Pros
- Easy mission to get behind: make commerce better for everyone - Visionary CEO - Working from home can be awesome - Great peeks + benefits - The guru role will give you a strong knowledge base not only of the Shopify platform, but also allows you to learn how to be an expert in commerce in general. If you are into business/entrepreneurship, this is a great way to learn and get paid at the same time. - People you work with are really genuinely nice. Your squad becomes your family. - Very progressive company in many ways when it comes to inclusion, diversity, mental health, and self care
Cons
Shopify is a great company to work for. If you are able to embrace the role of guru until mastery and then move on to something better, I think it’s a great stepping stone into other areas of the company. The cons below reflect my views of guruland. - Some gurus are straight up smarter + show more potential than their squad leads. From a high performer perspective, it’s tough to be coached by someone you know you can do the job better than. Unfortunately, if you want to advance and/or keep your position, you will need to get this person on your side and let them believe they are helping you so that they feel like they’re good at their job. - Reward for high performance is minimal. Even if you exceed your KPIs by 2x or 3x the expectation, the alleged “maximum” increase after a performance review is not much. If someone is putting up metrics that are equivalent to the work of 2 or 3 people, should they be getting paid only slightly more than the weakest link? - 30 min lunch is too short in my opinion. The issue is that scaling an extra 15 or 30 mins across hundreds of employees equates to a serious loss of productivity. I still think it would be worth it for employee morale, but there’s no data to show that. - Middle management and upper-middle management have some blind spots when it comes to the front line. Sometimes it feels like they are too removed. I’d love to see them hop back into the job 1 full day per quarter to regain perspective. - I don’t think the comp increase to go to a squad lead matches the responsibility increase. - advancement into another role is a grind. You can go through multiple rounds of interviews to find out that they are no longer hiring for that role. - internal talent movement can be better leveraged. The talent available in guruland is very high, but I feel like many high performers are not being used to their full potential. - the kool aid is good at first, but after a while it’s just kool aid, and you can spot it very easily - sometimes you will interact with incompetent and or disrespectful people.