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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“And it can be strategic, by the way. I've seen people use it as I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50% and then he gets to know you. And then I've seen people use it as the opposite, saying, hey, look, this team is hard charging. I'm going to start you at 100. Assume that you already have high trust, do the things. And only if you are doing things that are off alignment does your trust battery deplet. So I've seen people use it the terminology as a shortcut way to figure out how to work with somebody.”
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
“Remote. So, and then we have offices which are like, come in if you want, right? Like I mentioned, I come in like once a week, and now Toby moved to Toronto. So now I'm in like three days a week. But it's like, if you want to come in, you can. You don't have to, right? Today I work from home. But tomorrow I'm going in and that allows you again to have those random interactions and allow you to feel like, yeah, we're like 90 plus percent remote. But I would say the main reason is we want to hire the best people in the world. And those people can be anywhere. Just happens to be that they're not all of them are near an office. And so, but again, with the burst thing, like here's a good example for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I encouraged all evangelical engineering leadership to come to Toronto. We're all going to be in the office. Like, you know, watching the graphs. And then, you know, for hack days, I try to get people to go to the ports, right? Which we have, you know, four of them, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and New York, which again are coming if you want. But then get that IRL. And so it's kind of a little bit of a combo. I wouldn't call it hybrid, though, because like you don't really have every.”
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 we have this remote. So I like to call it like 90% remote or 95% remote because we have these intentionals IRL experiences. So every summer, we just started last year. Sorry, this year. We're doing this thing called Shopify Summit where we bring the whole company together, get together, and we like, it's a combination of talks plus hack days. And it's a coming together experience, like food and like parties and like, you know, bands and like, it's a super fun way to kind of re-energize and rebuild your trust battery over time. And then we have this thing called bursts, which is, hey, you want to work on a problem. You want to, you need to prototype, you need to hack. People can just say, hey, I'm starting a burst. We're going to have five people. We're all going to go to Ottawa or Toronto or Montreal or somewhere else. And we're going to talk about this problem and get together. And so a combination of those two things mean like throughout the year, you can recharge that we have the trust battery notion, which is like how much, you know, how much trust can you have between people? And it can deplete over 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
“No, not really. I mean, yeah, I mean, we're not super firm on working hours from that perspective, but I mean, we do have a lot of people on East Coast time zone, so a lot of stuff happens then, but we do have people all over the world. But I did mention we do have like the check-ins on the six-week reviews on the cadence. So that six week cycle does give you a little bit of the like, what did you get done and are you blocked mentality? You can expect like a couple being coming in a couple times and being like, hey, we didn't get a lot done being on block for you to change your approach to go, okay, I don't want to go to another review where we didn't get a lot done. So what am I doing this time to make sure we unlock a lot of progress? And that check-in can give you that ammo to be like, let's go, let's do this this 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
“Two pull. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because we use it exclusively, but we actually have this line internally. We call it like Shopify should be a crafter's paradise. It should be the place where crafters come to practice their craft and get better at their craft. Obviously, resonates from a lot of the engineering crafters, but it's not only engineering, it's UX and PM and ML, like all the places where you'd want those people to actually have a great experience, we want them to come to Shopify because we believe this is the best place for 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
“And having the leaders pair with those people on those problems, not just checking in, but actually pairing with them on the problems that they're facing. So you get both the crafters who are working on the stuff and the leaders who may have broader context working together to kind of unblock.”
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 you're not waiting till the end, especially with a beta flag. You're like, hey, it's in my store. I just realized that I went in and now this page takes like 20 seconds to load. Is that what you expect? You're like, oh, we didn't find this use case. Like you're going to learn that much more quickly. And that creates, again, intensity on the fidelity of the feedback you're getting because, you know, famously, some of our PM team will create a friction log. They'll be like, I am walking, they'll just create a screen share, create a video and go, I'm walking through and turn on the beta flag. I'm walking through this experience. Here's my feedback on the experience. You're getting this high fidelity throughput coming back to you that you're like, okay, let's fix these things for next week's iteration and then share another beta flag and say, okay, try it now. Try it now. Try it now. And so you're not debating about status reports. You're kind of debating about the experience.”
