YouSaid · the spoken record

Farhan Thawar

lines on the record: 121
first: 2024-12-19
most recent: 2024-12-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure. So Twitter is probably the place I try to hang out the most, X at FNTower, and maybe I'll put that in the show notes. And then listeners for me. Yeah, I mean, I love to be challenged. I'm sure that there are people who are like, they heard something that I said and they're like, oh, that's super dumb. We do this instead. Or here's research that says that that won't work. I would love to hear more about these because I'm just, again, on a learning journey. And I did something stupid, very likely. I would like to learn a better way to do things. So I would love for people to like comment and say, hey, this is dumb. You should try this or that doesn't make any sense. I would love to learn more. So that's what I'm looking for.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, everyone's smart at something, right? So I was trying to figure out she was really good at this thing. Could she be good at something else?”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is one example of pulling somebody out of that environment. And I did have lots of other ones where I overhear someone and they're a designer or an engineer and I try to hire them into my company as well.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She moved from the retail world into the office world. And then I brought her on as my admin, and she became one of my recruiters. And I taught her how to recruit and talk to people. And she came with me at an info sessions. And over time, we actually hired many more people from the restaurant that were really, really good at their job. And what was amazing was, one, she was organized, but not e-organized. Like she had to teach her at Google Docs and G-Suite and everything else, but she was super smart, but just never had the opportunity. The coolest thing about this is that she ended up being She ended up taking over the one of the HR functions for us. And she had a college degree. And because of the work she'd done with us, she was able to parlay that into finishing her, like doing one more year and getting a university degree. And now she's a director of HR at a company, which is amazing from she went from that environment to this environment. And a lot of her people she pulled.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, again, this is another long list of reasons my wife is annoyed with me, but this is another one of them, where whenever we are out, I'm always scanning and I'm always scanning people and do I know anybody around whatever I like to scan for people and I have a good memory for faces. But in this case, we were at a restaurant and I saw a waitress doing a very, very good job, like an extremely like She was running between different tables. She was smiling on her face, taking everyone's order and like, you know, making sure that like there was a thing happening in the kitchen. She was kind of like doing a phenomenal job of organizing the entire crazy busy restaurant. And so in talking to her, I said, what do you do outside of this? Because you look like you're super. She's like, what do you mean? I'm just the waitress. And I said, well, would you like to, this is extreme labs. I said, would you like to, you know, work at extreme labs? You're like, what's that? So I explained it to her and I got her contact info. She came into the office and she first started off as our receptionist.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Points on better potentially. I think Steve Jobs had a similar thing. Like, hey, you can design anything, like everyone, everything's designed by people. I love that one too.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm like, I'm always trying weird things. And so that's why I say everything you know is wrong. Like, who knows what's possible? Just try different things.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I do. And it's on like a lot of my profile bios. And it is everything you know is wrong. And the reason I like that one, and people always like, what would you put on a billboard? And people always come back to me and say, that's like, they know that as my motto. And the reason for that is it's this notion of if all the knowledge you knew was incorrect, could you from first principles build up like a view of the world? And that's kind of how I like to think of things is that anything could be incorrect, even things that you think are correct, which is why, again, back to the, I like to experiment, I like to look stupid, because I'm always trying shit because I'm like, I don't know if even though you say this is correct, that this is going to work, right? Actually, one example my wife hates this is I have a Tesla and I routinely will switch gears without fully stopping the car, which you cannot do in a regular car, but like I'll be in drive and then I'll slow down to drive back up into my driveway. And while it's moving, I switch it into reverse. And like, you never would know that that's possible except for trying. And sometimes it goes beep, beep, beep, because you're going too fast. But like, and she hates it.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if I want to be like in the zeitgeist right now, but like the meta-ray bands are amazing. And the biggest thing about the red array bands was just that I think I never got into it and I saw people around me wearing it, but I only got into it when somebody said I'd never take my airpods with me anymore. And I was like, oh, I can swap two devices for one device because I always have sunglasses and an airpods because I go for a walk or listen to a podcast. And now I can just have one device. And this happened to me. I was at a, you know, in the summer, I was at a pool party. And someone called me and I just took it from my sunglasses and people were confused. It's like where I was taking this call from. They are the right amount of tech. Like they're unintrusive. You can't tell. They don't look like any tech. And then I also, I was playing soccer with my kids. I have three kids. I just turned the video on. And I was the goalie and they were taking shots and I was watching them. They had no idea that I was just recording and it was such a cool moment because I was in playing soccer with them. I wasn't with my phone. And I got to get this amazing set of video that I would never have gotten. So I really liked MetaRay events.