely disgraceful. I have been furious after much smaller things like being told an interview will be system design when it was actually a LeetCode style interview. Can't imagine how that must have felt.
I had almost an identical experience, except I was local to Ottawa at the time. Literally a full day of back-to-back interviews. They asked which languages and technologies I was comfortable with, and then gave me a pair programming session with someone who didn't even speak to me, in a programming language I wasn't comfortable in, leading me to have to look up a lot of syntax. Radio silence for a week, then I called the original recruiter and they just basically said "no."
I would so love to name names of companies who told me that I was going to do a "pair programming" exercise and the interviewer didn't even speak to me. Of course I won't, but clearly people don't know what pairing means.
One of them was a zoom call THAT I WAS ON BY MYSELF AND BEING RECORDED. I was told it was going to be a three hour pairing exercise and _after the interview started_ dude told me he would be available for questions but ultimately wouldn't be involved. I'm still angry at myself for agreeing to go through with that.
Competitive esports is a bit different from mindlessly playing video games, it has far more to do with consistency, reliability, and marketing. Additionally, the person was being quite dismissive, this dude was already studying CS at a university.
I had experience with Shopify a few years back - around the start of the pandemic in 2020, not quite so disastrous as it didn't go that far but basically after an initial recruiter phone screen I had a technical interview with one of their Data Scientists, the questions were very easy and I got the impression I was significantly more experienced than their interviewer.
After that I had a second phone screen with the same recruiter - which I suppose was some sort of behavioral interview? I failed because I got the rejection after that with no feedback. Looking back, I got the impression they already had someone in mind but needed to tick some boxes or something - like show they interviewed multiple people for the role.
Knowing a few people that do work at Shopify I get the impression they are very particular about their cultural fit so maybe that was it.
> They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Was that your first tech onsite? The onsite is an interview you have to pass, you're not guaranteed an offer. Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
Honestly, sucks to fly out far and get rejected but that's part of the process my guy. Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
Not my first on site either, but normally I'd just need to go through a phone screen and a tech test to secure an onsite, not many hours of interviewing. Plus, I just listened to what the recruiter told me through the phone and confirmed through the email.
Why would I think I'd need to go over another round of interviews after spending over 4 hours interviewing remotely, plus interviewing with engineers, to do it all over again?
Fwiw, every time I "meet the team after interviewing", it literally is just to meet the team. If there were any technical exercises involved, I'd expect an agenda or some kind of heads up. And it makes sense to wait for the technical evaluation before scheduling this sort of meeting, imo.
For bigger orgs, this is a chance to sanity check team fit and potentially re-route if longer-term interests align better with some other team. For startups, it can be more of a vibe check.
> ...why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
I have several reasons for not bringing my personal hardware to a corporate interview, and a couple about the specific situation as described:
* I wouldn't travel with my laptop to an on-site that was described as a meet-and-greet.
* The recruiter promised suitable hardware would be available at the surprise technical on-site interview: "Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided."
* For many companies processing corporate data on personal, not-managed-by-the-business hardware is a firing offense.
* Grabassery happens, but if it's clear that my potential employer is an established company that is unable to plan ahead far enough to ensure that the interview has the hardware and personnel required for the interview, that's a _huge_ red flag for me... and one that's good to get out of the way early.
> Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
I’m not really “in tech” but this sounds like some bullshit for me. What if you don’t have a personal laptop? All I’ve got is a desktop machine, because my personal devices aren't for work.
After after going through a whole crapload of interviews, "most" onsites definitely are not 5 hours. They certainly are a thing. Some are even longer. But out of around 25 interviews, only three places requested that much time (I declined two of them).
People interviewing have to stand for themselves more. Several years ago, I was living in Germany looking to go back home later that year. I got into the interview process for a nice Silicon Valley startup (called Ooyala). After 3 phone interviews (2 technical) the recruiter was super excited and told me they would fly me from Germany to their offices.. A 10 hour flight.
I respectfully declined, telling her that because I was going to do the same long trip about 2 months later, I didn't want to fly. I told her that I would understand if they decided to pass, and no hard feelings.
Instead, she got one of the founders to interview me (Bel!!) And after that they decided to give me an offer. Everything resulted great for all of us, and I had a job waiting for me later that year.
I understand we may be desperate when looking for a job. But trust me that hiring managers are also generally in a hurry to fill positions. I know this bc I've hired plenty of people (both tech, HR, and g&a) in my career.
Fully agree with that. I had a similar experience when I was asked to complete yet another take home exercise and I simply told them to look at the last two I had done (for other companies). After a first bit of reluctance by the company's recruiter, they budged and accepted.
When hiring people, I ended up making similar concessions for the right candidate.
Well then Shopify should have better communicated and be better prepared, plus give the candidate enough time to recover from the flight. Bad form from Shopify if true...
They probably should do this, but if they have enough applicants for the job, this sort of "difficulty" itself is probably a useful filter to weed out those who can't put up with the pain.
That it is unpleasant for the potential hire doesn't really say much about the interests of Shopify. For senior engineers this probably is a bad strategy, but maybe not for entry-level or intermediate engineer who they will push around for a few years. Forcing you to jump through hoops may actually get them exactly the kind of employee they want.
In hindsight it’s easy to blame that person for not automatically expecting a grueling day of interviews or at least asking for details about what to expect.
But it’s easy for me to believe that the recruiter deliberately mislead the candidate about the on-site. I have experienced on-sites that were indeed more about meeting the team, having more casual technical discussions and being judged for “culture fit” (which has its own problems, but that’s another discussion).
It’s not unreasonable to take the recruiter at their word and be upset about the unexpected challenge, especially after a rough travel itinerary.
The role I’m currently hiring for, the face to face literally is just a meet and greet. All the technical stuff will be done remotely.
Also I wouldnt be surprised if the recruiter lied. I’ve had so many negative experiences with recruiters over the years that I’ve learned to trust very few and those who I do trust I now work exclusively with.
Shopify is notorious in wasting your time. They have a “life journey” interview where you talk about your life’s journey and experiences. A few months ago I spent hours of my time on interviews that I performed well in, only to be told the team is “moving in a different direction”. Looks like I dodged a bullet there.
Not quite. In this market, you can crush it and still not get the job. One thing I can say for sure, I performed way better than was required for the position. Anyway, ended up somewhere way better, so worked out in the end.
Sounds like you didn't meet their bar. I'm happy you're somewhere you like, and interviews are somewhat arbitrary so you're not gonna pass them all. It still doesn't reflect well on you to take that stance though.
LOL. WHAT BAR? the bar where a corporate suit in polos can judge your life story and compare it to his where he did not just travel to all those exotic destinations for fun but to understand the culture of the people living in bali, mexico, europe? this is an ecommerce platform. hell you can do it in php on a 1999 laptop. nothing fancy here man they not sending space shuttles to mars
The engineers are the ones setting the bar, the life story is to avoid assholes. Clearly he got past that, so congrats on not being an asshole, but the engineers weren't impressed enough.
There's a reason Shopify on your resume opens a lot of doors. They don't compromise on engineering.
Whenever I hear this, I immediately think "dick measuring contest" and take the team far less seriously. A lot of these companies think they're training astronauts for the dregs of space when really they're just trying to build efficient database apps.
> The balance of crafter to manager numbers is a tricky one to strike. Too few and you risk misalignment on the most important things, too many and you add heavy layers of process, approvals, meetings and… side quests. Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry. One of the insidious consequences of this is that it leads to the company increasingly celebrating activities rather than crafter driven outcomes. With the right numbers we’ll fully focus on outcomes and impact.
Am I reading this right that they decided they had too many managers, and are laying off some? They don't say it clearly in which direction they thought they were unbalanced, but I think that's the implication of "activities rather than crafter-driven outcomes", or just what is supposed to be the obvious answer when anyone says this is unbalanced?
