This part at the end of the article is probably the real true nugget in here:
> But implicit in that risk, Mr. Nayyar points out, is a lot of downside. Many executives thought, “but didn’t say out loud, that if demand disappeared or changed course – sometimes even slightly changed course – those people we brought on, it might not make sense to have them around any more. … You’re just a number on the page; whatever happens, happens.”
I have no doubt that a lot of tech companies, including Canadian startups like Shopify, hired like mad during the pandemic boom knowing full-well that they would end up laying off a bunch of those new hires once things got "normal" again.
A lesson to be learned for anyone taking a job in a fast-growing company is to really think about the value that your specific job brings to the company.
What is your direct contribution to the bottom line? Work this math into whatever official comms you get from your employer when trying to think about what your actual job security looks like.
That and be prepared for layoffs. Have a couple of months of runway put aside somewhere and don't touch it. Because I think these cycles of boom-then-bust for growth are only going to get more frequent.
> Shopify, hired like mad during the pandemic boom knowing full-well that they would end up laying off a bunch of those new hires once things got "normal" again.
You should read Tobi's post about what happened. That's not how it was.
> Before the pandemic, ecommerce growth had been steady and predictable. Was this surge to be a temporary effect or a new normal? And so, given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years.
> It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off.
> Ultimately, placing this bet was my call to make and I got this wrong.
Shopify grew like mad, but it wasn't from vanity. If the bet had paid off, it would have meant a permanent step up in company value.
Bias: I'm one of the last developers hired before the stock crashed.
> You should read Tobi's post about what happened. That's not how it was.
I did read that back when it was posted. I hope you recognize PR when you see it?
Sorry if it came across like I was saying that companies are being evil or bad or vain about how they're hiring. Quite the opposite, and more dangerously, I think companies see nothing wrong with the boom-then-bust approach to hiring, and that it's going to happen more.
And so my point here is that employees need to re-think how they look at job security in high-growth companies, and assume that they might be getting hired as part of a "bet" and not as part of a long-term strategy where the company has allocated the money to keep you around, like a lot of people assume when they take a full-time job (vs. a contract).
Plenty of larger tech companies that did layoffs, Shopify included, were never in any real financial trouble. They just made bets that didn't pay off, and so they corrected and moved on.
Yeah the point of this entire thread is that your (not unique to you, but you are certainly one of the CEOs that are easiest to vilify when discussing this phenomenon) incentives are so skewed that a given employee should be very cautious about joining your company.
You made a bet on e-commerce penetration. The reason it was so easy for you to make that bet is because if you were correct, you’d be even more fabulously wealthy. If you were wrong (like you were), you could simply lay off the employees you hired and tuck the severance package into one quarter of extraordinary charges.
The employee view of that is that if you were right, they’d be somewhat wealthy and if you were wrong (which you were) their lives would be completely upended.
That’s all. It’s just an attempt to remind people that even CEOs who have good intentions (and author layoff memos in a cerebral tone without the help of PR) can still cause absolute havoc in their lives because of the asymmetry of the power dynamic.
I agree an employee should be cautious for the exact risks you outlined but I don't know if I'd say this is a function of any power dynamic. Employees should be saving such that they have 3 months of expenses saved away for this exact scenario. Between that, unemployment benefits, and any severance most people should be able to find a new job without "havoc" on their lives.
It isn't not-PR just because you wrote it. It's PR because it's disseminating information to the public for the purpose of image management.
The information is that the company thought it could grow more during the pandemic by hiring new people, and "bet" growth would stick around and those people could stay on in the long term. Is that wrong? Well, that's business. (I have absolutely no doubt, of course, that the "bet"-nature of the employment was carefully communicated during hiring.)
The PR is that this business decision is presented as a story of Shopify's brave history of taking on daring bets, its decision to take on another, its defeat at the hands of unflinching (completely external) factors, its kind treatment of employees that there is no option but to let go in these difficult times, and the new, refocused, decisive organization that will be reborn (after some people who joined 6 months ago get laid off).
It's not all bad. 16 weeks severance seems generous to me, letting people keep their chairs is kind of random but nice, the job referral stuff is a nice gesture, etc. I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!
It's just, at the end of the day, it's an obviously-business decision that's being told as something else. People got fucked over by a confluence of factors after the higher-ups decided to take a risk. There's no story here. There's no arc of Shopify History. The job of PR, regardless of the letters after the name of whoever writes it, is to make it seem like there is one when bad stuff happens.
> disseminating information to the public for the purpose of image management.
This is pretty much the definition of anyone ever making any kind of public statement. Choosing ones words carefully with the knowledge that what they're saying will affect others perception of themselves and the situation at hand. I don't think anywhere in Tobi's post was it implying this _wasn't_ a business decision, I figured that went without saying. Shopify's a business, hiring decisions are an enormous consideration for businesses. Were you under the impression Shopify was a charity?
> I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!
As much as this is the way you cynically expect others might interpret Tobi's post, I think anyone with experience working in or running a business will have no problem understanding that businesses are not people and that messages from a CEO are not meant to be treated as blogposts or emotional diary entries.
I agree that Shopify is a business. My point is exactly that a business decision made for the profitability and stock price of the company is presented as an emotional story.