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early tech early tech, yeah, and like if you, I think there was an Andreessen podcast where he said this is the closest thing to what a real startup looks like. So Halting Cash Fire is like an all-time recommend. Everybody has to watch it.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TV show like that, yeah. Yeah, one of my all time favorites is probably Halt and Catch Fire. I don't know if you've watched that.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A recent one was Challengers, the tennis movie, with Zendai. Yeah, just randomly I was at home and I put it on. And the cool thing about it was more the cinematography and music. They had this weird style art house style where they would be talking and music would get like super loud. It was very strange, but a very, very good movie. And then you saw you said movies and...”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 chapters, 12 stories, no breaks in between. It's just each one is super long. But it just goes into a problem at such depth that if you can maintain your focus to get through the depths of each problem, you will just learn something, just like that post by Paul Graham. Like, I loved that it was so long because I sent it to people and I said, the test here is, can you read it? Can you just get to the end? And not in a pejorative way. Like if you can get to the end, like you will extract the alpha from this post if you can read it all. So those are reality. Mana is like the opposite. It's very, very easy and easy to read.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one, so Toby has an annoyingly long set of books that he recommends, and they're all. They're usually It is a book about AI. And I think the most interesting thing about it, though, is about a future in which the AI, the humans what to do. So it's this idea of like, imagine in the future you came into work and the AI would tell you what emails to pay attention to or what dashboard to look at because something weird is going on. It takes that to an interesting level. So I would recommend reading that book. It's not long. That's fun. I think another book that I recommend to people, and it's kind of a weird one to recommend, but it's Business Adventures from John Brooks, like the famous, if you ask, I think it's Bill Gates, what his famous book of All Time is, it's this book. And the cool thing about the book is that it is not easy to digest for anyone with focus problems. Like, you know, Paul Graham wrote the post, How to Do Great Work, and it's super long. The best part about that post is that you have to be able to read the whole thing. And so the same thing with business adventure. I think each chapter is...”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out good information. I've had multiple people in a review process tell me that when I deliver the feedback, they would say, wow, I've been in the industry a long time. This is the best performance review I've ever had. And it's because the framework pulls out good information. So congrats to you. But I think it was funny that randomly I was coming on this podcast and I just wrote that article to my, that doc to my admin like two, three weeks ago and realized it's the same person.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'll say something maybe embarrassing for you. I've been using your performance management framework. From your first round review article, not knowing by the way that it was you, like I actually found it you being the famous Lenny podcaster, but the old days, maybe the Lenny the PM. And I remember reading this a long time ago and just copying, there's a Google link in there to a Google Doc link with a template for a performance review framework that I've been using for years. Literally every review I've done at Shopify uses that framework. And I was writing a post to my admin about how we can use LLMs to make it easier for me to write these reviews, even though obviously you have to read it all and go through it. But I was like, how can I generate some of this with an LM? And so I wanted her to send her the original article. So I went back to the first round of review, found the article, and said, oh my God, it's Lenny, like the same guy. So I will say one thing that's interesting about that framework is I've used it now for, you know, like I said, six years here, is that, and I don't think it's me. I think it's actually the framework pull.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at Facebooks worked on the Facebook app and we worked on that app. I was in the office when we submitted the iOS app every single day that week because it kept crashing. And we had obviously direct access to people at Apple, but like we ship a new app on Monday and it crashed, ship an app on Tuesday, not just us, but us, Facebook together. It would just, and so I remember that whole HTML5 fiasco from the inside.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I didn't take that into account because, again, I did like five or six. I literally put all of everyone together. I was running the group. I was like release captain. I would hang out with the React team in Meta. We were doing all the things. We became core contributors in React Native before we became core contributors in React because of all the things I was doing. And so I think just like knowing that I was going to go all out, I should have said, you know what? This is not going to fail. And I didn't have the confidence in that path. So I hedged, right? Hedging is the worst. And I remember the CTO at the time said, I'm wondering if I should force you to go reagnative. Like he literally said that. And I said, I will do, if you say that, I will do it. But it would have been his decision. And so he didn't do it. He didn't tell me to do it.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, one thing about my career as well is I don't really do anything halfway. And when I started looking into React Native, it was never just that I'm like, oh, let me look at the docs and like read and like build a thing. It's like I flew to Meta and met with the React team. I became a core contributor. I ran the React native working group. We became release captains for React Native. I knew that I was going to do all the things. So I'm like, and of course in React Native, you can also drop down to native and do things there that are not possible. So like I think I hedged incorrectly because I knew I was going to do all these things and I should have looked at my own thought process and say if I do all the things, can I fail?”