Yes, I read the statement as Shopify having too many managers and is weighting their layoffs to address that ratio (as well as generally pruning "side quests").
> too many and you add heavy layers of process, approvals, meetings and… side quests (emphasis mine)
and
> A more fit for purpose Shopify centered on its main quest has less scope creep, fewer meetings, and more shipping great features for our merchants. (emphasis mine)
Yet they're not offering those managers IC positions, they're just cutting and targeting managers with higher salaries for the most part. Also heard of a few staff engineers that went.
I'm a rubyist, and they have been recently known for hiring people to work on ruby as a language and contribute to ruby/rails ecosystem in a general way, not always directly and specifically related to their own codebase. I wonder if they're gonna stop all that stuff.
It seems all companies are expecting the great AI windfall. I think this is mostly wishful thinking with today's technology. Unless CEOs have access to secret tech that no one else does, this feels like more of a hype driven forecasting exercise.
Once again a company that prides itself on being a follower rather than a leader. It drives me insane
>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
Ok, can we consider this in your compensation discussions this year? That you mindlessly followed the crowd and left your company structurally weak? Or do we think you're going to shoot for record compensation this year?
Is the company structurally weak? Absolutely awful situation for the workers, but I haven't seen systemic negative effects for the companies conducting layoffs.
I work at a company that did similarly large layoffs despite record profits. In our case, the cuts were conducted by an MBA.
Many important revenue driving products have been mangled by having their teams entirely removed, with pages going completely unanswered.
In at least one case, it seems like an entire team was cut in error.
The company was seriously negatively impacted, but the share price hasn't budged. To the extent that share price is connected to reality, I imagine it will take while for the market to notice the impacts of a layoff
2) by hostile take overs inside the company by MBAs, the phase lag between the layoffs and impact on velocity or the bottom line is too long. The second order fire that comes months later gives them an option to look like a hero again.
Most MBAs burn an asset for a short term gain. Period.
What the CEO is saying is that he hired a load of people into the company that they don't need. Now they're going to try and get rid of them. Wouldn't the company have not been better off just... not hiring the useless people in the first place? And isn't it going to be a significant drain on resources and morale to pick through and get rid of all the dead weight? And are they actually going to get rid of the bad people, or as with most of these situations are they going to be left with the politicians whilst the good people go off to great opportunities elsewhere?
Businesses are path dependent, you can't just go "oh, not enough people hire more, oops! too many, fire some!".
I love how they don't want to bury the lede, but they also will use the passive voice: "after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20%". "some of you will leave Shopify today". It's not at all that those people are being laid off!
For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
I don't even agree with that point. "Some of you will leave Shopify today" is a lot more blunt than the quasi-euphemistic term "laid off". Someone is really stretching for outrage.
> But now we are at the dawn of the AI era and the new capabilities that are unlocked by that are unprecedented. Shopify has the privilege of being amongst the companies with the best chances of using AI to help our customers. A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible. Our main quest demands from us to build the best thing that is now possible, and that has just changed entirely.
Most recent layoffs have been framed around needing to focus the company due to economic and market headwinds. This reads like AI has transformed the mission.
What does "A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible" mean here?
<< What does "A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible" mean here?
I think this is what is meant here[1]. Not copilot, but the idea is the same.
It is interesting, because 'prompt engineering' is being discussed in the same context. In the video, you will note several interesting bugs generated by GPT. Is it not exciting to see all those bugs in the next few years?
After IBM did it, every layoff from now on is going to explicitly or implicitly say that AI will cover for things in the future; it's some magic words to try to not spook investors.
Think of it more like auto-pilot. You go to sleep and your shop runs promos, creates new products (digital, or digitally-printed), runs a/b test on your collections, whatever - all so you wake up to new sales.
This is especially hilarious as Shopify senior leadership has traditionally been outright against AI, and is even blatantly against making decisions based on data, and even against people with domain expertise! Even today, I don't think they remotely understand AI and certainly not how to build it.
I guess their idea of AI is someone using the ChatGPT API. Good luck if they think they will "hack" some revolutionary AI together with a cowboy hacker culture.
Does anyone have a sense of how bad things really are for the US economy and what the next 12/18 months are going to look like? Seems like every day all I see is doom and gloom, I've not seen a bright spot in quite some time... it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to get a sense of where things are. People keep saying things are going to get worse, I keep reading things are going to get worse, friends are literally committing suicide. Feels like twilight zone.
I'm in the BI space. I'll answer anecdotally since I pay attention to the job boards in the US quite a bit. I've got no hard data for my assertion full disclosure. For the last 3 months entry level work has dried up. I'm seeing very few postings for underling positions. Mid level 4-7 years jobs have markedly declined as I'm seeing fewer postings across this same time span month over month. 7+ years experience seems to be flat, but not down as the other tranches of work. You asked for a sense. That's my sense.
doom and gloom? all major indexes are still trading at lofty values
"safety" stocks like AAPL are at or near all-time highs
real estate has budged slightly, but a rounding error off of the gains made in the last few years
even employment...tech hiring is getting hit but lots of other employers in retail, food & beverage are reporting record hiring and even wage increases
if there is a "crash", it hasn't happened yet
you may just end up with a sucky decade of stagflation...you are poorer every day, but just not dramatically so
Separate your personal happiness from your job. Who knows what the future holds, maybe it won't be working in tech. Be ready for anything IMHO. It might get better, or it might not any time soon. But the sun will come up again tomorrow, and the day after and after etc.
No, but it’ll certainly make me more likely to do things that might pay my rent. Certainly compared to a “la de da nothing is wrong xd it is what it is” attitude.
I think many people, especially the privileged in tech, haven't had to worry about money before. The possibility of losing it all and ending up homeless doesn't even cross their mind, either from ignorance or from significant personal/family wealth that provides a safety net.
Easy not to worry when you can't fathom that it may happen to you or your peer.
I also struggle to separate what I do from who I am. I've been trying to build a more purposeful sense of identity outside of work, because jobs will come and go. Plus I sound like a real tool if someone asks me what my deal is and all I can say is "software engineer".
The explanation that is circulating is that everyone is making decisions based on where inflation is headed. If inflation is not tamed, business leaders will seek to extract more cost cuts (more layoffs).
The other headline is that LLM and ChatGPT is reshaping the tech landscape. Tech companies are laying off engineers so they can hire AI/LLM engineers to compete with ChatGPT. Based on my limited knowledge, OpenAI is head and shoulders above everyone else. Google's Bard is a distant second.
We posted a job back in oct/nov for a senior tech position at a very large, but non-tech company - we got 3 applicants/resumes, 2 of which were out of the country and not considered. The one got hired (and was a good hire).
In Jan/Feb posted the exact same job (an additional position) and got over 300 resumes including from ex-FAANG folks who we generally don't see applying).
Something sure has changed imo, and I also personally do believe things are about to get much, much worse for many people.
By far the best historical analogy is the decaying USSR. We have an elite class that has been totally spoiled by the last 40 years of triumphalism, and lacks vision.
QoL for most Americans will continue to drop to match USA's precipitous decline in geopolitical status, but even Russia rebounded after just a couple decades. Hey, we got a bunch of O&G as well.
The letter seems to have two audiences. Investors and employees. It’s easy to criticize this stuff but i have yet to see HN provide any valid feedback in these threads outside of criticizing past decisions of the CEO.
Here’s valid feedback: don’t use ridiculous language (team change), treat us like adults. We know what this is. Don’t turn a message about layoffs into a marketing puff piece about Shopify’s mission to save kittens and make rainbows. Own up to literally any amount of accountability, and be real as for the reasons this is happening (we hired these people knowing the risk we may need to lay them off - we were wrong and now you suffer as a consequence)
Honest question. What good does that do? It’s a company they aren’t here to make you feel better.