> that messages from a CEO are not meant to be treated as blogposts or emotional diary entries.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Do you not believe the original post is written to elicit an emotional reaction? How do you interpret it?
> Those lines of code started a company and sent it on a fascinating journey full of wonder, toil, success, failure, ambition, and above all else comradery. Being on a journey, surrounded by great teammates, doing difficult things is what it's all about.
> Our customers are merchants, entrepreneurs, and small businesses owners - the bedrock of our economy and precisely those that are typically hit hardest during recessions. Most are already feeling it. We again have a clear objective in these challenging macro economic times, and we will use everything we’ve got to help them succeed and come out stronger. That’s our core mission.
etc. It reads far more emotional and blogposty than the typical dispassionate corporate layoff announcement ("Corp corp is reducing 10% of our workforce today. This change will allow us to be more agile and do more synergy.") The whole point of this comment chain is that despite the tone and better writing, it's essentially the same message.
If, OTOH, your point is "well obviously it's the same message but you should know that", well of course I know that. That's why I wrote my comment. I just find it sort of frustrating, and the author's response tone-deaf to the issue with it. It's a layoff announcement. Drop the beginning and end about the incredible journey and Shopify's crucial mission. The middle is mostly good.
Whether you wrote it or not (and fair that my post may have implied you didn't - my fault), any note/post/message that you publish on the Shopify website is still public relations comms, coming from the CEO of a prominent public company.
It's not personal, but you're the CEO. You're going to put the best possible spin on anything you or the company does.
That's your job, and everyone expects it.
It's like buying a car. I expect the dealer to tell me everything positive about buying the car and nothing negative, because, hey, he's a salesperson.
Even if you were being 100% factual and hiding nothing, nobody will actually believe that. It just comes with the territory.
There’s the rub. The parent’s suggestion was that, probably, the new hires weren’t told anything along the lines of “Hey, this is a crazy gamble and it might not work out. Sign here to play.”
Yes, it’s implied in “startups”. But companies as large as shopify aren’t generally hiring people from the startup scene anymore. People are (were?) leaving good, stable jobs to go there. Only they know what their expectations were.
> "Hey, this is a crazy gamble and it might not work out. Sign here to play."
That's a gross mischaracterization, and it weakens your argument. It wasn't a "crazy gamble." It was a calculated risk, one that I think even in hindsight looks like a reasonable one to make at the time.
I think the overall question is whether it would have been better for those jobs never to have existed in the first place, rather than having existed for a year or so before being eliminated.
And, in truth, I think it's a very fair question - many people might value a higher level of stability, even if it results in overall lower total wages in the long term. For me, though, since I am in an industry that is, overall, growing and not showing any signs of slowing down in the medium-to-long term, I'm fine with taking a job even if I can get laid off at some point in the future. Spotify was very generous with severance IMO, and I don't think I'd have any problem finding another job within 3 months.
Again, I totally understand not everyone shares my view, but also other folks should understand that even as an employee I don't think that getting laid off is some sort of unforgivable crime.
I don't agree that's a gross mischaracterization. For reference, the exact wording from Tobi Lutke is:
> Was this surge to be a temporary effect or a new normal? And so, given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years.
In other words, it was a gamble that an unprecedented leap in global commercial behaviour was happening. Was there some reason to believe it could? Absolutely. Were the chances still extremely small? Also, absolutely.
And when you're "thinking in bets", as Shopify clearly is, you only risk what you can afford to lose. Other people's financial security is basically free for Shopify (a bit of severance in the worst case scenario).
> Other people's financial security is basically free for Shopify
it is the assume responsibility of the individual for their own financial security. If the bet that shopify made turned out to be great, those people that got hired wouldn't have a complaint about how much they've gained.
It's always a risk to move jobs, and even more risk to move to a growing company. People who do so would've implicitly accepted the risk - it's not on shopify to spell it out for them.
No, period.
Pandemic e-commerce boom was direct consequence of people not going out, which comprised three major categories: back office employees going WFH and manufacturing/customer facing jobs getting shut down on one end and people needing some line of work / shops needing revenue on other end.
Were the chances that WFH proliferation will remain at pandemic levels high? No.
Were the chances that opportunistic eshops will remain once prior corrects high? Debatable.
Were the chances that WFH proliferation will remain at pandemic levels high? No. Were the chances that opportunistic eshops will remain once prior corrects high? Debatable.
This is just more hindsight being employed.
It is so easy, so simple to look back, and proclaim one superior and correct.
Did you have these thoughts, and think all these precise things when people were hiring for pandemic booms?
Did you proclaim this loudly, put your reputation on the line, emphatically state that everyone was wrong, wrong!?
I doubt it.
I further doubt you, and the other poster, would have staked capital either way too. And you know why?
Because you didn't know with surety. Because this is all hindsight.
Heck, I'm willing to bet you had no opinion at all about this specific topic at all a year ago. None.
Unless you looked at this, thought about this, you're looking back.
> It wasn't a "crazy gamble." It was a calculated risk
The theme of this thread is risk taken by employees. Sure, it can very easily be characterised as "calculated risk" for the company. Was that risk calculated for employees?