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
“Behavioral economics. Michael Lewis, exactly. And he said the famous line was alone we're okay, but together we're a genius. That's a pair programmer. That's like two people. You're like, oh, we're okay. But together, we're a genius. And that's exactly what pair programming is. And hopefully me plus like an LLM is a genius, right? As well. But that's the genesis of that thinking. So I would say another thing that helps us create intensity is demo culture. So as part of the GSD updates, we encourage people to share high fidelity updates, which is not just imagery, but actually a demo. One of the things that can go wrong even just their screenshots is you don't really get the full experience. Like you can't tell how slow things are or whatever. But with a demo, so you can put a link. We have this tool called spin, which is like an internal development environment, like a cloud dev environment where you can say, hey, click here to try this on spin. And then you can try it. And you can see how it works. Or they say, turn on a beta flag in your own store and then try it. And so this short circuits a lot of misunderstandings because you're like, I'm going to try 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
“No, for sure. Again, like underhead and free throws, it not only looks dumb, it feels dumb. People don't like they feel like they're wasting time sitting beside somebody and being like, well, I could be on my computer doing this thing. But together they are building like a machine, right? Like, do you ever read the undoing project Which is about Amos Verski and Danny Koneman, the famous philosopher.”
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 that goes back to the beginning, right? Like choose the hard thing. Don't just build the feature, go make the feature easy to build.”
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 are unlimited amount of wrong options for any problem. There's probably 10,000 right options, but everybody stops at the first right one. Instead, what you should be spending all your time on, because the options that don't work, you're not going to spend time on. But you have to figure out which of the 10,000 options is the right one and spend time in what are all these right options. Don't just stop at the first one. And so when I come to and say A or B, I'm picking two of the 10,000 and like he's like, that's not what I go back and generate more options because those are not the optimal ones. He is like quite the philosopher on these things and it does really change the way the company works because he'll push you on these things. And then we over time learn to spot the same patterns. And I learned to push my team on infra and deleting code and making things simple. Because by the way, who doesn't want to get free stuff, right? Like free performance, free, easy to navigate code base. Free maintainability, free resiliency, because now we went and did the hard work of deleting. It is hard.”
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
“Super, super hard. And I would say, like Toby is the secret sauce here because he pushes us to think about things as infra almost all the time. I mean, one of the things that annoys me the most probably is that I'll always come to him and say, hey, we can do A or B. And he looks at me and he goes, you know what I'm going to say, right? I'm like, you're going to say, go back and generate more options because he doesn't like those. I don't like A or B. Come back when you have something else. He actually, maybe I'll tell you a little anecdote. He has a story where he says,”
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 we, I mean, we actually think about when we're building something, we think of it in one of three buckets. We're like, are you building an experiment, a feature, or infrastructure? And once you bucket things, you can say, oh, it's an experiment. You're like, cool, this is not infra. This is like we're trying something to learn. And it might turn, by the way, that might turn into an experiment or infra, but it starts off as an experiment. Now, if you're building a feature, a feature is basically you're taking advantage of an existing piece of infrared, right? So token getting is the example I gave. If you could now build that in one hour, you would probably say, oh, we have the right infra below it. But if you did what Toby does, which is he's like, here's the infra I wish existed. Here's the feature. The feature might be quick to build, but now I have to go and build the infra. You're now slotting yourself into infra land, which is like that could take longer, but you're now enabling it for a bunch of use cases. You don't have to think about at once because you may have people using your API in a different way. So I think you kind of have to slot yourself. Now, how do people get into this mode?”
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
“Where is the 25% of all codas deleted by AI? This is where we have to start thinking about it because the right code is never the volumous lines of code metric. It's always something else. It's always like elegance. And that's where we have to think about. So it is something that we, as part of us being long-term infrastructure thinking, we really do care about 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
“And it's amazing. We almost always delete, I don't know if it's good or bad, we can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane. But at the same time, I applaud the teams for going after the cruft in the code base, and everything gets easier, right? Codelets loads faster, it's easier to understand. This is why when I look at GitHub stats, you shouldn't really look at, you know, I think Google put out and said, oh, 25% of all code is now written by AI. I'm like, where's the delete?”