They are treating you like an adult by giving you a nice severance package. I don’t understand the need for people to have companies admit they were wrong.
The notion that this CEO and hundreds of others made bad decisions by over-hiring is sensible, but the fact that so many made the same mistake at the same time makes me second-order think this. As cruel as it sounds, what if over-hiring was a good long term decision? What would that imply?
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
I feel like not hiring aggressively in a _low-interest-rate environment_ is harmful to your business.
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
From a business perspective, this is great for Shopify. The labor market for software engineers has seriously softened as a result of all the layoffs. Go look at job openings and their posted salaries.
When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
this is absolutely not true, I know engineering managers with around 5-7 years of total experience ( aka people under 30 ) making $400,000 CAD in cash compensation at shop. They recently did a cash/equity split where employees could choose their split and not a huge surprise many chose the maximum cash
there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this
Totally not true. My Shopify offer was slightly higher than my Google offer (as a re-hire), both base + stocks, about 3 years ago. However, going with Google really paid off because of the stock performance.
Last September. You now get $X per year and chose how much you want in stocks or cash. Depending on your level, a certain minimum of stock is necessary. Most Sr / Staff engineering had a floor of 10% stocks, but the rest is plain cash.
Shopify wasn't paying like FAANG, but also not like a startup. I would say 75% of a FAANG.
The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.
Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.
Isn't this frustrating? Employees of course have the bare the brunt, but god forbid its shareholders and executives that need to scale down their payouts.
Feels so incredibly backward.
And yes I know its "stock performance" but what do you think drives this? With executive compensation mostly related to stocks, of course at the end of the day, thats what they want to drive up.
Employees have to bear the brunt of the effects because those making the macroeconomic decisions are part of the capitalist class. Jerome Powell was a partner at one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Is it any surprise that he’s trying to spin a narrative that employees are paid too much? Isn’t squeezing employees to increase profits what those in private equity typically do?
In this case, "too high" = "we haven't figured out how to commoditize it well enough yet because the skill floor/ceiling is too high to scale with cheaper talent." This was one of the primary reasons I began to specialize partially in tech domains that are regarded as "hard" (compilers/perf): much smaller market means employees have a bit more leverage.
Do you feel there is much demand in those areas? I'm interested in more theoretical things but have doubts that many jobs would be available or for them to be valued even though its more difficult
Definitely a tradeoff: much fewer companies, but the ones that are left are higher quality if they are seeking out that sort of thing. It really depends on what you're looking for.
I settled into a role of research software engineer, where I do both applied research and development, applying a lot of compiler-ish stuff to different domains within cybersecurity, such as building out control flow graphs from binaries, thinking about how to instrument assembly code efficiently, fast pattern matching, and static analysis, where I am currently. The role fits me like a glove, but it isn't for everyone. In my job search, I started at, "I want a job doing compiler work," and eventually broadened scope a few times until I landed on, "I want a job where compiler-type approaches are on the table of possibilities." This offers a wider variety of work, which I like.
I can discuss more over email (check my HN profile) if you'd like, but most of what I know is US-centric due to how funding works for these types of research. Larger orgs like FAANGs also have it, but the pool is much more competitive, as you'd expect.
I'd love to have some more discussion especially on what areas within cybersecurity may have good demand :) Although I can't find the email in your profile or github!
Those parts you mentioned like the static analysis or control flow graphs sounds cool
> Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time.
While I agree that this is a naive belief to have (at this point in my career I think there's almost a slightly negative correlation between skill and TC) the general talent pool for software engineers has, at least in my experience, dropped tremendously while TC has exploded.
The most important skills for getting high paying jobs in the last few years has been grinding leet code, then grinding systems design etc, etc. Software engineers no longer have "rare/valuable" skills, they have highly commodified, easily replicable skills (at least at the interview level).
Software engineers today simply aren't that skilled (at least on average) despite what they want to believe. It reminds me a lot of dotcom bubble where anyone with a pulse that could turn on a PC could get a high paying job.
Honestly, it can't. What it will do instead is cause the most abrupt wealth concentration in the history of humankind. This will create 'revolutionary' conditions, although the shape and direction of that revolution will differ from context to context. In some places, it is likely to be fascist; in others, socialist; in still others, unexplored, undiscovered options. It will be a time of experimentation -- or as Gramsci eloquently, and more pessimistically, put it, a "time of monsters."
But what is going away, permanently, is the space between extremes. Pour one out. I miss it already.
> When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
> When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
Shopify was never paying top of market in the first place. They might be able to get better talent for the same price, but "a fraction of the price" to me has a connotation of "1 over (an integer bigger than 1)", meaning 1/2 or less what they were paying previously... and this is certainly not the case for them.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
Over hiring in the face of uncertain macro conditions and consumption changes is probably the right choice. If your market expands as you believe it might you're ready to step in and grow. If it doesn't grow you can just lay people off and you're back where you started. The important thing here though is that it's hard to catch up to competitors that have lapped you but it's easy to slow down when you're ahead. If you think there's just a 10% chance that covid causes e-commerce to 10x in size it makes sense to prepare as though it will and then shrink the workforce if things go back to normal.
If the company didn't do a round of layoffs I'm sure the workers would appreciate that, despite what's going on outside of the company. So even if the company hits a rough patch they'll stick with it, instead of abandoning ship. Or as they say, respect is a two way street.
It just reiterates that on a high enough level, employees are just numbers, resources and sliders to fiddle with, often having a direct correlation with share price.
This is exactly what is taught in business school. It's why you are a human resource, a thing to be used, rather than a human being with skills and a story and a life and needs
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.
Also the same CEO who joined Coinbase's board last year, and has seemingly fallen down the crypto rabbit hole. Maybe he's lost a bit of focus on Shopify.
>Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
Lutke's not a hero, he's a mini-Zuckerberg: he still runs the company he founded as CEO, but he has already made more than enough money to comfortably retire. Also like Zuckerberg, his company might be better off without him at this point, since being practically unaffected by success or failure makes continuing as CEO something of a vanity project.
Virtually anybody else who they'd hire as a CEO would also have more than enough money to comfortably retire. Lutke has more reputation/passion/history/identity tied up in the company than anyone else would - where money isn't a driving factor, deep connection to the thing you're working on is probably the most important motivation.
Lutke and Zuckerberg are billionaires. It is literally impossible for them to run out of money. Their grandchildren's grandchildren will be born incomprehensibly wealthy. They have won at capitalism.
But they also captain their first large enterprises: do they know what they're doing? Can they transition these firms into businesses that will endure? Or will they capriciously chase shiny objects while they waste the trust and goodwill of investors, the people who work there now, and the people who will want to work there in the future? They might have seeded the garden, but it took thousands of smart people to build it up, and it takes a constant supply to maintain it.
A new CEO will probably be rich, sure, but not "endow a historical dynasty" rich, and might know how to take a successful company and reposition it for the long term. Maybe the younger guys can do it. But it would just be for vanity at this point.
Sure, but if a billionaire can piss away 40B during an ego trip (which I imagine billionaires are susceptible to), most billionaires would no longer be solvent after making such a mistake
Tobi took a shitton of skin out of the game when the price was high. And he has a golden share, he can't be replaced, so there's no way for a board to discipline him or fire him. I wouldn't call that skin in the game. He owns the game.
A favorite quote of mine about the role of a CEO from the movie Margin Call. Tuld, the CEO of a major bank the night before the housing crisis in 08 starts to fly out of control, after one of the bank's risk analysts discovers they're holding toxic assets:
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
To be fair it's extremely hard to make long-term decisions when you have politicians deciding to arbitrarily lock down the economy forcing all small businesses to engage in e-commerce, and when you have a Federal Reverse which alternates between creating financial bubbles and financial crises every couple of years.