Employees, like capital, are a component of the bet. Work is a lever just like money. Always is, always will be, that's how we have anything in capitalism. We might as well call it capitalaborism.
tbh betting on the fact that you will have explosive growth in the future while you are at the best economical time of your life at an exceptional time where most of the industries but e-commerce are suffering due to a worldwide pandemic and hoping that while millions of people died, countries debts increased, well gamgling that people will buy more after this time is a "Crazy gamble".
All sorts of things are breaking due to major miscalculations during the pandemic. I have friends who work in the fashion industry and they're all worried about muted sales. NOT because of demand, but because they made some serious miscalculations about the kind of clothes people would want in 2022.
So many of them went heavy on "comfort wear", thinking that somehow everyone will still be working from home and that going out will be an exception, not the norm. Many even expanded or created entirely new "home" lines that included selling towels, comforters, candle holders, etc.
Now they're all finding out that people want normal, going-out clothes again, and their current catalogs just don't line up with the demand.
The "new normal" was touted around way too aggressively. At least here in my reality, it's mostly gone back to the old normal with vestiges of the "new" remaining.
And thus, again, the fashion industry colludes to do evil, teams up with bioterrorists, and releases a new virus, creates a new pandemic, so that their warehouses may empty.
So they made a bet and if it doesn’t pay off the devs get fired but the execs making the bet get to stay?
Its not like shopify is even that good of a job for developers, they pay well below FAANG. Checking levels, Senior SWEs are only getting like 15k/year in grants which means you are taking on the start up risk without the potential 10x or 100x payoff.
One thing I don't understand is why you need more engineers to scale your product usage to higher volume. More machines/infrastructure or even support makes sense but devs no. I have same question for Atlassian, they are hiring like crazy.
Do you believe him? I certainly don’t believe any of my leaders.
One of my orgs had layoffs. Similar story.
Now we are hiring like mad again.
Truth is that they just jumped like spooked horses and laid off piles of people to keep investors happy for the quarter. That’s all you are to these people.
The problem with many layoffs is that corps layoff one org but start hiring in another org. Instead of transfering employees they go the easier route and just layoff.
Its more likely that they calculated that the spike in ecommerce that was caused by people quarantineing in their houses would not last, but it would still remain higher than how it was. (And its likely that it did, when you adjust it to the economy).
But nobody seems to have anticipated the Ukraine war and the sancitons hitting back the West itself, exacerbating inflation in the US and creating record inflation in Europe.
That really kicked the balls of the tech industry. And judging from national currencies being used more in international trade now, its likely that the old environment with infinite cash and little to no inflation in the US will not return. Since all the dollars that are not being used by countries that are now trading in their own currencies seem to flow back to the US, causing inflation.
Its likely that this may end the high cash influx, bloated stock share value economy and make the old format non-workable. But in the long run when the inflation and the prices settle, ecommerce should still be a profitable activity. Except that now companies would be valued on what actual revenue they are making, instead of the elusive and unpredictable potential value into the next decade which may or may not come.
In short, less WeWorks, more companies with an actual business model that works immediately or in visible future.
I recently began the process of interviewing for a position with a Vancouver HQ'd Canadian tech company (that a friend works at) while also interviewing for a remote US HQ'd startup. I terminated the process with the Canadian company when I accepted the offer for the startup. A couple weeks later the Canadian company announced a large number of layoffs, including for the kind of position I was considering.
I just looked and they're now advertising for that position again, with a fresh new posting. Just two months after their layoffs.
> As the newest senior leader on Shopify’s engineering team, Polinsky will lead Shopify’s efforts to build its e-commerce infrastructure and will lead the company’s efforts to double its engineering team in 2021 by hiring 2,021 new technical staff. [0]
> “Engineering hiring is probably the biggest limiter to Shopify’s growth,” Harley Finkelstein [President of Shopify] said in an interview after the results. The company had hoped to hire 2,021 new engineers this year and current conditions mean “obviously, it’s hard to do that,” he said, without disclosing the number that have been hired.
A tight market for talent is a worry for many industries but none more so than technology. Universities are not producing enough new engineers and the entire sector is competing for graduates, Finkelstein said. [1]
As of today they only have 10 open positions in the "Engineering & Development" department, the majority of which are for Staff/Tech Leads. [2]
Perhaps it would behoove Shopify to put a bit more thought into their hiring strategy; rather than just wanting to inflate engineer numbers as a vanity metric via jingly campaigns (2021 on 2021). "Just a number on the page".
> A lesson to be learned for anyone taking a job in a fast-growing company is to really think about the value that your specific job brings to the company.
Imo the issue usually is that interesting and value bringing work are usually not in alignment at these companies.
most companies i’ve worked at, no one wanted to work on ads and found them boring even though they brought in all the revenue.
everyone wanted to work on the experimental or shiny new thing which may not have demonstrated value yet.
but not sure if it’s worth working on the boring thing just for job safety
What I don't understand about this: What's the point of bringing on so many engineers with the expectation of firing many of them? It takes time to get productive and especially when you hire lots of engineers they will probably work on new projects. Spending a lot of money on an engineer and then firing them before they start to really produce value is very odd...
In large companies, don't assume that there is a coherent and unified vision on hiring or growth.
Different managers/directors/VPs have their own portfolios, their own budgets, their own roadmaps and KPIs. This leads to duplication, inefficiencies, and more.. But tech companies make so much money that in most cases this is accepted as cost of doing business - up to a point.