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 there's a few things, right? One is the more context you can fit in your head around a code base and you can never really fit all of Shopify in your head because it's big complicated set of tools we give to merchants. But the more you can simplify, the much easier everything becomes. Resiliency, performance, reliability, maintainability, all the illities become much, much more, much easier when the code base is simple. Now, all you need really is the mandate, right, of like, oh, well, let's look at this code. If I could start this today, would I really build this thing or do I now have enough domain expertise to say, oh no, this is the right solution. So can I delete start over and build this more easily? And now everything else becomes easy to build on top of. And so we routinely, we have a delete code club. We have hack days, which happens two or three times a year, where there's always one team that is focused on deleting code. They even have like a manual. Here's how to find things to delete.”
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
“No, exactly. And actually, you're making me think of a stat. So last year, I tweeted out, you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub co-pilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify. And people are like, oh my God. And they got like picked up and everyone's talking about it. And I go, I don't know why I was ever getting so crazy because what I want to see is GitHub co-pilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when you know we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer, right? And so we famously have deleted millions of lines of code this year because we're trying to focus on, again, the sunk cost and like rebuilding things elegantly or you don't need this anymore and rebuilding. And I even tweeted out, I think someone said, oh, Shopify is in the top 10 Ruby code bases in the world. And I said, I never want to see on this list again. Like, it's not like we shouldn't be gunning for number one and we should be gunning for number 100. We want to be not on this list. Someone else can take the crown.”
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
“What has to be true so that you could write this in a day? What infrastructure do you need? And he actually develops this way. He will always like, he will write code against an API that doesn't exist because he's like, you know what should exist here? This API. He'll write the code. He'll go back and forth and refine the client and the server. And then he'll go, this is correct, the correct client code. Now let me go implement the server code. And like this notion of building things as infrastructure that sound slower today because it's going to take it's two, three months instead of two, three weeks. But after that, the things that people built on top, right, were so easy to build. There were so many more scenarios that were emerged. It's just a different way of thinking about software. And it really, again, allows its intensity in a different way. It's intensity around building this infrastructure layer, which we want to build quickly, but takes two or three months in this case, but then can get everyone building on top of our infra in a much, much quicker way. And of course, who knows what.”
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
“Be able to do whatever you want. And so we want to build this for you too. And sitting with Toby, he's like, you guys are thinking about it wrong. Because he goes, how long would it take to build NFT gating? I'm like, I don't know, two, three weeks? He goes, now how long would it take to build a platform layer which exposes APIs so anyone could build NFT gating in one hour? I'm like, I don't know, like two, three months. He goes, do that. He goes, because you don't know what they are going to build on top of the platform. NFC gating is one thing, one use case. But if you spend the time to build out the infrastructure layer, he calls it putting gas in the tank. If you put the gas in the tank, people could drive on that gas for a long time going forward. And so he goes, I always want you to think about, and he had the key part was, what can you build so anyone could build this in one hour? Right. So like he does this thing to us all the time where he goes, oh, this should only be, he'll say it and people get the wrong thing. He'll say, oh, you could write this in a day. And what he means 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
“Changes, it should be easy to see the changes. And so those are the kinds of things that again we can create intensity because this code yellow allows the champion to tap anyone on the shoulder and say, stop what you're doing and come help this thing, which is an infrastructure layer thing. And by building out this infrastructure, it allows you to go fast. It takes longer to build the infrastructure, but it makes you go fast forever afterwards, right? Actually, I'll give an example of one of these. In 2020, 2021, the heyday of like pandemic, obviously there was a crypto summer again and crypto was going nuts. And we were sitting back and saying, wow, a lot of our merchants are now asking for NFT gating. Remember NFT gating, which is like, if you have the token, you can now go into the storefront and see my products. You can see my prices. And you can check out it. But only if you have the token. And we were getting a lot of demand from merchants to be like, we want to do this. We want to sell an NFT and we want our buyers to have to have the NFT to have this great experience. And we're like, we agree. You want to be able to do, we want you to.”