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
Shopify was just a really fun place to work. And in part this was because they did a really good job of interviewing. Technical, yes, but in particular behaviorally.
So I can honestly say that many of the colleagues I know being let go are truly great colleagues. They were some of the most impactful people I worked with in my org (discovery) and they are a great get for any company.
Shopify calls its first interview the "life story" interview, and (in my experience) it was a great place for me to talk about my career, reflect on past successes and mistakes, and demonstrate empathy and self-awareness.
I didn't feel compelled to share anything I didn't want to share. I really felt free to frame it in a way that I was comfortable with. It's as much a "career story" as a "life story", IIRC.
That’s a bit presumptuous. I was enthusiastic about the interview until afterwards
The interview was conducted by the recruiter and while she didn’t flat out ask personal questions, she asked questions that would almost cause me to reveal personal information such as my marital status and sexuality. It was not fun coming with made up responses to avoid that because it’s none of her business.
There’s a reason interviews should stay professional. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued.
Sorry if my comment came off at an personal attack, that wasn't the intent.
With that said, there are lots of reasons why a company might want to vet candidate attitude besides discriminating based on protected characteristics.
Out of curiosity, what kind of questions did you find invasive or discriminatory?
So it wasn't the questions themselves, but when you start asking about why you moved from this city to that, or why did you choose this school, etc. Maybe it's because your SO got a job there, or some other personal reason.
I get that it's totally an innocent intent, but there are much better ways to assess a candidate's soft skills, that is strictly related to their professional experience.
Okay, my Original Point was that maybe one of the soft skills the test is assessing is the ability and willingness to share their personal self in a positive and constructive manner.
Many if not most people find us a desirable attribute in coworkers and workplaces. I get that it's not for everyone, but not every workplace is a good fit for everyone.
I think you're getting some rude comments because of exactly this fact
honestly that is something I value as well, but I think that's when a lot of bias can come into play. Perhaps that bias is desired for culture fitting, but you still have to be careful if protected-class stuff comes up and you want to reject the person.
fwiw, when I interview candidates in a technical interview, I still attempt at some small talk to get a sense of "can I have a normal conversation with this person"
Sure, I think I agree that once you get into picking people based on cultural fit, you run some risk of discrimination suit, real or unreal. It is a tricky area.
So only people who have slick enough social skills to bullshit their way through that will get hired. The quiet unassuming engineer who spend their free time programming will get passed on and the extroverted engineer who spent their free time partying will get hired.
1. That is a very deterministic statement
2. This is a part of the process, not the entire process. There are still technical elements tested during the interview.
3. The signal that they are looking for, but do not tell candidates, is a story about overcoming obstacles.
What I will say about the lifestory, is that it aligns with the skillset required to do well in a corporate environment. Namely telling stories, being relatively interesting, and having some ability to sell yourself and your accomplishments (in addition to being technically competent which is tested elsewhere).
“Yeah, we see here that you developed your own machine learning framework in your free time. That’s great and all, but jross225 didn’t find you interesting enough, so we’re going to have to pass, sorry.”
If you developed an ML framework in your free time and can't tell a compelling story about it in 45 minutes then I probably don't want to work with you either
Uh. I hope this was for a non-technical role. Otherwise, it sounds like a bad idea and best and a torturous thing that filters out a lot of non-native, non-extroverted people.
But then again, that's probably why the environment seems 'fun'
Being able to communicate empathetically with your coworkers is a core competency for technical workers too. There's a difference between an introvert and an asshole.
Asking people to tell their "life story" in a job interview seems like a sign of boundary issues, not empathy. An empathetic person would realize that people come to job interviews expecting to talk about their professional experience, so it isn't the appropriate environment to ask such an invasive question.
You choose what to talk about and what to share. It's open ended to give you the ability to share as much as you're comfortable with. You can tell the story of your career, no need to get any more personal unless you want to.
You've interviewed at places that didn't require you to talk about yourself?
Just because Shopify might name it something specific, doesn't mean it's all that unique. Some companies hold this potion entirely on a first/second phone call, others might having an initial section of the interview dedicated to talking about yourself and your experience.
Not sure how this weeds out non-native or non-extroverted people, both of whom are very capable of talking about their experiences. It would be great if you wouldn't infantilize them.
This is a strawman. Nobody is saying that people should not have to talk about themselves in job interviews. What people are saying is that "tell me your life story" comes off as creepy and invasive in a professional context where the parties don't know one another.
Huh? I'm an introvert and I can communicate and actually like interacting with people. But I'll need time for myself to re-charge afterwards. But everyone needs to re-charge somehow.
I'm still at Shopify (even after today). I can confirm that the colleagues I'm losing are just all around great humans—in addition to having good technical chops. The hiring process optimizes for nice colleagues, and it seems to have worked quite well.
Former Shopify here, there are a lot of really special people going today.
People who mentored me, who work hard, and do high quality work, and people who really carried the best of culture of the company (both technical and personal culture).
The buddies I made at my first internship at Shopify are friends I still chat with to this day, despite us living all over the continent. I think that was my fourth of five co-ops, but it was by far the most socially stimulating.
I'm bummed to hear about the layoffs, I hope the culture doesn't suffer too much. Shopify Ottawa was genuinely warm and familiar in a way few tech offices are able to be.
+1 for an awesome interview experience. I had an offer last year which I didn't end up accepting (for various reasons) but I walked away from the process having actually enjoyed it.
I got the whole way through to the end of a senior backend role interview process a couple of years back and it was very enjoyable because of the people.
Sadly I got vetoed by one interviewer for an inelegant game of life solution (first time I’d ever seen GoL and I got bogged down in the middle logic) - never been so disappointed ever as every interview I had went really well on a personal level and (with the exception of that one) all my code was fine.
I hope to see Shopify continue to do well, I’ve used it for over 10 years and love using the platform.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadIt seems like these two facts should at least go out in different press releases on different days.
For Shopify, does anyone know whether the 20% figure includes the people leaving with the sale of SFN to Flexport?
Edit: just heard in the earnings call that the 20% headcount reduction does _not_ include the logistics teams going to Flexport.
The headline is to pitch possible future investors that Shopify will prioritize investor returns over anything else (as ordained by the Prophets of capitalism)
Put it this way - would you like to be paid to mow a lawn using scissors? I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless. If that is happening it would certainly be because a government regulator required someone to sit there twiddling thumbs.
And yet if you spend any time in any large corporation, you'll find countless examples of these, including in the tech industry. Don't you have any friend working for Google/Meta/${big tech co}?
Bullshit jobs can and definitely exist with capitalism: any successful and large business is filled with them.
I don't think we should be interested in the "asymptotic theoretical limit" of capitalism which is never reached. Let's discuss "capitalism in practice", not "capitalism in theory". If things self-correct in a time frame longer than your own lifespan, do you think it's an ideal scenario? I personally don't.
I don't see the government forcing Google to pay thousands of highly qualified workers to fill in BS jobs. This is a natural consequence of being a very successful business: complacency, empire building, etc all decorellated from economic incentives.
People spend decades with BS jobs in a very capitalist society.
Note that I've never argued that a socialist alternative is any better or that the government isn't filled with BS jobs either.
I just observe that the problem manifests itself regardless.
If there is not a better option, then yes.
The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical and convince people to pay a lot of money for them, a capitalist will gladly pay for everything from digging to shipping of those rocks.
From a common sense perspective that activity is useless because it's purely wasting resources with no useful effect. From a capitalist perspective the activity is not useless as it brings profit.
The answer to your question is it depends, and is one of the big things that has people worried about AI and automation rapidly improving over time. If things like wealth redistribution don't occur in a highly automated society you end up with big problems really quick.