Also in some places, if you don't hire for your headcount, it becomes harder to get it back later when you truly need it..
There is a ton of organizational dysfunction like that in very larger companies (thousands of employees or more), even in the "best" companies that HN likes to fawn over.
Execs should also get held responsible for some churndex number because that ultimately reflects on how good the execution is in a way that cash flow deltas alone does not reflect.
I dont think they intended to have to lay off people. If everyone recalls during the core of the pandemic people really thought that this was the new normal. Im sure they thought that this was a full time step change in demand. I doubt they anticipated a recession (much like most companies). The executives at most companies aren't that smart on long term macros, much more reactionary to immediate needs
I doubt anyone would do it differently if put in Tobi’s place. If you see a bump in demand and growth for your product, do you just wave it off and hope the existing team can handle the increase stress on infrastructure, product needs, customer support, sales, etc?
Why not capitalize on it while you can, and if it doesnt pan out just reverse course and fire fast.
I mean alternatively they wouldn't have had those jobs and i think the team hired on hope of sustained growth.
If we always hired on expectations of layoffs (which i believe were incredibly generous from news reports) your current staff would be be beyond burnt out.
1. Why would Shopify willingly hire and train lots of people during the pandemic if they knew they'd let them go afterwards anyways? This makes no economic sense at all, they'd be better off to silently burn that money and not take the reputation hit.
2. You assume that layoff decisions take your individual job and situation into account. This is not the case in practice, especially so in quota driven mass layoffs.
The argument isn't that they did evil stuff for no reason. The argument is they "bet" that growth would continue at pandemic levels, and hired to support that growth, with the plan that if the growth didn't continue and the new people weren't needed, they'd just lay them off.
The opinion is that, if that was the plan (which Tobi's layoff post seems to confirm), that it's a crass way to operate. People uprooted their lives to work there. They quit old jobs, maybe moved cities or countries. Of course layoffs happen and companies make mistakes, but deliberately setting up a strategy with a high possibility of failure ("a bet") and then hiring people knowing that they'll be laid off if things outside their control don't go right in the near future--that's sort of crass.
Obviously no exec was twirling their mustache and saying "find me Jim, we'll fire him first because I hate him". It was just a plan set up, seemingly, without regard for the outsized risk it placed on new employees relative to the possibility of the business itself failing. New employees that would disproportionately be affected by a layoff, by nature of being new employees.
This isn't a uniquely Canadian problem at all, it's just Canada experiencing the pain of the wider tech sector.
Ultimately, it's the same issue as what's happened (and happening) in the US: the VC fun money dried up, and it's no longer cool to be an unprofitable business with a lot of "growth potential". Now tech leadership is being forced to balance a budget and figure out a path to profitability instead of just perpetually increasing revenues at negative margins.
Shopify is publicly traded and is an e-commerce platform. It isn't dependent on VC money to run, and neither are its customers. What happened was people shifted discretionary spending to e-commerce during covid, and between things reopening, having a fully-stocked home gym, and inflation, they cut back on buying stuff.
Wealthsimple might have funding issues (I'm not sure), but it lost a lot of use because again, its growth was driven by people bored at home.
The stock price is somewhat independent of the underlying business. The stock price is based on what investors think other investors will pay for it sometime in the future, weighted against other investments.
> The stock price is somewhat independent of the underlying business
Yeah, it was. Now it will likely have to be dependent on the underlying business. At least, in the US. In Europe it was always highly tied to the success of the company's business. To profits, especially.
In the US it was more like 'this will take over the market and go big in the future'. But, a lot of major companies haven't been able to do that. From Facebook to Twitter. Not even talking about those like WeWork or Uber.
> The stock price is based on what investors think other investors will pay for it sometime in the future,
And sometimes that 'investor' can be the company itself, doing a stock buyback. Or prices rising because of a corporate tax cut. Often times these swings in share price have nothing to do with the underlying business.
That's a pretty lopsided characterization. Yes, they had big losses in Q1 and Q2 2022, but they had nearly 3 billion in earnings in 2021. Large companies will often swing to big losses from big profits when there is a big macro shift, which is exactly what happened to Shopify. That's meaningfully different from a company that has had a sea of losses since inception, especially when those losses grow proportionally with revenue increases.
My favorite apocryphal explanation for the origin of the term "black friday" is it's the first day in the year retailers are in the black. I wouldn't be surprised if Shopify follows this pattern, too. You really need to look at YoY numbers for them.
Like many other things affecting western countries though, it's worse in Canada since we have lower investment rates, spend less on R&D, have an ultra-risk averse culture, extremely high costs, etc...
> lower investment rates, spend less on R&D, have an ultra-risk averse culture
Why do those make it worse? Lower investment rates means less money to lose, R&D is often trimmed first, and investment should go to lower risk in this kind of environment. And costs shouldn't be much higher than USA.
I think the problem is actually the opposite. People say the US is willing to take risks which is why their tech and startup scene is so good. Among the complaints about all other countries trying to work out how to become the "next silicon valley", near the top is almost universally "risk adverse". I think that's backwards though, investments in Canada and other such places in tech startup are very high risk and speculative, because people are just closing their eyes and praying that these fanciful predictions about being the next silicon valley are true and they hit it big, rather than being based on any real evidence or logic.