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 I think, again, I think there's nothing I would say again start from the beginning there's nothing more than pair programming because literally you can't do anything else but be on your computer. So like pair programming is the number one I will say the weekly cadence helps a lot, right? Which you mentioned, which again, which is part of GSD, which is sharing the updates and then the six-week reviews, that does a lot. On the other side, we also have a lot of metrics and alerts that help us see when potentially things might be happening in the system that can allow us to be like, hey, wait a sec, there's too many things going on of this type. We probably have to sit back and reset and figure out what's going on. So one thing that happened, for example, was we started seeing that it was taking a lot of time to develop in our admin, like engineers at Shopify, developing in the admin. So we called what's called like a code yellow, which is before code red. But Code Yellow is this idea of like, hey, we're going to call it Code Yellow on the admin. We want to make sure that the developer experience inside Shopify is really good. It should be easy to start up the repo. It should be easy to make.”
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, it has the commenting, but it's not the same as it's not the same tool. Like, by the way, Slack is amazing. We use it. It's just that for this thing. It wasn't working for us, and so we wanted to move that somewhere 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
“Yeah. I love Slack. It's like the I am tool. Everybody uses it, but it can for sure cause distraction. And so what we did was we moved all announcement information. So like anytime you're sending a status update or large group announcement, we moved all of that to Face Meta workplace, like Facebook for work, basically, which is now being deprecated. So we'll have to figure that out. But it just moved all this stuff to like a ML feed that you can kind of consume differently than you would Slack because Slack is like a messaging univert and all this stuff versus workplaces like oh, I want to go and consume content from the company and get updates and share updates. And so that reduced a lot of distraction as well. And so I'd love to figure out what the next tool for us is, but it's probably something more like a river of information that I can dip my toe into versus like I am and chat everywhere.”
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, you're asking me now a good question. I have to go look and see, but it came down by something like 50 or 60 percent. Like it was like something like five or six hours for interverse contributors and came down to three. And then the managers, I think it was like 10 and came down to six, something like that. But it was a huge difference. And the only two things were like I mentioned were like one was the meeting get in. The other one was like this. And I can talk about this. This is like a.”
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
“Of our Slack into workplace Facebook workplace, which I'll talk about, those are the only two things we did. And we saw a huge decrease in the amount of time crafters were in meetings. And then we saw all kinds of other productivity enhancements because they were able to have that flow time and work on things. So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours per week. That's not bad at all in order to get aligned. All the rest of the time is work 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
“So, not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two week moratorium where you are not allowed to add a reoccurring meeting. You can add a regular meeting, but not a reoccurring meeting. And the idea is that there's a lot of inertia behind a recurring meeting. It just always is there, and you know it's coming up. And it's hard to delete because you're like, oh, yeah, we talk about this thing every week. And so what we do is we kind of just do a meeting reset. And I think, yeah, it's just called Chaos Monkey. And the admins go in and delete everything. Now, what's cool about it is it forces you to rethink, do we need a recurring meeting or do we just need one meeting or do we need a different cadence? That's one thing. The other thing is it frees up so much crafter time, right? Like one of the stats I track across engineering is how many hours are individual contributors and meetings per week? And we noticed that after we did, we did two things, by the way. And this is, I have a spicy second one for this. But the first one was we deleted meetings. And the second thing we did was we moved a lot.”
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, sure. Actually, the funny story about the meeting Armageddon is that I was messaging Toby prior to me starting at Shopify about meeting Armageddon. And so I actually think I had a little hand in him like doing this before I got to Shopify because I was like, hey, have you seen? I think it was Dropbox. Have you seen what Dropbox is doing and meeting again? And so he was like, this is super interesting. This is years before I started. So I think it's funny that it ended up being a real thing. But here's what we do. Once a year at a random time, we will delete all recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones.”
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 was like, oh, I didn't even think. I thought he hired me to take problems away. He hired me to work on problems with me. Like, that's completely different than what I thought.”