Are you excluding those 20% MFs that are getting fired from Society? Where are they gonna do their scissoring now?
> As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them
This more sounds like a trap mindset to me to be honest. Its associating some sort of morality to what is just regular part of running a business. Companies do what's best for the company and its investors first and foremost.
I was pointing out that’s not the case.
I believe the suggestion is that they certainly should be based in some moral system. Corporations are a convenient fiction we use to shield the actual humans from the effects of the actions they collectively take.
The Luddites weren't idiots, nor they were against progress. They revolted because the way the new technology was applied was destroying their specialization, and in many cases, destroying their lives.
The promise of "reallocating skilled workers to new areas" is bullshit at the individual level. What's being reallocated is the new generation, the kids that grow to specialize in the new area instead of the old one. The specialists from the old area aren't being transferred along with rank and pay. They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age, their living costs, their families and other dependents. Even the kids of those "reallocated" old-timers aren't going to partake fully in the newly opened fields of work - they'll be weighed down by the fallout of their families suddenly dropping a level or two on the living standards ladder.
The Luddites rebelled because their lives were being destroyed. And the people who did the destruction? They didn't give two damns about what society will get out of it. They did it only because they saw a way to cut costs down and increase their own profits. You don't get to criticize Luddites for selfishness when the other side was just as selfish, if not more.
Kudos!!
When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless - it had been superseded by new technology.
I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around. If one person can make 1000 shoes a day while a cobbler can only make 5, this is great for society.
This is why we live in skyscrapers rather than huts. This is why I don't pay people to cut my grass with scissors.
Relevant Mitchell & Webb Look sketch: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ
Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.
Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.
This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/26/protests-in-greece-expected-...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/business/france-economy-m...
You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.
Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.
Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.
But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.
A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.
One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.
I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.
the alternative to this is gerontocracy and stagnation. We actually have a real world example of this, Japan. Seniority as a leading principle and the inability to fire in the name of social stability sounds great on a 10 year time horizon and appears empathetic, on a 50 year time horizon you are going to be poor compared to an economy that accepts (but ideally cushions) the fallout that comes with economic churn. In 1990 Japan's economy was 50% as large as the American economy. Today it's 19%.
Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.
We really should aim for both. That the society as a whole is better off when it receives the benefits of creative destruction, it also has a moral obligation to make sure the "destruction" part is only shifting labor and expertise allocation - destroying ephemeral constructs like companies and brands, not actual lives.
It is a moral issue first and foremost, but we can't be burying our heads in the sand here and pretending we didn't know - the issue carries with it a real threat of those whose lives get destroyed rising up to tear down the civilization that crushed it. It's in everyone's self-interest to be on the side of the Luddites.
Increasingly I wonder what this means. What KPIs are you evaluating to determine if society is getting better or worse? And is it?
Right, but that's not the actual dichotomy. First, if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
Second, realistically the dichotomy, in the short to medium term, is will these people be employed in a skilled job, or will they be unemployed? You might say, that's not Shopify's problem. But let's not pretend unemployed people is "better for society".
> then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy
Are you assuming they'd be put onto the existing projects (which may slow down delivery, yes) rather than doing new projects in parallel (which will not and will in fact let them deliver more because there are more projects)?
The company leadership doesn’t believe that. There is a line where adding more people will not justify enough revenue increase, and that’s up to the company leaders to decide.
It’s worse for the people laid off, but ultimately wouldn’t they want to do something useful? In a new job they will be wanted. At Shopify they are not wanted.
I think this is something all companies struggle with: at some point you may achieve product/market maturity but the people that could determine this are fundamentally in conflict with ever communicating this because they or their peers would be out of work at that employer. In my opinion, this is when internal politics start to become more prevalent because its human nature to protect your well being/source of money.
This is difficult to believe. I think everyone sees signs all around them of foolish decisions by firm principals that hamper consumer and worker welfare even in the short term, to say nothing of the effect of various kinds of hysteresis on the long term development path of economies (e.g. detaching people from the labor market in a manner that undermines their health, currency of their skills, etc.)
How many software products has Google released over the years, which they're able to do so because they have a massive number of employees? More employees will allow for more products.
Whether it would be prudent or profitable to tackle more products is another story, but we're already talking about hypotheticals with 'infinite employees' here.
I do think there is room for 20% of its employees to work on other products that could integrate well with their vision and still be within the ecommerce realm. But that doesn't juice up their stock price right away.
Starting rather recently and suddenly, don’t you think? The company leadership did apparently believe that each and every time they made a hire. And I bet a lot of the people laid off today were hired fairly recently.
That is assuming everyone contributes in a meaningful way. That might not be the case for various reasons: - Incompetence / lazyness - You feel productive, but you impact is actually really low ("I am preparing an alignment meeting") - You are working on a product / component that generates little to no revenue/interest (Hello "metaverse" team from Facebook) - Your skill are not highly required at the moment and don't seem to be required in a short/mid term; someone else surely needs you more.
Sometimes, doing more is not necessarily the right thing. 37 signals is famously known to have far enough revenues to hire a ton of guys and probably launch many new products. Yet, they choose to remain at a fixed headcount for now and return the profits to their shareholders. They do not hesitate to let people / fire them if they feel the need to despite their profits. Why can't Shopify follow the same strategy; albeit at a different headcount ?
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1212837791031279616?la...
When you argument is to take the extreme, you must understand that it is bullshit, right?
It’s tough when you have no counter argument, which is why you resort to arguing against the method rather than thinking of something intelligent.
How? Decide you want your yard to look different. On a whim. Just decide you want a hill over there with a ring of bushes on top. Congratulations, you have created demand. Pay a local crew to have it done, money flows into the economy, everybody eats.
For greater effect, manufacture a cultural preference so that entire country clubs of people at a time decide that all hills need bonzai trees at their crest -- have all the clubbers pay all the landscaping crews.
A golf course is just a jobs program /s
What specific measures of society are better?
Please use whatever metrics you deem relevant however I'll propose a few options to choose from based on the Harvard Human Flourishing Program [1]:
1. Happiness and life satisfaction
2. Mental and physical health
3. Meaning and purpose
4. Character and virtue
5. Close social relationships
[1] https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/measuring-flourishing
If you are running a zombie company and just squeezing the last bits out it might be considered running a business I guess?
If you are an employee, nothing management does is for you.
I intend to be an under the radar B- player at a diversified portfolio of companies until I can retire.
When Bezos was still at the helm of Amazon in the 2000s, the investors demanded a profit (and a dividend?). Not giving in, he kept reinvesting any earnings back in the business for years to come.
The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
Still, seeing the same response across all companies in every industry is bizarre. This gives more credence to the big-three-index-funds-control-most-companies theory[1].
[1] Hidden power of the Big Three? Passive index funds, re-concentration of corporate ownership, and new financial risk https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
Lots of differences. #1 is Amazon was not losing tons of money. They were also doing something novel and building physical infrastructure. Investing in an online retail business when there were few others (none at Amazon scale) is far different than investing in one with tons of competitors and low barrier to entry.
>The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
People have always like more money than less money.
Anyway, I'd encourage you to step back and examine your rage. It seems misplaced.
I'm as surprised as anyone how quickly, but I think it's a great thing to see
"I'm so pissy because the US Fed isn't giving away free money anymore. I'm moving to cash and will shower money on any company that does layoffs."
Yeah, it works.
Yes, there can be recessions causes by world wars, worldwide droughts, pandemics and other cataclysmic events, but usually it's not the case for US.
Tech is a small part of the economy, but cities like Seattle that have built restaurants and services catering to the tech crowd will see further fallout. There was this idea that Seattle would be this next big metropolitan area, but tech implants have found it’s not for them after a few years
> Shopify to cut 20% of its workforce, beats an already/comparatively-to-history reduced/calibrated quarterly revenue estimates for the current economic landscape
What're the workers gonna do? Protest? Strike? Hah. No, the remaining employees will pick up the extra responsibility and thank the employer for continuing to employ them.