True it's often governments engaging in this reckless risky spending, which seems to make it appear to be "low risk" to other investors. That doesn't make it so though.
Higher investment rate means when prices go down/a recession happens, people invest in new businesses which means a recovery happens quicker and is more robust.
Just look at Canada's GDP per capita over time versus the US'. Or the fact our only job growth since the pandemic started has been in government jobs. Our private sector is dying because it's more profitable to simply move money to the US or to put it all into unproductive real estate.
> Higher investment rate means when prices go down/a recession happens, people invest in new businesses which means a recovery happens quicker and is more robust.
I mean you have lower rates so the downturn will have a smaller impact in an absolute sense.
> Just look at Canada's GDP per capita over time versus the US'. Or the fact our only job growth since the pandemic started has been in government jobs. Our private sector is dying because it's more profitable to simply move money to the US or to put it all into unproductive real estate.
Sure. If the downturn has a disproportional impact despite the sector's small size (investment), then it's because it was a far riskier investment than others.
> Downturns are more about whether or not consumers still spend, which is based on their savings rate and willingness to invest.
For tech startups focused on selling to the government, that doesn't really apply. And for those that aim to sell their product internationally it's not specific to the country they are based in.
> Like many other things affecting western countries though, it's worse in Canada since we have lower investment rates
And I am asking why that made it worse. Less investment means less investment to lose. Canada could lose 100% of their VC investment and it would have less of an impact in terms of people affected than a small trim in the US.
I think you're thinking of a different definition of "investment". Since this is a discussion of the economy, I'm using the "economics" definition of investment spending.
You don't "lose" infrastructure, land, machinery, etc... in a downturn. The point is that Canada spends less of our wealth on things that improve the economy. Half as much as the US (as a % of the economy).
Well this started by talking about investment (e.g., from VC) in the software sector which carries very little infrastructure, so I don't know what you're talking about now. That may explain why you were saying costs are very high when wages are typically far below the US, you don't seem to have been talking about the same thing.
VC is the type of grassroots investment that still can be called "investment" in the economic sense. Ie. you're not looking for immediate returns so any money pumped into startups by VC firms helps the economy whether or not it yields anything.
The VC scene in the US will help your recovery since VCs will still be putting money into the system (albeit at lower valuations) meanwhile in Canada it'll completely dry up.
And again, this isn't the type of "investing" where you're super concerned about paper losses like, say, the stock market.
Also software does count as an economic investment, the same as infrastructure.
> VC is the type of grassroots investment that still can be called "investment" in the economic sense. Ie. you're not looking for immediate returns so any money pumped into startups by VC firms helps the economy whether or not it yields anything.
Are you making up this as you go along? VCs absolutely look for returns and they're much less patient than what you would call a long term investor. If they don't see returns on investment from growing equity, they'll can it.
> The VC scene in the US will help your recovery since VCs will still be putting money into the system (albeit at lower valuations) meanwhile in Canada it'll completely dry up.
We're talking about the effect of investment fleeing due to the downturn though. In absolute terms, the amount of investment leaving USA is far larger because the investment in Canada tech companies is so small.
> And again, this isn't the type of "investing" where you're super concerned about paper losses like, say, the stock market.
Now you're definitely making things up. That's the only thing tech startup VCs care about. They don't even care if they know it's a sham, so long as they'll be able to cash out and leave someone else holding the bag.
> Also software does count as an economic investment, the same as infrastructure.
You've lost me. Tech startups create very little in the way of long term valuable assets like infrastructure. In any case it doesn't matter what kind of strange way you like to classify these things, doesn't change what they are.
Canadian tech startups are hilarious. The domestic media likes to play up Hootsuite in Vancouver like it's a big deal. Maybe in the context of Vancouver's size of tech job market... But it's absolutely nothing compared to what exists in Seattle or anywhere in California or places in NY, Texas, etc.
The unfortunate lesson that every Canadian working in the tech field will learn is that if you're really talented and experienced, you're going to ultimately be faced with the stark choice of accepting a dramatically lower salary for the privilege of living and working in Vancouver or Toronto, maybe because you have family obligations or can't/won't move to the USA. While you will see your peers who are free to move take jobs at double the salary in USD-equivalent in the US.
Honestly fuck Canadian tech companies. The pay is literally half or even a third of what we can earn in the states. The rise of remote work has been such an amazing development for Canadian software developer. Really there isn’t much point in living in a Canadian tech city like Vancouver or Toronto since it makes no sense to work for a Canadian company anymore. Even taking a remote job at any run of the mill non flashy firm in the states will pay more than anyone pays in Canada, so may as well just move out to Winnipeg or Halifax.
Some of us enjoy the culture, food and network of living in a large city. There’s a whole world in what your day to day is between living in the 3rd biggest city in US-Canada and living in Winnipeg. Both are fine, but they are different, not interchangeable
Sure, if you like it for its own sake but I’m just saying that there is no career advantage to living in Toronto rather than Winnipeg now, since I’ll probably never again work for any Canadian company.
I'm Canadian, and I lived in Vancouver for six years recently. Never once did I consider working for a Canadian company. They're a joke when it comes to compensation. You can literally double your salary by moving 100 miles south to Seattle, in the same company! When I changed jobs earlier this year, some companies had location based pay for remote work. They made me a lowball offer, I told them it was too low, and I didn't even bother negotiating further with them. I just focused on the other offers.