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 if I work on this problem with you, I kind of got to see where you are pretty often and then give you advice, or you're going to share contacts with me because I don't, I'm not in the work every day, to then come back and say, oh, based on what I know and what you know, can we move this in this direction? Maybe that's better for merchants. It's really like, I don't want to overuse the pairing paradigm, but it is really much like, can I pair with you? And I learned this actually very early in my Shopify tenure because Toby would have these one-on-ones with me. And I'd be like, Toby, you don't have to waste your time, man. Like you hired me. I got this. I'm like, where he goes, oh, you misunderstand why you're here. We're here to work on problems together.”
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 mean, it's a combination of trust, but verify, right? Because don't forget the goal of the check-in is not for you to be like, ha ha, I caught you not doing your work. It's not like the Dilbert boss. Like, hey, did you do your thing, right? It is, like, even when I look at the Elon text, which is like, hey, what did you get done this week? It wasn't to try to catch parag in a you didn't do anything or you did a bunch of useless stuff. It was hopefully to pair on the problem, right? Meaning like when I ask somebody, hey, like, did you, you know, did we move forward on this LLM project because we now have this larger context window? And then they came back and said, oh, here's what we learned. And so then I can then look at the answer and say, oh, so now are we going to try? Like, have you thought of this? Have you tried? It's a way to pair on the problem. So it's not like, you know, we talk, we have this word like everybody talks about micromanagement as a word. And like, we don't actually think it's a dirty word at Jopify. But the reason we don't think it's a dirty word is because it's not just, again, Dilbert boss saying, where did you do the thing? It's like, hey, can I work on this problem with you?”
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
“Created the intensity of the team and be like, oh, we can now quickly get unblocked. So that's the kind of example of just like moving quick and trying to just ask again, ask a dumb question. I'm like, this is probably not possible, but. And then they came back and said, Oh, yeah, we can do 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
“There was an interesting AI problem we were trying to solve with LLMs that required us to have a very large output context window. And most of the LLMs today have a very small output context window. But in the review, I actually met, we have Schert's Slack channels with all the LLM folks, right? I messaged in the OpenAI channel. I messaged in the Gemini channel, whatever. And within an hour, we had increased the output context on a bunch of major models. And we were able to kind of move forward through the thing just because I asked. And so that's an example. It didn't take another six-week review, but it increased the intensity because the team was like, oh, we were blocked because we thought we had to now chunk up this data and do this thing because we had smaller output context and we thought we could do a big input context, but like we'd have to do this caching. It was like this whole thing. And I'm like, well, do we just ask them if we get bigger? And then they were like, oh, we don't have this as undocumented, but like, we'll disable it right now for Shopify. And so that kind of.”
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
“Each project Each project can get like it has an update, it might have a video of here's the experience, it'll have a bunch, obviously, a bunch of writing on like what's changed since last time. We have a process called OK1 and OK2, which is like OK1 is typically at the director level where they're like, okay, this is like I'm aligned with the direction that this is going at or I'm not aligned and they can make changes. Then when it goes to OK2, it's typically a VP level of the area who's now looking to say, okay, what you're working on actually aligns with the overall architecture. But by the way, have you looked at this context? Maybe you haven't seen this. This is happening or in the industry. So you're trying to align at that level. And then again, like I mentioned, every six weeks we go through with Toby. And like, he's an intense guy himself. And so a lot of it is like, hey, why is this taking so long? Are we overthinking it? Are we not trying to move forward on this thing because we're blocked on something? Is there some piece of infra? Actually, I'll give you a good example. In one of the reviews from last 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
“Yeah, Chaos Monkey, right. But that actually works because it just says, hey, by the way, shit's going to break. And so let's be resilient to that. And so same thing here. Hey, by the way, someone's going to move your cheese. It's fine. We are here to create more entrepreneurs in the world. We are not here to have a six-month change management roadmap. And that will just actually hurt the speed at which we can deliver value to merchants.”
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 how Toby increased the resiliency in the company. He would walk around in the old days when we had a data center, just unplug machines.”
