Great benefits, great culture on engineer level, risky for APAC team
Pros
- Great compensations and benefits - Work from home, flexible working hours - Good work life balance if you do not need to stay up late for cross time zone meetings; but you can start work late the next day if needed - Great engineers in APAC - talented, responsible, produces high quality codes and always willing to help out. No blame culture. One of the best teams I've worked with.
Cons
- Always a risk working in APAC, with most of the teams in NA and EMEA time zones. It's hard to get impactful projects here, therefore limited career advancement (depending on what you're looking for). Hard to even keep your job despite good performances. My team in APAC was recently made redundant despite having the best engineers, and producing solid technical designs and code. - Lost of trust in the senior leaderships for my team. Politics were observed and felt by the engineers even. The good leaders were moved to other roles or have left. The SLT we ended up with seems to have more interests in their own KPIs than Shopify's overall goal, and definitely does not care about the growth of the eng team. The SLT told us one thing but told upper management a different story. Eventually the eng team got the blame for what was directed by the SLT, despite having recommended the green(er) path. Unfairly called the team out for slow delivery (opposite to the comments from our prior SLTs) despite the amount / quality of work the team has produced. - Constant reorganization. - Constant tech changes. While keeping up with latest technologies is good for tech firms, constant tech overhaul seems unnecessary - especially for something that is working well. Disruptive and imo not putting talents to best use. Why not focus on improving the product?