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yeah, total failure. Sorry, the product is like super successful now. And we're all on React Native. And even the shop green app is on React Native. Everything's React Native. And we're like core contributors. It's all good. But I literally burned, I think, 18 months of time for 100 engineers as my first decision in the company.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all he said. Not like, hey, bad, good. He goes, Did you learn something? Like, it was like an epiphany for me, but he was like, this is a learning org. And I totally failed. And I told everyone I failed and my mistake and everything else. He goes, just tell everyone. Because he goes, do you know what mistake you made? And first, I was like, I don't think what mistake he's like, you didn't take, he goes, I will always come down harshly on people who do not take risks and you did not take a risk in this case. But if you take a risk and it doesn't work out, you'll never get in trouble because you took the risk and it was the right risk to take. But he goes, but you didn't take the risk. And so what I should have done, and by the way, even now, thinking back, it would be super hard to do. First week a job by, right? Is like take a risk on a platform that we've not launched in production app on. But he was correct in that we should have because we would have saved ourselves so much more time.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I went back and I said, Hey, everybody, I made a huge mistake. We just spent a year building this thing, it's in market, but we're going to have to rewrite. We're going to have to rebase back onto this iOS version. And I think I burned 18 months of time with like 100 engineers, like literally from the decision I made in the first week of joining Shopify. And Toby, when I went to Toby and I told him, I go, hey, man, I think I made this mistake and we have to do this. And it's going to cost us like, you know, 100 engineers, another six, whatever. And he looked at me and he goes, you should tell everyone this story.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A year later, we launched the iOS version and it was a huge success. And we then spent like another six months building the React Native version for Android and everything else. And we realized pretty quickly that React Native was the platform for the future. Like we're like, oh my God, this will allow us to have And by then, we had also lost a shop app, which is React Native. And so we learned a lot about this.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a new technology platform. And it was my first week, and I'm the mobile guy coming from Extreme Labs. They're like, Should we build this in React native? Or should we build this natively on the mobile platforms? And so I went through this evaluation, spent a lot of time, blah, blah, blah. And I came back with a hedged solution, which is kind of dumb. I said, let's do iOS in Swift, and let's do Android and React native. And the reason I said that was I said, I want to learn about React Native, and I think Android's the harder platform, so let's build that in React Native. But iOS on Swift, because that guarantees us a productive market. And we didn't have any React native apps in market at the time.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few. I'll say one thing, by the way, because I think I read this in Tim Ferris's book or on the podcast where he said, create a failure resume and write everything down. And I would not recommend doing this because I did this and I got super, I'm like a high energy happy guy. I wrote down like I have a note on my phone called failure resume and I wrote down all the times I failed. And it is depressing. So I would not encourage people to do that. But I'm happy to tell you about a few instances. Well, one is actually I've been laid off twice and people would not expect like, oh, like, you know, I'm doing this thing. And like I've been laid off twice and I think in both times it was the right thing. Like it was the right thing for the company, the right thing for me. And I kind of used that experience as like a way to reevaluate and eventually came out with my framework of how I want to spend time. But that's maybe a different story. I'll tell you about one at Shopify. The first week that I started 2019, we were rebuilding our point of sale system, which now does billions of dollars of GMV. But back then, we were like, let's rebuild it with a new U.S.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have like we have the F14 or something, right? Like, we do have these guardrails where I think we say, hey, like an engineering, you should have between eight and like 20. There are definitely people who have more and people who have less. But we do try to keep things as flat as possible because we do believe that it doesn't make sense to have like three people reporting to and then to somebody and then they only have three people like it's you just make a very deep hierarchy. We actually do see by the way Farther you are from Toby, we can see things in like the survey results, like the alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general. And that can be achieved by just having more direct reports per level.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That off the top of my head. So that helps. The other thing, the thing that it broke was, actually, this is Chamath. He came in and became our biggest investors. And he actually, he's obviously a smart guy. But he said the right thing, which is not, this can never work because then I would go into defense mode and explain to him why it would work. He just said to me, I'm not going to debate with you whether this works or not. But will it work at 400 people? And I said, probably not. He said, okay, so let's change it. And so we did then ended up putting a little bit more of a structure, but I went to, I made a few people directors and I forced them to have 40 direct reports each. Like I said, we're just going to make it still pretty flat. And then that did end up working because it still allowed them to use the system to unblock people versus like having to do a one-on-one every week or having to talk about things that potentially a system could unblock. And so I tried to figure out ways to systematize things.