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
“Because Parkinson's law is real. It sounds funny, but I keep bringing this up. But whatever time you allot to something will be the time it takes, right? So if you're doing something monumental, like, I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out. It's probably like six months in most companies. Shopify, this is like a week or two. You sit down, you're like, hey, this is kind of the bones of it. Let's bring some more people in think. But then you know it's going to start leaking. So we just like launch it, right? And we do the same thing with lots of things in Shop. We just try to move more quickly and get out of the chain. We don't do change management. We kind of just like land it and then go, hey, everyone, it's kind of like a volatile company. This is what's happening, but this is how we get things done quickly and then move on with our lives.”
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 we're going to talk about the project, the resourcing, how it's going, and we're going to make changes. And again, that creates intensity because you want to show what has been done, what have you learned since the last six week review. And we find six weeks is a very good cadence because it's short enough that you can remember the context and it's long enough. Six weeks is long enough, especially if you have, let's say, a team as a dozen engineers, you can do a lot. And not only that, you can do a lot in a day, but this is like kind of like a check-in point. And what I've noticed too with intensity is, let's say we get a review and there's some feedback we get in that review. We don't wait till the next six-week review, right? Like the next day, we are building things. We are iterating. We are tagging people. And then by the next week, we're like, here's the trajectory, right? Like I actually, I want to get that Elon shirt made. Like, what have you done this week?”
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 we have a few things that we have going for us, right? So, one, we have this tool called GSD, which stands for Get Shit Done, which you probably heard from maybe talking to other Shaba folk, which is this notion of like weekly updates to the whole company on what's happening. Again, Parkinson's law at scale. If you ask people every week, they want to show progress every single week. So that's one way. I talked about pair programming as well. The other thing we do as a company is we used to have like twice a year was our cadence. We like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or like we had like an event in the summer. And now we do six-week reviews. So teams have this notion of like every six weeks actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing, and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also with Toby. And so what's cool about that, and by the way, it's a huge time investment, right? We all get into a room. It's happening tomorrow. So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, we're going a bunch of us will be in the office together, and we're going to go through every.”
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 different language now because the API and the syntax is much easier to pull forward. And so all of those things are like a win for engineering and a win for everybody who wants to build any sort of software.”
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
“So AI is super interesting. What's happening right now with an AI co-pilot, like GitHub co-pilot, is it is your pair programmer. So you now can feel like you're pairing actually without another human. You can pair with the AI. And so what's happening too is that you're seeing people use like Whisper, like they're talking to cursor and they're talking through Whisper to say, okay, let's build a new React component that does this and they're talking and then it's building us, oh no, that's not what I meant. I meant doing this. So you can actually not even have to type just using voice, go back and forth through your pair programmer. I would say that's amazing. I would still contend take that experience and add to humans together. So you've got like an AI co-pilot and humans because what's happening is generating code and the two humans can look and say, oh, I know what it's trying to do. And either delete the code because you have inspiration and write it yourself or just take the suggestion and move it forward. But I love today's world of AI co-pilots because you're now, you never have to code alone on your own, right? You never have to code alone.”
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 then also, we do a lot of pairing during an incident or a way to figure out together, work with somebody, and say, hey, I'm not really sure. And let's jump on a call together or jump on a tuple and go down the path and say, let's figure out together what's going on.”
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
“By the way, 18 months later, we've now figured out all the things and we should, that's the time we should delete everything and start over. And that's something that we will do at that point. And so you don't want to be pair programming for 18 months. You want to be like wayfinding and past finding and then go, I see the matrix. Let me just lead everything and now build it because the learning is what you're going for. We have all the learning. Now let's write the code.”
