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> OP's ability to put his learnings into words

Reading this gave me the exact opposite impression - the amount of work it takes to extract takeaways from this writing is IMO one of it's biggest failures. It felt like pulling teeth to try and even get meaning out of some sections. #3 in particular is so nebulous I struggle to find the lesson at all. To me, this seems like a case of bad writing organization. If done better, I bet this piece would be half the length of current.

As to the contentious content: taking time to understand how your company works, great! Needing 6 months before being considered useful? Huge red flag.

> When you’re in a company full of smart people, like Shopify, it can often be quite tricky to resolve disagreements and impasses

Here's another huge red flag for me. The later explanation around having an idea of how the leadership/company thinks? Great. But having that philosophy/approach outlined should make resolution a lot easier. The "full of smart people" excuse could be rooted in a few things, but I struggle to think of a good one.

> Needing 6 months before being considered useful?

I don’t think this is ‘useful’ so much as ‘having a clue what is going on’.

It’s easy to be productive on the one project you are assigned to, but you won’t have any context for the implications of what you are working on.

Quote the original piece:

> "In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim."

Useless is their word here, and the way they continue to describe it gives the same impression.

I'm in agreement that knowing how organizations work takes time and experience, but six months is indicative of a larger problem in the org. Brevity and succinct, digestive philosophy is valuable. If you can't at least communicate a good outline to new hires in a month or two, something has gone wrong. The minutiae of course will take far longer than 6 months in total, but you should be able to "swim" by then, just not as fast as a 2-4 year vet.

I just read point #3 after reading your comment, and I don't see what's nebulous about it. Perhaps different people are good at grokking different writing styles, because it was quite easy for me to extract the lessons:

- It really is true that big companies move much more slowly than startups.

- Consequently, startups should be wary of projects that depend on partnerships with big companies.

- Big companies are slow because knowledge is widely distributed and tough to wrangle, and liabilities and gotchas are numerous. Even simple things require a lot of know-how.

- To minimize slowness, find a single person who knows all of the moving parts involved. Avoid hodgepodges of people who each know only a tiny part of the whole challenge.

- It's important to start with this person, because problems snowball. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I like your summary a lot better, and much of this info is buried. Something that speaks volumes is reading the first sentence part of each paragraph in that section, you get exactly zero of these points.

The storytelling flow of consciousness might work for some, but generally it's well established that for this type of writing, leading with your point and backing up with examples after tends to be more effective. But also in this case, a lot of the details don't actually add context to the lesson and can be removed without hurting the content of the piece.

As an example, here's a possible rewrite of section #3 that I think reads a lot better and really doesn't lack any material:

> A long time ago, I was told “if you’re a startup, try not to waste your time talking to big companies unless you’re doing it deliberately. They have an absolutely endless capacity to consume your time with meetings.” I didn't truly understand until I got a chance to work with a partner for my first time within Shopify on our partnership with Operation HOPE to help start 1,000,000 new Black-owned businesses over the next decade.

> It’s clear to me now how this happens. In a partnership, I have found the most important thing is making sure that someone who understands every piece of the project is involved from the very outset of the project. If this fails, you end up spending a lot of time (like I have) straightening out requirements and capabilities on both sides. This creates meeting after meeting as new groups get pulled in, but never solves the real problem.

Word Count: 488 vs 154

Not to mention brevity being a sign of good communication. The same point is covered over and over with slight changes. You really slog through and feel like things aren't really clear. I have worked a bunch of tech companies and am having trouble figuring out how I could possibly be "useless" for an entire 6 months. What is going on there? He never really says.

This! Agree completely and having worked in different companies, including huge enterprise, Shopify sounds like a great company to me based on this post! When a company grows it starts to function like an enterprise business and being aware of it and managing it is just great management and it sounds like that’s what Shopify is doing (long learning period expected, transparent leadership).

> Long learning period

True. But this is why Goliaths get run over by Davids. When it take half a year's salary to begin getting return, that's six months of high risk. And then when your product cycles are six to twelve months, you're slow and venerable.

Full disclosure: I do some Shopify development. It's a love hate relationship. There are things that are great. But there are things where I stop and think "For Ford's sake??!!?? Really??" This article explains the excess of the latter.

When was the last time a David ran over Goliath because they moved faster?

Uber and Lyft knocked the taxi industry on its arse.

Amazon ate Walmart alive, alone with a handful of other retailers.

Etc.

> Amazon ate Walmart alive, alone with a handful of other retailers.

Walmart is actually doing very well, especially in e-commerce.

Walmart online growth was directly cannibalized by AMZ for some time. Walmart stopped getting eaten, but the history stands.

As it stands, you have the poorest Americans (the long tail) competing against a small section of the rise who can afford and trust that shipping goods to their door. The overlap is minor, excepting for perishables.

Now. Maybe. But when Walmart was #1 they could have - and should have - never let Amazon and the like get a toe hold. Jeff ran up and over Walmart in less than a decade. It took Walmart well over a decade - and a few acquisition - to find their feet and sort it out.

David is so far ahead Walmart is looking in the mirror thinking they're ahead :)

How is uber and lyft not the goliah when they have billions of dollars poured into them vs the local tax companies...?

Uber is global, your local tax company is not. Plus your local tax company is restrained by you know, laws.

Amazon vs Walmart is also not a good comparison .. I believe this david vs goliah is mostly start up people that think too highly of themselves! In reality you have Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft... all huge companies that have been dominant for decade + and aren't too different from the post.

We're talking about culture, agility, and mindset, not war chest per se. That is, lean and aggressive vs slothy enterprise.

Sears... Amazon and the likes not only ate, but stole their breakfast lunch and dinner.

Blockbuster... Could have invested in their David but didn't, I'm sure they're still regretting that.

To name a couple fairly obvious and well known examples of large incumbents being knocked down.

I agree. I find it interesting how many people are saying something to the tune of "I'd rather spend my time adding value to the company's product than learning office politics". Firstly, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. And secondly, at least in my experience, the first six months at a new company is mostly an information gathering exercise. You're not going to be able to make valuable changes to the company's product in your second week, and attempting to force through something before fully understanding why things are the way they are is probably just going to leave a bad impression on people. If that happens, good luck getting the team to buy into those good ideas you're so eager to spend your time on.

It actually sounds like their structure is really sycophantic and codependent. Possibly even cult-like. You are taught to view things as a small handful of leaders and never challenge their viewpoint. Sounds kind of not a great place to work.

I think a key piece of info omitted from this article what OP actually does at Shopify. I'm assuming based on context that he's maybe a mid-level developer.

Exactly. At the entry level end we should talk about the number of employees who end up on flaming out or on short term disability from the stress.

Not even just at entry level. Gas lighting and bullying at this company are nuts, people constantly having breakdowns and having to go on stress leave, looking forward to more updates of and when this guy stops drinking the cool aid.