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just see if it's working or not. Because if two people are intensely on the computer, it's working. If one person is laying back or like, you're like, it's not working. So you could just walk up to them and be like, what's happening? But they would come and ask me questions and I could unblock them. Like, hey, we're blocked on this. We don't have this API. We need money for this machine, like whatever. And so the unscheduled one-on-ones ended up being like a real clarifying thing for me because I did scheduled one-on-ones my whole career and I realized after leaving like Microsoft for three years I'm like where are all those one-on-ones useful right once a week for three years right 151s so the unscheduled ones were though I was like when I knocked on my manager's door and said I have this problem those were important so that's what I created at Extreme and the 120 direct just it just grew over time I just didn't think I needed managers I was like let me unblock these people in another way and we came up with other things to systems to unblock them that didn't require a manager and I just also had a good memory I knew exactly everyone's skills and compensation you all”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demos with the clients every week because we're contract manufacturing for mobile that gave them feedback on whether they're going in the right direction. We had set working hours, which made things like super intense in the office. This is again like 2009 to 2013. So all these things didn't really need a manager. And what I realized was what the unblocking thing needed to manager. I'm blocked on this. Well, I said, okay, if I did have all these directors, I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports, and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones. Because you can't have 120 direct reports and do scheduled one-on-ones because you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, I'm going to be around a lot because I don't have a lot of one-on-ones. So we can do unscheduled one-on-ones. And what that means is if you are blocked, actually there's a famous picture where I had this weird cube desk where it was like a circle almost in the middle of the whole floor of engineers. And I was always there because I wasn't in a lot of meetings. And people, if they were blocked, they could just come up to me. The cool, actually, one cool thing about pair programming IRL is you can kind of look across.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so what ended up happening there was we started off small, right? It was 10 people when I got to Extreme Labs. I wasn't the founder, but I was very early on. And I just had a phone report to me. And then as we grew, I just kept having those people report to me and I was trying to figure out like, you know, we talked about like crafters and crafters paradise, this idea of like people don't really like their managers are useful. But I was trying to figure out could I solve the problems that they needed their manager for in other ways? So for example, what should I be working on? I was like, okay, well, we have product backlogs. Or I'm blocked on something. Or I need feedback on the product I'm building or I'm stuck on this technical problem. Like I tried to figure out ways to like not have managers be the answers to those questions. I'm like, there should be another answer. And so pair programming really helps you get unblocked quickly because you have another person that you can bounce technical ideas off of, having a product backlog can tell you what to work on. We had demos every week. Demos internally.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, there you go. And see, for us, actually, what I did my startup helpful, we hired, I had one or two engineers. And then I actually literally just hired four interns because you hired them in February for May. And because I was doing pair programming, I had to make sure I had four full times by then. So I hired the interns in anticipation of having the full times. And I literally had, I think it was, I was off by one week. So one intern had no pair for a week. But then after that in May, I had four full-time four interns and then they paired.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So every four months I did either a school term or a work term. So I was doing work in January sometimes and September sometimes. And it was super good because again, it also allowed me to be super intense at school for four months and then go to super intense work experience for four months. But yeah, it's a model that like I mean, I go to, I was just at Waterloo this week doing a talk. So I just like, I love that symbiotic relationship between Waterloo and employers. And by the way, not just Waterloo, right? Lots of schools do a summer program, UFT, and others. Lots of schools in the states.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's during years. So, what happens at Waterloo is what I did was I did eight months of school at the beginning, so two terms. My first co-op term was summer. But then it was work, school, work school alternating for the whole rest of my time at Waterloo.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason for that is because we want them to have a cohort because early talent is different than you and I who've been in the industry. We worked in office, we worked out of office, we're more comfortable with navigating like partnership discussions and like talking to people in different companies. But these people have not. They maybe have never worked anywhere. And so to not have the IRL component would do them a disservice. And so we specifically made it in those ports. And the people are traveling, by the way, like they're like moving to Montreal to do the internship. It's great. And then if you're a mentor or manager for one of the interns, you have to at least see them like IRL once a month. So we're kind of making these experiences. And of course, they'll have a cohort of dozens of people that will be with them along the way. And so we think that'll just make their experience better. And of course, nothing like typing someone on the shoulder and be like, have you seen this error before? And so it's easier in an early talent situation. And then, of course, over time, if they become full-time, they can still come to the office, right? It's coming if you want, but they can also go full remote.