The following is an excerpt from Niya Dragova's weekly Candor newsletter: ****************************************************** Inside Shopify's Exodus What’s happening at Shopify is war - Tobi is rumored to have pushed out 35% of the C-suite. Meanwhile, salaries have gone even lower now that everyone is “remote”. Not looking great. The stock trades at 87 times trailing gross profit I never thought I’d see a company with a worse pay model than Amazon. Under the guide of ”everyone is remote”, SHOP is trying to pass off lower pay compared to the rest of the industry. With the stock trading so high - where exactly is the upside? TLDR: Strong performance but below-average compensation compared to peers.
heard rumors that amazon is planning to edge out shopify with a competing product anyways.
Sounds like something that's easier said than done and also something Amazon should have addressed sooner. Granted, they may have wanted to avoid cannibalizing Amazon.com. Shopify is an entrenched player and a hundred billion dollar company. And not a fake billion dollar company like snowflake, their p/e is high but not that outrageous. I genuinely do wish you guys the best of luck though, competition is always good.
Snowflake is a great product. Use it to know it
It is clear Tobi is not interested in overpaying the employees. His approach is working. The fact that Shopify is able to move fast with this structure makes me think that he believes the marginal gains you get by bringing in even stronger engineers at a higher price point is not worth it. I can bet he thinks that combined time to hire 2 good engineers at $200K each and total productivity is better than aiming to hire one very good engineer at $400k.
If he cared about talent, he would at least move Shopify's HQ from Ottawa to Toronto.
He probably still gets the best talent... in Canada. Because Canada doesn't pay a whole lot in general. It is like how Atlassian just pays enough to attract Australian talent.
Can confirm. If it wasn’t for the massive stock appreciation the pay is way below market.
The comp is trash and Tobi likes it that way. Not sure what the strategy is. Let mediocre coders spin in circles and see what happens? All the talent is leaving as soon as their initial grant vests.
6 months!
Paywall by pass: https://outline.com/Kk8huV
Not sure I get how the 40% stuff fits in with the rest of that email.The rest of it seems similar to the basecamp stuff only perhaps executed better? Any one have some internal context? I've heard the response was mostly "shrug, get back to work" internally?
That email was from last summer (early into the pandemic). Tobi got some feedback from it, especially that 40% better part. Suspect it was only brought up because it sounds similar to basecamp.
Anywhere I can read the full newsletter?
Anyone know what Shopify pays in SF/NYC? Are they at least consistent between Canada and the US in this remote first world?
US base is usually the same number as CAD base but in USD so 30% higher. SF used to be the only city they paid a lot more. Used to have no official difference for NYC or other hcol, but people there usually had better competing offers than lcol so avg was higher. Might be different now.
This is incorrect. I know L7s in Canada making 140k CAD but L6s in US making 160k USD
What are TC numbers for sde 2-3?