>Canadian tech startups are hilarious. The domestic media likes to play up Hootsuite in Vancouver like it's a big deal.
Don't forget how, after Trump's election in 2016, Canadian media proclaimed at length how hordes of tech companies and employees would flee north of the border. Montreal as "AI superpower", anyone?
Only $50k grants? You must have missed the AI startup wave here in Montreal. They didn't end up producing much, if anything, of value. But they sure knew how to scale those grants/"government investments" to a completely new level.
At least a few of them found a niche and are doing okay, but it was almost funny to see the number of AI startups 3-4 years ago whose business model was essentially "hope businesses pay us to apply ML libraries to their data".
Yeah, that was such a sleazy move by these ML influences or whatever you call them. Have connections with government and the right degrees? Boom, now you taking photoshots with PM and syphoning hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. I think it's especially bad in QC where there is a lot of government support.
There were a couple of startups in MTL that had absolutely nothing to show but a lot of PR and it was so so obvious.
I would've thought the whole Element AI debacle would've reined that in but I guess not? If the patron saint of DL can't keep a startup with 100M invested in it going, I don't even know what left, right, up and down are anymore.
>Only $50k grants? You must have missed the AI startup wave here in Montreal.
Indeed, I certainly remember the days when Montreal was said to be the next "AI superpower".
How much of that was driven by the media predicting after Trump's election in 2016 that hordes of tech companies and employees would flee north of the border? (And how much of that reporting, in turn, was driven by smug Trudeau government bureaucrats who actually believed what they told sympathetic/gullible reporters?)
Montreal still is a AI powerhouse. Most of the same people who were here ten years ago still are, and still working on the same research topics, just with less flashy PR.
Yeah if anything I think the ecosystem is healthier. More established corporations have moved in, and the startups that pop up are usually more legitimate.
(Though I think MILA is kind of losing some of its lustre, both in terms of research output and quality. I guess it might just be that my friends there are mostly doing RL or cognitive research, which I both find to be pretty... unpractical? They give me a 1980s AI dead-end vibes, but that's obviously purely personal biais)
Interesting. Not disagreeing with you, but just out of curiosity, are there any other reasons why you believe research quality has declined at Mila specifically, outside the broader trend that progress in deep learning is starting to slow, and besides your opinion that RL/CogSci research are dead ends?
It makes sense. Plausible business models can get normal business loans. Funding what no one else or not enough people are funding is typically the point of a grant.
I wish they would cancel the SRED program and simply reduce business taxes in general. It is such a stupid drag on productivity and generally selects for things that sound cool to government bureaucrats while allowing for many juicy corruption opportunities.
Yikes,that sounds like a easy way to sink a lot of effort into something totally useless. With how mercurial the government can be with those credits it's better to do the work you need first and think about how to frame it for filing after.
Unpopular opinion with some truth in it. Many of the SWEs and other product people in these companies left at the peak of pandemic due to burnout, but mostly due to cheap money. Many senior leaders cashed out their stock and went into the sunset.
Companies responded with mass hiring as money was everywhere. They grossly underestimated the complexity of running an engineering org and now the bill is due. I think until the old guards come back, we will see the pain exacerbate.
Most Canadian companies don't want to pay the salaries to have the "old guard." I suspect a lot of people left during COVID not just because they were burnt out but because they could get better pay working remotely for US companies.
They better hope we end up in a deep recession, because they're not fit to compete for talent when there's employers out there hiring remote at competitive rates.
That's exactly the narrative I want to address. Because I have seen this first hand. When the stocks were booming. Old people left. They didn't took another job. They left. Some cashed out $x millions.
Lot of indiscriminate hiring happened to puff up the leak. Companies were flushed with money. But that was a failing strategy. Companies can continue to go down that path, it will have further diminishing returns
I mean, I did that. I left Google and cashed out. I'm not old, but I'm mid-life. I'm not able to retire. I just couldn't handle the bullshit anymore. But now I'm working again (for less $) because I need the money :-)
But TBH the hiring frenzy was happening long before that. When I left (end of last year), I heard Google had hired something like half its staff just during the pandemic period. Not sure if I believe that, but if so, that's crazy. None of those people even saw the inside of the office.
There you go. I have done something similar. And place was puffing up with out of college new hires. Everyone getting pat on the back. I stand by my assertion, companies will have to get the old people back unless they are happy to have years of over investment with little returns, increased uncertainty around release cycles
> And place was puffing up with out of college new hires. Everyone getting pat on the back
I've read that FAANG companies like Facebook and Google dramatically increased their headcount in the last couple of years during the pandemic. It definitely seems like jobs were being handed out like candy and now companies are going to feel the consequences.
I'm "somewhat old" and not done, just done with BigCorp. I did well with stock, but it turns out it takes a lot of $$ to live well when you have kids in school and all that still.
I'm doing the startup game for a bit to try to re-ignite the spark. A few weeks away from Google and I was excited to write code again. Google sucked the motivation out of me.
The typical Canadian company is probably not worried about it as they believe they will be able to find offshore workers, use Fiverr to fill the gap, etc.
I interviewed at a startup once in Canada. They offered 40K per year (Canadian) and asked late working hours right in the interview process. No thanks...