I don't think that bad smell subsides that quick for everyone.
Growth also goes down, which means more firings and rinse and repeat.
They're going to work for other firms, who have also simultaneously laid off staff. They will accept lower wages. Salaries will be permanently anchored lower, improving the cost structure of US software across the industry.
It's an effective coordinated move by firms against labor.
Interesting side effect here is that in order for staff to avoid a layoff, the benchmark is not whether they produce output in excess of the risk-free return -- it's whether their worth is greater than the long-term benefit of paying each new hire 30% less.
Know of a relatively well known brand that laid off a large chunk of it's tech staff and most / all the others are looking for routes out the door
Chunk of the tech leadership that took over after the original tech leadership was laid off have already found new roles
What law? I’m not criticizing Spotify at all for this decision, I’m just genuinely curious. A few other companies recently are giving away the laptops so I’m wondering what is different here.
It would be difficult for a IT department to guarantee, for sure without replacing the internals of the device, that the device doesn't contain sensitive information. Probably easier from an inventory and IT security perspective to just capture every device than try and coordinate with individuals to reformat, etc.
(for the same reason, some companies outright destroy old devices instead of reselling.)
Secondly, would you want to have a computer which your previous employer can wipe your disk at any time?
So all in all probably a good thing for both parties.
If they give away the laptop, it will be difficult to guarantee and verify that the data is wiped out entirely within whatever time frame they are aiming for. So, they want their property back.
I too am guilty of using work laptop for personal work like shopping etc couple of times.
Personal anecdote:
one of my colleagues was recently discussing about replacing his 6 year old laptop that he rarely uses, one of our architects commented : "I don't understand why anyone would need a personal laptop at home. We can use our work laptop for anything that our mobile can't do". I was surprised to hear that from an architect and even more surprised to see many others nod in agreement.
Edit: fixed a typo
If I were a senior government official or in some other high profile/sensitive role I'd probably be more conservative but it's pretty common to use some combination of personal and business-issued devices for everything.
Lots of possible reasons.
In 10 years when interest rates are 0 we can have the tulip Olympics again.
Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
Management doesn't care about you, so anything that is about your comfort and well being is a scam.
Acting like they are civil institutions tasked with upholding the social fabric is absurd.
Don't like how they do it? Create your own company and run it how you want.... We live in a world where you can do that.
No-one owes anyone a living, but you don’t need anybody’s permission either.
Seeking to create artificial certainty in outcome leads to insurmountable stagnation.
Edit: I clearly misunderstood the above exchange
Would you prefer that companies be absolutely sure before they hire anyone to ensure layoffs never happen? It seems like the end result would be less hiring / more people without work.
There are (very limited) lawful structures that try to make this happen, but much more is down to culture. In many (most?) countries it is considered shameful if a company prioritises shareholder value above everything else. I honestly believe the US is an exception in this regard. Unfortunately US culture is taking over.
- And now to go on a complete tangent: In the second part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy, The Dark Forest, institutions are described that have both an operational officer and a political officer. The navy has an Admiral that decides the strategy, and a political officer that makes sure the Navy does the right thing. The same is then applied to companies. - I wonder if this is a model to apply to a capitalist society: Where you have a CEO doing their regular thing, but also a political officer making sure society is not disadvantaged. Hard to pull off without falling into totalitarianism I guess.
Who is choosing the CEO and political officer?
Companies are formed by shareholders to make money in some venture for the shareholders. People can pursue their social objectives through other types of organizations. Perhaps governments that impose regulations and taxes. I myself support moderate taxes and light regulations.
To the extent that companies focus on anything other than money for the owners, it is a failure by the owners to reign in the CEO. The CEO might want to get a fat paycheck for not much performance. The owners want to delegate everything to the CEO. After all, we’re all lazy humans.
So you would have no issue with owners lobbying to change the law so they make even more money, right? As you said, more money is the only goal.
What would you say if it's you who is worked to death? See, everybody thinks they will be an owner, a master if you will in this system. But it's more likely you would be another sla.... ahem... valued employee.
The richest countries all have strong rights, legally and also informally expected rights. The richest companies have confident people who have lots of options, not 12-hour-a-day slaves.
Because nowadays almost all money is made using the mind, so there’s a natural relationship between a higher human development index and my net worth. (I mean I’m a normal human with empathy who also enjoys other people doing well, but even a sociopath could see they’ll make more money in the US than in either a totalitarian state or a government-less state - North Korea vs Haiti).
But all that is besides the point. Companies are single-purpose entities. Like Unix programs - do one thing well. This is very hard, and goals should not be mixed. The one thing is making money for the shareholders by doing X.
For the type of worker protection you would argue for, you need other types of organizations like unions, governments, political parties, etc.
This is why you need capitalism and democracy to make a thriving society.
If AI really kills as many jobs as predicted, we will definitely have to rethink society. It doesn't really make sense that a technology that improves overall productivity of society ends up making large segments of the population suffer. We need to find a way to have everybody benefit from progress and not just a few at the top.
Because some highly paid people lost their jobs we need a new vision for society? Sure, it sucks to be laid off but you talk as if there's mass unemployment and droves of people suddenly living in squalor. Don't be so dramatic.
I definitely agree in situations where the company is doing poorly. If a company has found a way to become more efficient then bosses probably do deserve bonuses.
I see you're assigning this failure to reaganomics, are you then ready to assign all the successes to reaganomics too? i.e. The US became the largest exporter of IT and software, the US corporations put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, with US online companies being 90% of the top companies in the world.
Are you going to say that this is due to reaganomics too? Or only bad things get attributed to it?
Shopify is a Canadian company, not that it matters for my question.
As a small-business Shopify merchant, I would appreciate more competition in the market.
Genuine question: Isn't it a pretty crowded space? Do not SquareSpace, Square, Wix all have variations of Shopify products/offerings?
Wix/Squarespace, at least last time I checked, treated e-commerce as an add-on to their core service (building websites.) Square is a payment processor which with an e-commerce add-on, but is heavily templated.
Disclosure: my current employer
The main quest / side quest analogy works so so well!
> “There’s no cuts coming for us,” Harley Finkelstein told The Canadian Press. “We’re in a really good place.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/9494197/shopify-outlook-no-layoff...
Once a coach has to say "[player] has my absolute confidence in their success," you know the player is ~2 weeks from being benched.
Coaches and players... they talk about each other a lot.
Similarly, you don’t ask tech companies if they’re doing layoffs when the sector is booming.
That the question is even asked probably shoots the probability of benching/layoffs up to some ridiculous amount to begin with.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=taoiseach%20has%20full...
Might be true in other countries but I'm old enough to see this pattern play out a few times.
Or a sign of the kind of delusional optimism that leads to over-hiring.
Shame - Shopify is a fun place where I've learned a ton. We were just getting a cool Data product off the ground.
Well, if anybody's got a need for a Staff/Lead Data Engineer (Remote EST) with experience in Scala (+cats/fs2), Python, go who has spent the last 10+ years building Data Products on BI, then Hadoop, then GCP (+ the Apache Zoo, lately namely Kafka/Iceberg/Beam), my email is in my profile. :)
Have a great day!
An organization that has nothing but fairly senior researchers working on separate projects might need little management. An organization with lots of more junior engineers working on something like a rocket (where every part depends on every other part) might need more overhead.
Unrelated, I think that we should stop calling workers individual contributors. I think "workers" is a more fitting description.
"Individual contributor" makes the worker seem smaller and less impactful, as if management is contributing in a way that's superior and bigger than the individual. In reality, only the workers work, and managers manage, doing less work the higher up on the ladder they go.
