Shopify Senior Software Developer reviews

- Not what it used to be anymore, during my 1.5 years the company changed from caring about employees, their mental well-being and making sure its a great fun place to be to the complete opposite of that. - Layoffs: after the first 10% layoffs, secret layoffs happen all the time where people are kept in the dark, then recently another 20% layoff that targeted mostly new hires in the EMEA region and around 90% of folks in Germany, I wonder how the company will ever be able to grow if it keeps laying off people who have just gathered enough shopify context and domain knowledge to be rockstars. - Lots of toxic positivity and mumbo jumbo positive words that are really used as a glass ceiling for career advancement nothing more, I applied for a staff position and was downleveled to L6 despite my interview having nothing negative and passing the interview, I was told by the recruiter that ill be able to get to that level after a year which obviously didn't happen, the ones that get promoted to such levels are the ones who've been there for 4 years or longer, they're not necessarily stronger/better engineers or have more experience, just the domain knowledge because at Shopify all the tech/tooling and knowledge is domain specific not really technical. - Senior management and company keeps changing direction every week causing radical changes in org which no one likes, like pushing facebook as a worktool on people to use and reducing slack usage, cutting off vital meetings from everyone's calendars reducing any actual chance for communication and aligning on blockers in a remote first environment. - Impact reviews and performance reviews are very subjective, its really more about your managers opinion of you and how much they like you than your actual performance and knowledge. Impact, mastery, scope, level, opportunity are all correlated with each other, and your manager is really the one that decides who to give that opportunity to have a higher impact or to be inline for a promotions and there's nothing you can do about it. - Its very difficult to gather context and knowledge that you need at Shopify since everything is domain specific, you have to constantly pull knowledge and ping people to understand anything or get anything done - New tools and technologies change every 2 weeks, not necessarily for the better, the latest tools were a disaster and no one really liked them and they never worked as expected: ex: ramp, workplace, etc.. during my 1 year I already changed managers and ended up with a worse newly hired manager that created a competitively toxic culture based on favoritism