There are McDonalds in the US that offer 40k (USD) to entry-level, no-experience workers. With such an insulting salary proposal as you experienced, it's amazing that Canada has any startups at all.
There were two very talented devs I know that took $11/hr CAD jobs personally. I know of more with rough salaries $40,000 and below. Even me; when I was in QA, my salary was $52,000 for 9 years of experience. And that was after a raise.
Like it or not, there's people willing to take those positions. No where near as many as Canadian companies would like, but they are there.
> two very talented devs I know that took $11/hr CAD jobs personally
When was this?
Note that $11/hr CAD is below the current minimum wage of every Canadian province and territory as of June 1 2022 [0]
As an aside - what leads to a talented individual doing dev for $11/hr CAD? I'm not able to conjure up a scenario where that is the case other than they were working for their own startup ... ?
About 10 years ago, at the time the minimum wage was around $9/hr to $10/hr or so. Adjusted for inflation it'd be around $13.78 in today's money.
> As an aside - what leads to a talented individual doing dev for $11/hr CAD? I'm not able to conjure up a scenario where that is the case other than they were working for their own startup ... ?
They were freshly graduated, with low cost of living at that time. But like many new graduates, were having difficulty getting that first job, which caused a measure of desperation. Throw in the fact that the problem domain we were working on at the time was genuinely interesting, and it's not too difficult to convince yourself that kind of money isn't so bad. At least for a while.
If they're that talented, they should learn how to negotiate for themselves and realize there are much better options. Right now they're just being taken advantage of, making more money for someone else.
Few years before the pandemic i researched moving to canada from the uk. I was shocked at how low tech pay was. Basically it was lower than in some east european countries for my level of experience. The way i see it, canada will follow the path denmark went after the 2008 crash. The software tech sector all but vanished and has not recovered since.
While it's hardly as dynamic as the U.S., Denmark seems to be doing just fine in the tech space. It's fair to say that a lot of tech talent is in larger organisations rather than startups. Denmark is a very sticky place to live (the quality of life is amazing, particularly for families), so people are reluctant to leave even if wages are not excellent. That said, wages are very good for Europe (there is only one or two countries where I could earn more).
All in all I see plenty of tech talent, it's just that, internationally, tech talent doesn't see Denmark as an obvious choice to which to relocate. Nine times out of 10, that's the U.S.
I left denmark because tech wages were quite low compared to the uk after _all_ taxes have been factored in. The tech job market was basically non existent around 13 years ago. Still seems small upon a quick check as of today. Schools and universities are free but nowhere near the quality the uk offers. Public healthcare is ok but you still need to queue up or go private. It is a cool stable country, i like it, and danes are super friendly, but tech is dead.
The U.K. is certainly not a bad place to end up. Tech wages are higher in Denmark (https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...) but you're right: the taxes are also higher. I still strongly disagree with the notion that tech is dead in Denmark. Me and hundreds of colleagues are all very happy with the tech wages in our company. I mean, Denmark is a much smaller country than the U.K., so in an absolute sense, there are certainly more tech opportunities in a country with 10x as many people.
Calling Shopify a Canadian Tech Startup is really getting old. At 10k+ employees the term “startup” should really stop being applied to it. It is really big, and many of its execs are from huge American banks. So even “Canadian” may soon cease to be a valid label for it.
As a non-SVer, this has always been something that confused me. What is the actual definition for "startup"? It doesn't seem to be tied to age, funding level, employee counts, user counts, revenues, or really anything else at all.
Honestly, it seems like a mostly self-selected tag used to indicate culture -- e.g., expectations of working conditions (hours, for instance) that in "normal" business we have long ago realized are actually counter-productive.
A lot of the "startup type" characteristics of a company can possibly be correlated with one of the above categories. If you don't fall in either category, it would be weird to display those characteristics.
> mostly self-selected tag used to indicate culture
This is _precisely_ how I've seen it (mis)used; a (IMO very creepy) need to hang on to those wonder-years that got you there. It's also when you typically see the "visionary" type leaders start heading out and doing it over again.
Which, frankly, at this point might very well include every company founded since Facebook and including FB. Maybe every tech company post-dot com bubble is spiritually a startup.
Shopify was also launched in 2006, making it a 16 year old company. While not all startups are young in time-age, calling shopify a "startup" is a misnomer.
I've seen this a couple times; a startup makes it past whatever threshold you'd consider a startup, but doesn't want to let go of that "culture" or zeitgeist, or whatever romantic notion they had of yore.
In one case they were bought, so now they were part of a 75k+ employee behemoth. But still, with only some irony, called themselves "scrappy".
In another they're still privately owned, but are over 7 years old, with close to 500 employees, and allegedly #1 in their space. I feel they like to hide behind this "startup" idea because it relieves them of putting on the big-boy pants and accepting that the expense of moving fast being the #1 priority is actually something they're having a hard time paying.
I’ve never seen entire industry hiring freezes so i’m not aware of the concern. Would rather stay on job during hiring freeze than he let go. I can sense if i need to bail without being subject to one or another.
Hiring freezes don't have to be industry wide to be problematic. If you are competing with dozens of people for a job, there is a high chance some of them are both a good fit and willing to accept crappier compensation.