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I went to Waterloo. And so, yeah, hint hint. So I went to Waterloo and I did my co op and I did intern programs there. It was amazing, what a great experience because what ends up happening is you leave Waterloo with your degree, but also with two years of experience because I did six four month work terms, 24 months, and you end up walking. I mean, I think one of the big parts of it is just interview skills because I interviewed for 10 plus jobs every four months. And I did that six times. And so you come out having done lots, you have a lot of interview experience, but you also have work experience. And so just taking that to the next level, Shopify has always had interns. And what I felt like we needed to do was, again, restart this notion of early talent in the ecosystem. There's one, I would say one or two big differences with our intern program. One is we're making them come in three days a week versus full remote. And the reason for that is early. And we're doing it just in three offices right now, Montreal, Toronto, and Ottawa.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's great for everybody because now they're realizing that they also realize that these people are super valuable and they bring together a completely different set of skills. And by the way, here's a secret impair programming, interns will always be more intense than the full-time. And so that also helps the flywheel of intensity go.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you telling me I could hire a thousand people over the year and they will come to work with an LLM and a brain because they're growing up in the age of AI, they will be useful to us because they come from a different generation and they have like in our case in commerce they have a different experience about shopping and AI and bots and chat and voice and like all these things they'll be useful to us. We'll teach them some stuff as well. And then together we can decide if they might end up going somewhere else, in which case we have the Shopify imprint on them going to whatever other company, which is, I think, a positive. Or they might stay at Shopify and be useful over a longer period. Like it seems like win-win-win. The other thing that was cool is after I did that tweet, a bunch of other CTOs messaged me and said, hey, we're going to hire a thousand one interns to beat you guys. And I'm like, great. Like if we can, just from that one tweet, if I can get like the early talent ecosystem restarted here after a really tough last few years and layoffs.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's two things. One is some people look at an internship program as like community service. Let's give back to the community. Let's hire early talent. And I'm like, hold on a sec.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would love to do. It's hard to do with the volume of resumes we get, but we do do it at scale with the internship program. So, like 2025, we're going to hire a thousand interns. And that is going to give me a thousand job trials to pick the top X percent of those to come to Shopify full time.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In that first period, we actually have a survey that goes over Slack that says, hey, how happy are you with the person that you hired? And that should, in conversation with the person, you should give them the feedback to figure out, hey, are there things you need to adjust to kind of better fit in and make sure the expectations are set up? But then also together with the person figure out, hey, if you're not feeling this, let's find you either a different role in the company or somewhere else because we want the people here to have high impact, but that person should have high impact somewhere. Could be at Shopify, could be in the same role, could be in a different role, could be at a different company. But that's like a good thing for everybody.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such an interesting insight, right? Your resume should be a why. Why did you go from this company to this? Like, that's the interesting part. Not that you were a PM at Microsoft and a PM at Stripe. It's like, why did you switch from Stripe to like Microsoft to Stripe? There's something interesting there. And so the life story is trying to pull that out. It's like, why did you make the decisions? What did you do in your past that was like interesting? Are you curious? Do you have, like I always fought, I read this great book, Range by David Epstein? That book was maybe one of the hardest books for me to read in my life because every page I was like, I don't believe it. I kept thinking I was a specialist. I kept turning the page going, I don't like this data that keeps showing that generalists are better. And then by the end, I realized that I'm a generalist. It just was like, it took me so long to realize. And funny for me because like I ended up redesigning the compensation system for Shopify, even though I'm an engineer. So I still thought of myself as an engineer through and through, even though I work on recruiting and HR and all these other things. But I think that that's where we're trying to tease. And then, yeah.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think the way to think about it is more like we want to make the interview process as close to the real job as possible because by doing that we can likely assess the skills that you have in your interview closer to what's happening in the job, right? So that's one. Two, we have this interview step called the life story where we try to figure out if are all the experiences you've had up until now actually going to be like does it show that you are a curious person with range? Because if it does, that's likely more of someone.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that, you just got to look at the work product. And so I'm a big fan of job trials. And in my previous companies, I almost, like you mentioned, I almost didn't interview anybody. I almost just said, come in and work. And it allowed us, we had a much higher, like in the first 90 days, like 20% attrition before 90 days because it just didn't work out. But those after 90 days, we had less than 1% attrition because they knew exactly what they're getting into and we knew exactly how they were going to fit.