Don't believe me? Here's a list of CEOs that somehow managed to be CEO of multiple companies at once.
- Jack Dorsey
- Jeff Bezos
- Elon Musk
- Carlos Ghosn
And yet, my employer forbids me from having more than one day job.
It arose from the assumption that managers have finite amounts of time and energy to spend with their people and their jobs.
Analyzing British military leaders, Hamilton found that the leaders could not effectively control more than 3-6 people. These figures have been generally accepted as the "rule of thumb" for span of control ever since, at least in the military where the bulk of my management experience lies.
Research that I have seen hints that people who were in I shaped teams (i.e. single person reporting to a manager) and V shaped teams (2 people reporting to a manager) were much unhappier than larger teams.
Similarly, somewhere close to 10 is when the there is just not enough 'managing' or mentorship happening. I have seen that work only in cases where most of the ICs are senior/staff level and are effectively self-managing.
https://jobs.netflix.com/culture
Also there is benefit of flat orgs which comes with higher ratio in terms of meeting reduction and also communication efficiency both top down and bottom up.
Back in 2019, I was contacted by Shopify for a job opportunity. After acing multiple remote interviews, their recruiter couldn't contain their excitement. They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Imagine my surprise when, after enduring a 15-hour economy class flight with barely any time to recover, I received a call from the recruiter. They casually informed me that the team had decided to put me through five grueling back-to-back interviews, including a whiteboard session and a pair programming assignment. Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided.
What followed was an unmitigated disaster. The first interview bombarded me with ecommerce questions, completely unrelated to my field of expertise. The pair programming session was a nightmare, as I was handed a barely functional laptop that delayed the start by 20 minutes, and then given just 30 minutes to complete the task without any assistance.
Bear in mind, I was already physically and mentally drained from the arduous journey.
While the remaining interviews were passable, they were nothing to brag about. After being sent home with the promise of a call, I received a cold rejection a week later, citing a lack of experience based on the onsite interviews.
Looking back, I'm grateful I didn't sacrifice everything for a company with a track record of questionable practices and frequent layoffs.
One of them was a zoom call THAT I WAS ON BY MYSELF AND BEING RECORDED. I was told it was going to be a three hour pairing exercise and _after the interview started_ dude told me he would be available for questions but ultimately wouldn't be involved. I'm still angry at myself for agreeing to go through with that.
After that I had a second phone screen with the same recruiter - which I suppose was some sort of behavioral interview? I failed because I got the rejection after that with no feedback. Looking back, I got the impression they already had someone in mind but needed to tick some boxes or something - like show they interviewed multiple people for the role.
Knowing a few people that do work at Shopify I get the impression they are very particular about their cultural fit so maybe that was it.
Was that your first tech onsite? The onsite is an interview you have to pass, you're not guaranteed an offer. Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
Honestly, sucks to fly out far and get rejected but that's part of the process my guy. Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
Why would I think I'd need to go over another round of interviews after spending over 4 hours interviewing remotely, plus interviewing with engineers, to do it all over again?
For bigger orgs, this is a chance to sanity check team fit and potentially re-route if longer-term interests align better with some other team. For startups, it can be more of a vibe check.
I have several reasons for not bringing my personal hardware to a corporate interview, and a couple about the specific situation as described:
* I wouldn't travel with my laptop to an on-site that was described as a meet-and-greet.
* The recruiter promised suitable hardware would be available at the surprise technical on-site interview: "Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided."
* For many companies processing corporate data on personal, not-managed-by-the-business hardware is a firing offense.
* Grabassery happens, but if it's clear that my potential employer is an established company that is unable to plan ahead far enough to ensure that the interview has the hardware and personnel required for the interview, that's a _huge_ red flag for me... and one that's good to get out of the way early.
I’m not really “in tech” but this sounds like some bullshit for me. What if you don’t have a personal laptop? All I’ve got is a desktop machine, because my personal devices aren't for work.
> Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
What an absurd practice.
Indeed. If it takes 5 interviews after 4 hours of remote interviewing your hiring process is completely broken. Giant red flag.
After after going through a whole crapload of interviews, "most" onsites definitely are not 5 hours. They certainly are a thing. Some are even longer. But out of around 25 interviews, only three places requested that much time (I declined two of them).
I respectfully declined, telling her that because I was going to do the same long trip about 2 months later, I didn't want to fly. I told her that I would understand if they decided to pass, and no hard feelings.
Instead, she got one of the founders to interview me (Bel!!) And after that they decided to give me an offer. Everything resulted great for all of us, and I had a job waiting for me later that year.
I understand we may be desperate when looking for a job. But trust me that hiring managers are also generally in a hurry to fill positions. I know this bc I've hired plenty of people (both tech, HR, and g&a) in my career.
When hiring people, I ended up making similar concessions for the right candidate.
Remote interviews are generally phone screens. Aka just weeding out candidates.
On site interviews are the real killer.
That it is unpleasant for the potential hire doesn't really say much about the interests of Shopify. For senior engineers this probably is a bad strategy, but maybe not for entry-level or intermediate engineer who they will push around for a few years. Forcing you to jump through hoops may actually get them exactly the kind of employee they want.
If that's a useful thing for your software development company to do, it is a bad place to work and it should work to improve it.
But it’s easy for me to believe that the recruiter deliberately mislead the candidate about the on-site. I have experienced on-sites that were indeed more about meeting the team, having more casual technical discussions and being judged for “culture fit” (which has its own problems, but that’s another discussion).
It’s not unreasonable to take the recruiter at their word and be upset about the unexpected challenge, especially after a rough travel itinerary.
The role I’m currently hiring for, the face to face literally is just a meet and greet. All the technical stuff will be done remotely.
Also I wouldnt be surprised if the recruiter lied. I’ve had so many negative experiences with recruiters over the years that I’ve learned to trust very few and those who I do trust I now work exclusively with.
There's a reason Shopify on your resume opens a lot of doors. They don't compromise on engineering.
Whenever I hear this, I immediately think "dick measuring contest" and take the team far less seriously. A lot of these companies think they're training astronauts for the dregs of space when really they're just trying to build efficient database apps.
Am I reading this right that they decided they had too many managers, and are laying off some? They don't say it clearly in which direction they thought they were unbalanced, but I think that's the implication of "activities rather than crafter-driven outcomes", or just what is supposed to be the obvious answer when anyone says this is unbalanced?
> too many and you add heavy layers of process, approvals, meetings and… side quests (emphasis mine)
and
> A more fit for purpose Shopify centered on its main quest has less scope creep, fewer meetings, and more shipping great features for our merchants. (emphasis mine)
https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...
>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
Ok, can we consider this in your compensation discussions this year? That you mindlessly followed the crowd and left your company structurally weak? Or do we think you're going to shoot for record compensation this year?
Many important revenue driving products have been mangled by having their teams entirely removed, with pages going completely unanswered.
In at least one case, it seems like an entire team was cut in error.
The company was seriously negatively impacted, but the share price hasn't budged. To the extent that share price is connected to reality, I imagine it will take while for the market to notice the impacts of a layoff
1) wage suppression
2) by hostile take overs inside the company by MBAs, the phase lag between the layoffs and impact on velocity or the bottom line is too long. The second order fire that comes months later gives them an option to look like a hero again.
Most MBAs burn an asset for a short term gain. Period.
Businesses are path dependent, you can't just go "oh, not enough people hire more, oops! too many, fire some!".
For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
Most recent layoffs have been framed around needing to focus the company due to economic and market headwinds. This reads like AI has transformed the mission.
What does "A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible" mean here?
I think this is what is meant here[1]. Not copilot, but the idea is the same.
It is interesting, because 'prompt engineering' is being discussed in the same context. In the video, you will note several interesting bugs generated by GPT. Is it not exciting to see all those bugs in the next few years?