Yeah, even if there are only some actual layoffs and only some degree of hiring freezes/slowdowns/tight budgets, that translates to fewer openings with more people competing for them with lower TC being offered. The general sense among the people I talk to is that it's increasingly significantly less of an employee's market than it was 6 to 12 months ago.
Nowhere near dot-bomb territory of course (and the dynamics are different) but the market has changed.
Interesting. I haven’t seen this. Been through many hiring freezes and economic downturns but my salary has only ever gone up and if my employer tightened the reigns, i moved on. (here is your sign)- nothing really changed the market unless it was something such as 2008 meltdown with was systemic.
2008 didn't really effect tech that much. In dot-bomb, a lot of people were out of work for a long time and many left the industry. I was lucky to find something fairly quickly but it was a significant pay cut. (Not developer but in "tech").
I wonder if there's an intuitive ratio here, like 10 freezes for every layoff, and 10 slowdowns for every freeze
Freezes and slowdowns don't really need to get announced. We've definitely seen an uptick in candidate quality (we're especially keen on an open position in data to work w/ DOJ leadership on-site in DC!), and while the growing graph AI market can explain some of the interest, the broader industry slowdowns elsewhere have to be part of it.
Layoffs may not even be a bad thing if job mobility is high. Startups lay off a lot of people who have bullshitted their way into their position, members of low ROI teams who can't be easily be transferred somewhere else, quiet quitters, etc. On the other hand struggling to find a job as an experienced engineer is usually a symptom of a sick economy.
Heck, I've even been almost jealous of the ones who got laid off once, at a company that was starting to circle the drain. They were effectively being paid to job hunt with the severance package.
Startups are a crapshoot; not a sure thing. Startups sputter and fail in the best of times and worst of times.
You can go through 30 years of career doing nothing but hopping from one failed startup to another, which can span a bubble or two and a couple of recessions.
Software? Most software ever written has been a commercial flop. Not a single customer.
We're in a recession. Any time there's a recession, people become bearish and want to be paid in cash and not stock options. So it's bad times for startups. The good news is, the startups that make it though this will be the ones where people really made a product they were passionate about. Think Square or Skype.
Companies using jobs as a profit buffer is truly sociopathic.
Yes of course when things get truly bad companies need to lay off staff, but what we are seeing is people being fired to preserve a profit margin and CEOs are massive bonuses.
I can’t speak for parent but I’ve been headhunted by crypto companies a lot and my feeling is the same.
For me it’s as simple as: I will never work for a company where I cannot immediately and concretely understand the value proposition.
Crypto people can frame this as me not being competent if that’s what they need. But I think I’m reasonably smart and usually it just sounds like a fraud.
HN is the absolute worst place to recruit given the bias against crypto here. But I’ll flip it around and say many startups in all manner of verticals are shaky - Fast.com, innumerable food delivery and fintech, “AI for XYZ” etc. etc.
One thing you can use to differentiate firms is the team, the founders, the funders. My company is backed by Point72 / Steve Cohen which does a lot more due diligence than most other firms. YMMV however - I myself would never work for adtech given my distaste. But a lot of HNers love certain FAANGs that data mine you and your children to sell you crap you don’t need. But many choose to disregard their morals and dismount their high horse when $$$ is involved.
Mhm. My bias is not exclusive to Crypto. I need the value prop to be obvious. I’ve worked for a company where it wasn’t and nothing makes a job more miserable than pivoting every four months because everyone’s just playing startup and nobody has any clue where to aim.
Totally fair - my company has high revenues (unlike 99% of crypto) and we are essentially a digital Pokémon card company, and we resell our Pokémon card factory to others white label. It is a very straight forwards and logical business model.
You surely realize that in the US or Canadian tech cultures, Steven Cohen is only slightly better than being backed by a billionaire Russian oligarch. Cohen is certainly extraordinarily rich and well connected, his reputation isn't going to be positive for techies generally however. That is to say, tech workers are far more likely to be turned off by your pointing that investor out than the other way around (but hey, maybe it does some screening re potential applicants).
To work in crypto at a sophisticated firm like Coinbase, Gemini, Circle (my former company) or my own co, it would be a given you believe in markets and the experimental nature of digital assets given… that is the whole reason to work here!
I am a libertarian, free thinker, capitalist, etc. which is the standard profile in this industry. I have recruited engineers out of Amazon and Google who said they needed a change of pace from the “moralizing” (use your own judgement). It is a very open discussion, open inquiry industry.
So if working for a Cohen company is against your morals, easy to ignore. If that doesn’t bother you, then you passed the first question! Steve is a genius - but not everyone likes Wall Street.
Sounds like, "Move fast and break ,[habitually other people's] piggy banks." SAC is totemic in a industry founded by other people's money and the carry without any equivalent downside. Speaking as a former prop trader, of cutting edge products including those I've designed as principal, when you're touching the wider economy a entirely different set of rules either applies or someone's gotta be responsible. I don't believe that anyone's understood what "the buck stops here" means for two generations.
The people - the intersection of finance and tech attracts some of the most spectacular international-level pro scumbags I've had the misfortune to meet. Then there's about 5% of everyone in the entire space that understands the technology, the rest are just bullshit peddlers along for the ride who can smell a quick buck and an industry ripe for abuse because so few understand what it actually is.
