Good core product, company suffers from mismanagement and bad actors - Senior Data Engineer Shopify Employee Review

1.0
6 Feb 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay was good while it lasted. Benefits also, but I've heard they've been cutting them where possible

Cons

The founder is somehow very extremely hands-on and also very out-of-touch. I got the impression he is just surrounded by sycophants and has kind of lost sight of reality. Every person in leadership I encountered directly was either a competent person who just wanted to keep their head down and collect a check and so allowed terrible decisions to just pass by, or someone who seemed to be aggressively incompetent and toxic. I went to one offsite and the director who was supposed to plan the day for like 50 people was too hungover to function. For failures, there was a constant blame game perpetrated by the source of said failures. Somehow one megalomaniac engineer who was well known to be underqualified and dishonest was allowed to control a major company directive for at least a year making the work of like 100 engineers downstream of him completely pointless. There are talented people there, but they are underleveraged into cynicism. Vibes are culty and weird also They were also doing constant silent layoffs the entire time I was there. After receiving very positive feedback overall, I was laid off before my first performance review without reasonable severance.

Explore other reviews about Shopify

5.0
2 Jul 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Amazing company with incredible product

Cons

None that I can think of

2.0
29 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Kind and talented co-workers - Generous AI token spend - Fairly transparent company (has been getting less transparent over the years) - Lots of opportunity for impact

Cons

- Product management discipline is quite lacking since the new CTO joined - Microsoft culture is adding more chaos and stress, and causing projects to actually go slower - Managers are afraid to tell the truth to Mikhail about the loopholes in engineering; they just want to look good, so they rush their teams to ship crap - Top engineering leaders are moving out of management roles or leaving the company - Tobi used to be far more involved in ensuring a high engineering bar, but seems to have handed over the reins to the new Microsoft regime

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