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Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

news.shopify.com

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Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#291

Post by exhibitapp »

pastor_bob wrote: post #259
rcme wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a business perspective, this is great for Shopify. The labor market for software engineers has seriously softened as a result of all the layoffs. Go look at job openings and their posted salaries. When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price. Also, this is largely a coordinated effort from activist investors specifically targeting large tech salaries. E.g.…

Shopify already pays at the low end. I mean, not even relative to FAANG; you can make a similar salary at a government job as an engineer.

this is absolutely not true, I know engineering managers with around 5-7 years of total experience ( aka people under 30 ) making $400,000 CAD in cash compensation at shop. They recently did a cash/equity split where employees could choose their split and not a huge surprise many chose the maximum cash

there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#292

Post by annexrichmond »

organsnyder wrote: post #203
tmshu1 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a bit about what they did well in the behavioral interviews? Do you have specific examples? Would love to learn some best practices

Shopify calls its first interview the "life story" interview, and (in my experience) it was a great place for me to talk about my career, reflect on past successes and mistakes, and demonstrate empathy and self-awareness.

I did that interview. Borderline illegal. My life story I consider pretty personal and was so was a pretty uncomfortable interview.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#293

Post by callmeed »

Arubis wrote: post #155

“We will also keep Slack and internal email open today for everyone so we can share farewells.” That’s drastically different. Most orgs that’ve run layoffs over the last few years have terminated access immediately, or even before informing those losing jobs. This feels more human, and I hope it goes well for them.

We also did this when we did a layoff last month (announcement was on a wednesday and people had access to email through the week). Agree with your sentiment.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#294

Post by flavius29663 »

nus07 wrote: post #9

Last time I read a very reassuring and cogent letter by the CEO of Shopify about the layoffs . But at no point did the letter hint at further layoffs no less 20% which is huge. Wondering what the explanation is this time. I understand everyone has their worth and price but I fail to see how management and leadership at companies still have jobs and huge bonuses. Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new visio…

> Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.

I see you're assigning this failure to reaganomics, are you then ready to assign all the successes to reaganomics too? i.e. The US became the largest exporter of IT and software, the US corporations put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, with US online companies being 90% of the top companies in the world.

Are you going to say that this is due to reaganomics too? Or only bad things get attributed to it?

Shopify is a Canadian company, not that it matters for my question.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#295

Post by Barrin92 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #173
monero-xmr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are falling into the trap of the Luddites. As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them. Otherwise why not pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, forever?

You are falling into the meta-trap of misunderstanding the Luddites. The Luddites weren't idiots, nor they were against progress. They revolted because the way the new technology was applied was destroying their specialization, and in many cases, destroying their lives . The promise of "reallocating skilled workers to new areas" is bullshit at the individual level. What's being reallocated is the new generation, the…

>They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age

the alternative to this is gerontocracy and stagnation. We actually have a real world example of this, Japan. Seniority as a leading principle and the inability to fire in the name of social stability sounds great on a 10 year time horizon and appears empathetic, on a 50 year time horizon you are going to be poor compared to an economy that accepts (but ideally cushions) the fallout that comes with economic churn. In 1990 Japan's economy was 50% as large as the American economy. Today it's 19%.

Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#296

Post by kodah »

cde-v wrote: post #121
kodah wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and yet people agree with them.

There, fixed. And what’s the elevator pitch for your killer app written in elixerust?

Why are you even here? It sounds like you have contempt for almost everyone here. This place was made for entrepreneurs and hackers, hence it focuses on curiosity. You seem to have none of that.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#297

Post by tracerbulletx »

bombcar wrote: post #226
rpsw wrote: post #114

> But now we are at the dawn of the AI era and the new capabilities that are unlocked by that are unprecedented. Shopify has the privilege of being amongst the companies with the best chances of using AI to help our customers. A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible. Our main quest demands from us to build the best thing that is now possible, and that has just changed entirely. Most recent layoffs have been fr…

After IBM did it, every layoff from now on is going to explicitly or implicitly say that AI will cover for things in the future; it's some magic words to try to not spook investors.

both Meta and Google mentioned it as well. They're much bigger trend setters than IBM

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#298

Post by jq-r »

ethanbond wrote: post #274
ryukafalz wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it doesn't grow you can just lay people off and you're back where you started. "Back where you started" with a now highly demotivated team isn't quite back where you started.

Usually when there are layoffs the environment outside the company is not so great either

If the company didn't do a round of layoffs I'm sure the workers would appreciate that, despite what's going on outside of the company. So even if the company hits a rough patch they'll stick with it, instead of abandoning ship. Or as they say, respect is a two way street.

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#299

Post by pxeger1 »

allanmacgregor wrote: post #205

This is not surprising Shopify has had an identity crisis and lack of focus for years now. To name a few: - Alienating marketplace partners by trying to absorb their functionality - Trying to break into the logistics space - Failing to develop and make headway into the Enterprise space. Shopify needs a reality check and new leadership if they want to continue being relevant

What is the "enterprise space" in the context of Shopify? Does that mean B2B sales?

Re: Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics

#300

Post by mattgreenrocks »

rcme wrote: post #224
bambataa wrote: post #143

Is this the same CEO who decided to double the engineering team in a single year? https://techcouver.com/2021/01/06/shopify-to-double-engineer... Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?

From a business perspective, this is great for Shopify. The labor market for software engineers has seriously softened as a result of all the layoffs. Go look at job openings and their posted salaries. When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price. Also, this is largely a coordinated effort from activist investors specifically targeting large tech salaries. E.g.…

It's not just tech compensation.

The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.

Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.

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