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y7GRYaYYQg
I guess their idea of AI is someone using the ChatGPT API. Good luck if they think they will "hack" some revolutionary AI together with a cowboy hacker culture.
"safety" stocks like AAPL are at or near all-time highs
real estate has budged slightly, but a rounding error off of the gains made in the last few years
even employment...tech hiring is getting hit but lots of other employers in retail, food & beverage are reporting record hiring and even wage increases
if there is a "crash", it hasn't happened yet
you may just end up with a sucky decade of stagflation...you are poorer every day, but just not dramatically so
But even if that is not your intention, it can come out as dismissive. Many people do worry about the future for very good reasons.
Plan for the future, good or bad, but don't dwell on what you can't control.
They affect me. I don’t give a fuck what the sun does everyday if I can’t pay my rent.
> “la de da nothing is wrong xd it is what it is” attitude
You misunderstood, no one above was taking that attitude.
Easy not to worry when you can't fathom that it may happen to you or your peer.
The other headline is that LLM and ChatGPT is reshaping the tech landscape. Tech companies are laying off engineers so they can hire AI/LLM engineers to compete with ChatGPT. Based on my limited knowledge, OpenAI is head and shoulders above everyone else. Google's Bard is a distant second.
In Jan/Feb posted the exact same job (an additional position) and got over 300 resumes including from ex-FAANG folks who we generally don't see applying).
Something sure has changed imo, and I also personally do believe things are about to get much, much worse for many people.
QoL for most Americans will continue to drop to match USA's precipitous decline in geopolitical status, but even Russia rebounded after just a couple decades. Hey, we got a bunch of O&G as well.
Yeah, not as bad as the CEO laying off 900 people via zoom, and then plying for sympathies at how hard this decision is for him to do.
our entire economy is out of whack in so many areas.
They are treating you like an adult by giving you a nice severance package. I don’t understand the need for people to have companies admit they were wrong.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
https://techcouver.com/2021/01/06/shopify-to-double-engineer...
Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
Also, this is largely a coordinated effort from activist investors specifically targeting large tech salaries. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce...
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
source: I was a Shopify employee until today and can confirm my salary was closer to FAANG than not.
there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this
Shopify wasn't paying like FAANG, but also not like a startup. I would say 75% of a FAANG.
The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.
Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.
Feels so incredibly backward.
And yes I know its "stock performance" but what do you think drives this? With executive compensation mostly related to stocks, of course at the end of the day, thats what they want to drive up.
I settled into a role of research software engineer, where I do both applied research and development, applying a lot of compiler-ish stuff to different domains within cybersecurity, such as building out control flow graphs from binaries, thinking about how to instrument assembly code efficiently, fast pattern matching, and static analysis, where I am currently. The role fits me like a glove, but it isn't for everyone. In my job search, I started at, "I want a job doing compiler work," and eventually broadened scope a few times until I landed on, "I want a job where compiler-type approaches are on the table of possibilities." This offers a wider variety of work, which I like.
I can discuss more over email (check my HN profile) if you'd like, but most of what I know is US-centric due to how funding works for these types of research. Larger orgs like FAANGs also have it, but the pool is much more competitive, as you'd expect.
Those parts you mentioned like the static analysis or control flow graphs sounds cool
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/25/britons-nee...
While I agree that this is a naive belief to have (at this point in my career I think there's almost a slightly negative correlation between skill and TC) the general talent pool for software engineers has, at least in my experience, dropped tremendously while TC has exploded.
The most important skills for getting high paying jobs in the last few years has been grinding leet code, then grinding systems design etc, etc. Software engineers no longer have "rare/valuable" skills, they have highly commodified, easily replicable skills (at least at the interview level).
Software engineers today simply aren't that skilled (at least on average) despite what they want to believe. It reminds me a lot of dotcom bubble where anyone with a pulse that could turn on a PC could get a high paying job.
AI is already displacing some people from their work. I hate both absolute capitalism and socialism/communism. How can AI help us find a sweet spot?
But what is going away, permanently, is the space between extremes. Pour one out. I miss it already.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
Is there evidence of this now?
What I see is a small fraction of the open roles I'm used to seeing.
Compensation, on the other hand, is the same at these big companies. If not even higher than it was a couple years ago.
"Back where you started" with a now highly demotivated team isn't quite back where you started.
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
But they also captain their first large enterprises: do they know what they're doing? Can they transition these firms into businesses that will endure? Or will they capriciously chase shiny objects while they waste the trust and goodwill of investors, the people who work there now, and the people who will want to work there in the future? They might have seeded the garden, but it took thousands of smart people to build it up, and it takes a constant supply to maintain it.
A new CEO will probably be rich, sure, but not "endow a historical dynasty" rich, and might know how to take a successful company and reposition it for the long term. Maybe the younger guys can do it. But it would just be for vanity at this point.
Musk has reminded me that even billionaires are one accidentally legally binding agreement away from pissing away $40B
There is no tangible difference between being worth $1B and $100B beyond social cachet. It is impossible to spend meaningful money at that level.
Then why are they compensated like they're gods?
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
Shopify was just a really fun place to work. And in part this was because they did a really good job of interviewing. Technical, yes, but in particular behaviorally.
So I can honestly say that many of the colleagues I know being let go are truly great colleagues. They were some of the most impactful people I worked with in my org (discovery) and they are a great get for any company.
The interview was conducted by the recruiter and while she didn’t flat out ask personal questions, she asked questions that would almost cause me to reveal personal information such as my marital status and sexuality. It was not fun coming with made up responses to avoid that because it’s none of her business.
There’s a reason interviews should stay professional. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued.
With that said, there are lots of reasons why a company might want to vet candidate attitude besides discriminating based on protected characteristics.
Out of curiosity, what kind of questions did you find invasive or discriminatory?
I get that it's totally an innocent intent, but there are much better ways to assess a candidate's soft skills, that is strictly related to their professional experience.
(The two options that work here are to post something thoughtful and substantive, or not to post.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Many if not most people find us a desirable attribute in coworkers and workplaces. I get that it's not for everyone, but not every workplace is a good fit for everyone.
I think you're getting some rude comments because of exactly this fact
fwiw, when I interview candidates in a technical interview, I still attempt at some small talk to get a sense of "can I have a normal conversation with this person"
(appreciate the sensible responses btw!)
1. That is a very deterministic statement 2. This is a part of the process, not the entire process. There are still technical elements tested during the interview. 3. The signal that they are looking for, but do not tell candidates, is a story about overcoming obstacles.
What I will say about the lifestory, is that it aligns with the skillset required to do well in a corporate environment. Namely telling stories, being relatively interesting, and having some ability to sell yourself and your accomplishments (in addition to being technically competent which is tested elsewhere).
But then again, that's probably why the environment seems 'fun'
Just because Shopify might name it something specific, doesn't mean it's all that unique. Some companies hold this potion entirely on a first/second phone call, others might having an initial section of the interview dedicated to talking about yourself and your experience.
Not sure how this weeds out non-native or non-extroverted people, both of whom are very capable of talking about their experiences. It would be great if you wouldn't infantilize them.
People who mentored me, who work hard, and do high quality work, and people who really carried the best of culture of the company (both technical and personal culture).
Really a shame to see this happen.
I'm bummed to hear about the layoffs, I hope the culture doesn't suffer too much. Shopify Ottawa was genuinely warm and familiar in a way few tech offices are able to be.
Sadly I got vetoed by one interviewer for an inelegant game of life solution (first time I’d ever seen GoL and I got bogged down in the middle logic) - never been so disappointed ever as every interview I had went really well on a personal level and (with the exception of that one) all my code was fine.
I hope to see Shopify continue to do well, I’ve used it for over 10 years and love using the platform.