When you’re the first large provider of tech apprenticeships, you want apprentices to stick around after graduation. The problem is that Shopify generally can’t force employees to stay (companies hate suing over breach of contract for education subsidies). One work around is to pay a low salary during the training period. That’s exactly what Shopify is doing (160K over 4 years = 40K per year).

This could be a cheap way of boosting Shopify’s workforce and reputation. Tech companies have high revenue per employee. If Big Tech follows suit with other apprenticeships, Shopify could be known as the company that made white collar apprenticeships a thing in the U.S. and Canada. The apprentice program would become less expensive for Shopify over time as it captures apprentices from other companies.

They’re not paying them that much- $160 000 over four years, including tuition. So it’s $40 000 a year, which is a great deal imo (for both parties).

I assume that, with sufficient screening, you can get someone contributing relatively quickly, and start getting value. I think the key is the screening- they’re not giving this offer to every CS student. At the places I’ve worked, we’ve definitely got value out of interns comparable to a junior developer.

Depends on the 'intern' culture they have here. They are basically paying people 40k per year. Combine that with an actual program for entry-level hires (like a bootcamp), and I can see the value. I'm not sure what Dev salaries look like in Canada, but in the US, 40k is extremely low. I think Shopify is a rails shop, which is super quick to get productive in. Also, given the stack, it's probably not as easy to just throw H1b (or whatever Can equivalent) at the problem.

This is also a great value for the applicants, as you get actual experience, with no tuition. Very interested to see how this works out. Kudos to Shopify for forward thinking.

I'm going to tackle this from the perspective of an apprenticeship (which is what I'm doing). In general it seems similar to hiring tech interns - they're expensive but can pay off if you really invest into it. Few things to note:

1) Usually they pay apprentices less but apprentices can still provide huge value to the team they're working on (after a while).

2) I have no solid data on this, but I assume apprentices have a lower churn rate/stay at their company longer.

3) The biggie: Some countries basically force companies to have an apprenticeship programme. In the UK, there's a levy which effectively makes a company put aside 0.4% of their payroll for funding apprenticeships - which nicely incentivises companies to do something that would otherwise be unprofitable.