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
“So, Shopify, I mentioned that Toby and Cody did this at the beginning of Shopify. And the cool thing about pair programming is, and in my old world at Extreme Labs, is that we knew exactly what to build because we were building mobile apps that were almost like contract manufacturing. They're like, we have an iOS version. Can we build an Android version? So we kind of quickly were able to say, here's the spec, go quick. Shopify is such a different company, right? We are a pathfinding company. We are trying to find the right thing to build. And so pair programming may or may not make sense all the time, like pivotal and extreme. We were doing 40 hours a week. Shopify is much more of like a four to eight hour a week pair programming culture where you're gathering together on a problem and saying, hey, let's pair for half a day or let's pair every Wednesday. And we use that tool in our arsenal to move quickly down a path. But a lot of other time is spent pathfinding and trying to figure out what to build and trying to convince people to be like, hey, we're going to go down this path. Oh, now I know exactly.”
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
“Never going to do it because it looks dumb. And by the way, go back to the beginning of the interview. I don't care what looks dumb or looking stupid. We're going to do this. And so actually, I ran the biggest pair programming shop in the world.”
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 they said, Why don't you throw underhand? Because he was notoriously bad at free throws. And he goes, It looks dumb. Even though he's paid millions of dollars a year to do this thing, it looks dumb, doesn't want 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
“And we have this sunk cost fallacy. So it's hard to lead. But if you can do that, you will actually land upon like a much, much better solution. And of course, pair programming has high, high rates of learning because you're just like sitting beside like not only, you know, whether it's Tuple or directly you learn keystrokes and you learn how somebody thinks about a problem. You go back and forth on the talking. And yes, you will write probably less code, but you will move faster along the path of delivering value for your customers than you would if you did it on your own. And then there's all these studies that show happiness is higher, knowledge transfer is higher, less silos, intensity is higher, all the things, and at a price of like, you know, 20% or something of like what you would normally do. The analogy I have is the underhanded free throw in basketball, right? Statistically known to sink more baskets, but looks dumb and nobody does it. Like literally Shaquille O'Neill, I'm not that big a basketball fan, but I read this about Shaquille O'Neill, who is a hall of fame.”
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
“Start over because his thinking was the right elegant solution should be able to be written in one hour. And so pair programming, I mean, that's an extreme version of it. But even at like Pivotal Labs, if your pair was sick that day and you wrote a bunch of code, the strong version is like your pair would come in the next day, delete all the code that you wrote, and then you'd write it again the next day. And again, like, what better time to rewrite code than like right after you've written it? Because you now know the problem domain. And it's, by the way, it sounds like a waste of time, right? Like it sounds like I'm just deleting code. But the reason is that code lives a long time. Code is a liability. And the right solution, the usually shorter lines, more elegant solution, tends to appear after you've done a bunch of pathfinding. And the only way to do that pathfinding is kind of start and then delete and then start and be like, oh, no, now I know delete. And it's super hard to delete, by the way, because we're humans.”
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
“Because it's not about lines of code, right? The throughput limiter is not hands on keyboard. It's not like we're both sitting there and the limiter is like us trying to get through the key, like the keystrokes onto the screen. The limiter is, where is the good, elegant solution? How do we think through the problem and build the right solution for the problem at hand? Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming. And what he would do is he would actually set a timer and him and his CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour. And if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all the code. And they would keep the tests and they would start over. And then what their thinking was, if we were not able to articulate and write the code for this feature in one hour, we must be on the wrong design. We must be building the wrong thing. And so they delete all the code, kept the tests, and then wrote it again. And sometimes to be over by one minute. And he would still delete the code.”
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 is the most underutilized management tool in engineering, bar none. Like it is just not used as much as it could be. So pair programming, for those who don't know, it's two people on one computer, right? So two keyboards, two mice, two monitors, but one computer. They work together. And if it's remote, they use it. You can use a tool like Tuple, like which we use. And you can just remotely be on one computer. And you're totally right. The famous tweet about pair programming is, wait a sec, we have two engineers on one computer. Won't they write half as much code? And the answer is, oh no, no, they're writing.”
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
“Take a person who is good and extremely good, the extremely good person can actually get a lot of output in a short amount of time. And the person who's good might take longer. Like I think there's a time variance there that people don't think about. So you can kind of like not drop the quality too much, but get the time down by like 2x, 3x, right? Like Parkinson's law at scale, instead of, you know, if I give you an hour to do something, a good, a really good person can get a high quality output in one hour.”
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