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that, we want to be as you know the best 10,000 person company in the world. We're not looking for millions of people. We just need the best 10,000. And so if it's not a fit, like it's in your interest and our interest to figure that out quickly so that you can go somewhere where you will be amazing and for us to have the people who will be amazing at Shopify. And so job trials I'm a huge fan of, which leads me to like intern programs. What a great interview process because you now have real work product from somebody for four months. They get to see what it's like to be at Shopify for four months. We get to see what it's like for them to be at Shopify for four months. And that can turn into a full-time gig. And that's a great interview process because you literally know exactly. You don't have to give you a funny example. I think I've heard a company where like, oh, we have an intern process. And then afterwards, we interview them for full-time. I'm like, what are you going to learn from like, let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not going to have learned from four months of real work experience? And so there's this.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly, right? Less than half the code. Anyway, so pairing, and they, and it was pretty clear after just a few weeks, I would say, let's say up to three months is like the amount of time I give people. That person A wasn't going to work out and person B was. So what I really like to do is use this like race car analogy. If I told you, hey, I want to go hire the best race car driver. There's not really that many questions you could ask them except for like put them in the car. And so the same thing happens with us is that Of course we have to do interviews, but we do really spend time in the 30, 60, 90 days to make sure that the thing that they are bringing actually lines up with what we need at Shopify. And you should also be transparent with people because if it's not a fit, it's actually good for them and you to figure that out as quickly as possible because they could be amazing somewhere else, right? Like we mentioned like the chaotic environment and FASMI environment Shopify is that's not for everyone but that's okay, right? We're not looking for right.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was just so curious. And we gave them both a shot. Like, the key was, I didn't use the resume in either way to bias. We brought them both in. We said, here's the environment. It was all pair programming at my startup. And so they pair programmed. And actually, as an aside, you know, I care, I really believe in pair programming when I made people work in pair programming with my own money. Like I paid people to have, I paid for two people to be on one computer.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so throughout my career, what I've noticed is that, and I'm sure everybody, this is a dirty little secret, right? Interviews are not a good predictor of performance. We know this. We know this from studies. We know this. Everybody at their company knows this, where somebody interviewed well wasn't as good in the job or the opposite. Didn't interview well and then came in and was phenomenal. One example I have from my startup right before we came to Shopify was I hired two people for machine learning. One was like a PhD taught at the university was like, oh my God, no brainer was also recommended by an employee. We're like, oh my God, this person's going to be great. The other person was like a dude I met at the coffee shop who had never had a software shop but was like just so interested in machine learning. And person A, we let go within a few weeks because like not a fit for a culture and person B is still went was at our startup and is still at Shopified today and is a phenomenal machine learning engineer who literally at our Christmas party was like, you know, this is my first software job, right? We're like, how?”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, yeah. It's like the opposite, right? It's like this idea of people feel like the comfort gives you like stability and really the um comfort gives you stability because now you're you're in a con you're constantly learning and that makes you more robust against things that could come across”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would actually go farther. I think if you don't have two or three big projects that are on fire, you're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your like if everything's going well, are you really trying, are you really taking the risks you need to be taking? So I think you kind of have to overrotate a bit and have a, there should be a few things on fire at all times. Not because you should create that, but it should just happen because you're stretching into new things that potentially or you're going faster than you should have or there's a new leader you've counted on early because all these things that should create this thing of like it might work. And so you want to have a little bit of chaos at the edge.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the personality of the leadership team is quite intense. We have a lot of founders on the exec team which are impatient, intense people by design. But even some of the non-founders are just accomplished people who tend to be pretty like they have, we all have this attitude of impatience. And so maybe that's, I don't even know if that's like a learned skill you can learn or if it just comes like, you know, it comes along with your personality, like genetics. But we typically, even at the leadership team, for example, we try to do like my here's my weekly thread of all the things that are going on so that we can not only share, but also show progress on things. And then someone can jump in and say, oh, this thing you're doing that relates to my thing that I'm doing over here. But it creates this notion of like, there's a lot going all the time and we want to keep the vibes, keep the energy high. So a lot of high energy intense people.”
2024-12-19 · Lenny's Podcast · How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source