[hbsbsbsndk]

Having worked at Shopify, Tobi is 100% a try-hard Elon wannabe. Anil is correct that this is about performing "being a CEO" for the sake of his image among his peers.

My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process. The "other" category includes examples like "Olympic athlete".

[kunzhi]

I know some folks who work and have worked at Shopify and their experiences track with this statement.

I was told that within Shopify there's something called a "Tobi Tornado" - basically when Tobi swoops in on a program / feature and demands significant change in short order. Carefully planned initiatives can be blown up and then it's maximum effort expected to turn it around.

What everyone had in common was saying that Tobi is quite a smart person and often not wrong, but he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.

[skrebbel]

Fwiw this is exactly what I'd expect a product founder to do. If I wanted to work at a bank I'd go work at a bank. It's so easy for groups to over-cover-their-asses, go for maximum safety everywhere, design-by-committee all the things, etc. I think this is almost unavoidable in a large org. It's the task of a decent product minded founder to add some balance to this.

I've no idea whether Tobi gets it right, just.. this isn't necessarily a bad thing!

[hbsbsbsndk]

There's a kind of survivorship bias to people saying "he's very smart". I was in a neglected part of the engineering org far away from his micromanaging. If he had been showing up and complaining about my projects I wouldn't have stayed for years.

[rchaud]

The PC term for this is "founder mode".

[AbstractH24]

> he's still human, and so there's simply no way he can make 100% good calls because he can't always have full context.

This is a good thing for all us humans to remember

[jasondigitized]

This is also called "Swoop and Poop" or "Show up and Throw Up"

[TZubiri]

This sounds like any normal privately owned company or hierarchical organization to be honest.

[skrebbel]

Another counterpoint, he's been a pretty pro-nuance voice for a long time, very un-Elon like. Eg I still frequently quote some of this thread to people: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1210242184341000192.html

My favorite part:

> I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not.

> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company.

Obviously, as I'm replying to someone with first-hand Shopify experience, which I don't have, take all this as you wish. I only know the Twitter Tobi. (and I think his "AI first" memo is ridiculous, to the point that I struggle to imagine that the same person wrote this twitter thread)

[hbsbsbsndk]

2019 public-facing Tobi is probably the least insane version. He has gotten worse and more egocentric (and more explicitly right-wing) since then.

Early (pre IPO) Shopify had a pretty toxic internal culture with a lot of drinking and sexual harassment. I was lucky to be there around the post-IPO, pre-pandemic era when there was a bit of structure and the techbros were getting reigned in a bit. Once the pandemic hit I think he just lost his mind.

[ed]

Counterpoint: externally, at least, Shopify seems to be a well run organization and that has to come from somewhere. (Parter for about 8 years.)

[pera]

Not from my point of view: Last year I paid for a product from a shop that was using Shopify, you would think that given that this was a one time transaction, once the payment has been processed they wouldn't keep storing your PII forever but guess what? A couple of months ago I was going to buy a product from a totally unrelated shop also using Shopify and as soon as I typed my email address they sent me an OTP to my phone to autocomplete all my personal details. So paying for a product equals to creating an account with Shopify.

This is incredibly shady and I wonder if it's even legal here in Europe.

[ysavir]

> My favorite stupid Shopify cult thing is the hiring page having a "skip the line" for "exceptional abilities" which explicitly lists being good at video games as a reason to skip the normal hiring process.

Hah! Now you have my curiosity. What do they replace the normal hiring process with? A game of LoL?

[mjburgess]

Some weak evidence of why "exceptional abilities" is not a bad idea, even if gimmiky, is that performance "at the extreme" is highly correlated. So that the people who tend, eg., to be concert pianists, tend also to be very accomplished artists, and the like.

So if you're hitting (a verifiable) top 0-0.5% in some field, there's a reasonable bias towards assuming a high general competence.

I did once hit 0.5 percentile in a multinational PHP exam in my teenage years however I did have a second window open with an interpreter running for the most fringe questions. -- who knows what that means.

[WJW]

Starcraft 2 is I think the preferred one.

[0x1ceb00da]

You gotta beat the boss to get a job.

[spacemadness]

That is one of the stupidest things I’ve read all day, and that’s saying something. Why are so many tech CEOs this childish?

[colechristensen]

Every group has these people. Whether it's churchgoers, world leaders, tech CEOs, high schoolers, beer league softball, or even chimpanzees. Social bullshitters who do most things for the image among a small group of peers. It's a good skill to recognize this kind of pattern and how so many kinds of patterns are the same things repeating themselves in a different environment.

[rchaud]

They've been slathered with money, PR and attention for years before even making a single penny in profit. At some point that creates a sense of cognitive dissonance that's hard to shake.

[MarcelOlsz]

Dinner party economics.

[BoGoToTo]

I remember one town hall where he was asked "If you had to start over again, what sort of company would you start?" and his answer was "I wouldn't, all the good ideas are already taken."

[JohnFen]

That's genuinely astonishing in its degree of ignorance.

[sulam]

That sounds too dumb to be true. As in, is there some missing context that this quote was forklifted from?

[85392_school]

The "skip the line" page: https://www.shopify.com/careers/extraordinary_0dac47b1-3275-...

[jnatz]

the irony in this page being poorly formatted on mobile with unintentional horizontal scroll

[dismalaf]

Dunno, Shopify is the second largest Canadian corporation, in a country ruled by a bunch of monopolies enforced by the government. Only RBC, a 161 year old bank, is worth more.

Tobi's doing something right.

[TZubiri]

The skip the line concept sounds interesting. I'm interviewing and some companies telling me they schedule an interview in 2 weeks feels like a light rejection / recognition that the skill has abundant offer.

It reminds me of the time I wanted to go out with a girl and she scheduled a date with me in 2 weeks, not a good outlook. I was happy to have a date so I just counted the days. When this happened with another girl I was less invested in, I told her to forget it, and she literally removed the guy she was seeing that week to go out with me.

I think that when the queue is too long, the solution is to cut the line or find another one (or participate in a meat market as a commodity amongst 100 for a low probablity of advancing for a low salary)

[ferguess_k]

Actually the investment banking industry seems to be doing this for ages.

And if people think about it, it's actually not too different from Leetcoding.

[medhir]

on the topic of hiring - the “life story” interview left a particularly bad taste in my mouth.

I didn’t click with the recruiter because she kept hounding me about why I didn’t finish college. Felt totally put on the spot in the most discouraging way, the whole thing seemed like a formal way to discriminate against those that don’t fit their in-group.

definitely felt a bit cult-ish overall.

[TZubiri]

It does say Top 100, and implies competitive gaming.

You made it sounds stupid. But being Top 100 in something with a huge global competitive base is not of useless or easy.

If you are offered a kid who spends 16 hrs per day competing and studying to be the best at something, and they can channel that energy at your company (with probably a shitty salary) wouldn't you take it?

[tschellenbach]

When I watch Messi play I think his technique is sloppy to be honest.

[Kalabasa]

Shopify has an esports team called Shopify Rebellion

[guywithahat]

Well having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ, and so you could make the argument that to be good (like professionally good) at video games means you're exceptionally intelligent. I certainly wouldn't list it in the list as you've described though.

[cadamsdotcom]

That statement, “ having a fast reaction time is directly correlated with your IQ”, is fascinating.

Care to share the evidence you’d use to back it up?