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Comment by MEMORYC_RRUPTED | Hacker News Reader

There’s more information available in the full email by Tobi (the CEO): https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team

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16 weeks of severance pay.

Additional week for every year of tenure at Shopify.

No Equity cliff.

Medical benefits (for 16 weeks?).

Internet costs reimbursement (16 weeks?).

Get to keep home office furniture.

Kickstart allowance that can be used to buy new laptops.

Outplacement services.

Free Shopify account those who wants to start on their own.

I would take this for my current job with which i'm moderately okay with currently holding. Stunningly generous benefits.

O'Canada.

I wonder how the free stuff is taxed. It sounds like it would fit under a fringe benefit and technically would mean it’s taxable.

It's a taxable benefit and they do let you opt out if you don't want to pay the taxes.

The first time is generous.

This actually makes laying off a recent hire sr employee more expensive. As they’d need to pay out all the equity and 16 weeks of expensive base salary.

I don’t think that’s what no equity cliff means

if it’s a standard one year cliff then it just means if you’ve worked there for 5 months you get 5 months of equity whereas you would have gotten zero. it’s not “all the equity”

Also Shopify is -80% ytd so if you were hired the beginning of the year you were expecting a completely different compensation package than you are getting now.

Yeah, I think this is correct. I've been in a position where the company that hired me couldn't keep paying me and we decided to part ways a few months short of a year. The founder offered me the amount of options that would have vested had there been no cliff.

If the strike price for the options is 5x the current stock price (due to 80% drop), I wonder how useful the no-cliff rule is for recent hires.

Does Shopify give out options? I would have thought RSUs considering they've been public a while.

Even RSUs are converted from a dollar value to a number of shares in the month you join. If you’re getting them a year later with this level of stock decline a $220k/year salary and $220k/year of stock would be $264k of compensation when you were expecting somewhere near $440k. So even with RSUs the pain is real.

Actually it's much worse. They are doing it quarterly. So if you've worked there for 8 months, you get equity vested in first 6 months only.

Wow these are some amazing severance benefits. I'd love to see more companies as generous a this when reducing their staff load.

I want to get laid off too :(

To everyone who says they want to get laid off-- this is an obvious sign that you should find another job! If you would quit your job for four months pay, you might be able to get that in a signing bonus and a raise. Plus, why be somewhere that you are so happy to leave?

I would rather have severance + sign on bonus than only sign on bonus!

Because there is so much more in life than work, and I don’t think there is any job somewhere that I would not be happy to leave, why people like jobs , how did we get to this point in time

I think this just means you haven't had a great job. When you have a great job, it doesn't feel like work" in the same sense that a not so great job does.

Would you still go to work if there was no pay check?

I want to take that money and vacation for 4 months lol.

This sort of thing used to be pretty common with large employers. A classmate got caught up in maybe the first layoff round of one of the old-line East Coast computer companies. He'd only been there a few years but as I recall he still got something like 6 months severance and he took off to Greenland for an extended trip before even looking for another job.

I have been at startups where they just stop paying the office lease and salaries stop. These days i am just prepared for it. If you are in the backend side of things you can figure out most things with a few sql queries.

> If you are in the backend side of things you can figure out most things with a few sql queries.

Expand on this? You querying the prod db to sus out the health of the company?

Even without querying prod db, postgres://billing.and.analytics.internal is available to most engineers in small startups.

Yeah, the lack of a revenue dashboard at a startup would be a red flag in and of itself.

For the platforms I've built I've had access to the customers table for example, you know if it's growing or shrinking.

You don't even have to explicitly nose around, looking at the logs you'll see customer IDs and if they are sequential a keen eye will notice if they stop getting any higher.

We generated a report each week to let all the devs know how many customers we had starting that week, what products they were launching, how many users they each had...

It was great for planning the on-call rotation as well as giving us a heads up on which nights we could go out drinking and how late we could come in the next morning.

if you have to query the database to tell how the company's doing- or you don't trust what they're telling you- that's probably a pretty big red flag by itself

> stop paying the office lease and salaries stop

Last job I had before this one, I came into work the week before Thanksgiving to a mandatory morning meeting that consisted of "the company is out of business effective immediately, you will all be emailed your severance details by personal email, please clean out your desks".

The downside is that the worst performers get the best severance benefits - each round of layoffs reduces the benefits and gets rid of the less expendable folks.

You assume that the folks receiving severance are actually "bad performers"; layoffs are not the kind of mechanism that cleanly separate "good" from "bad" performers.

Well, when a company starts considering who to lay off, they're not gonna start with people who they think are rockstars. At worst those folks would get reassigned.

Only the first time and even then not really true. Reassignment assumes that reqs haven't previously been canceled as part of belt tightening in those other groups.

Also, by layoff N, you're cutting meat unless you are a massively bloated company, which is somewhat rare this time around (unlike HP, Cisco, Sun, etc. in 2001).

I work at a series B startup, and even we are bloated. It would be next to impossible not to be given the prevailing funding environment of the last 10 years.

Well considering that a large chunk of the layoffs were in recruiting and that you basically have a hiring freeze I am sure plenty of rockstar recruiters were nonetheless laid off.

Depends on their salary

They're probably getting rid of the least effective per dollar spent (or trying to, good luck measuring anything, especially around productivity)

> actually "bad performers"

Well, ok - "the most expendable" then.

I don't know if the way this works really correlate to worst / best performers in this case or in my experience. I once worked for a company that after some great successes slowly went bankrupt. Naturally there were many episodes of layoffs and in general I would say people were let go based on changing priorities. You could have been a great employee in an area they were going to pursue and you were gone.

After the first or second round of layoffs that I avoided, I mentioned to an older employee that I was really glad to dodge that bullet. "I don't know," he said. "The earlier ones usually get the better deal." This was so true! I stayed until the doors were closed for good and didn't even get vacation paid I was owed. I don't regret it though because as the company imploded I got to try my hand at new roles, and worked with a really clever team that tried heroically to turn the company around.

I wish I could get that offer right now. I would take it straight away.

That reminds me though. I went through quite a few big layoffs at GE and one of the better ones was when they were offering people 26 weeks of pay plus one week for each year of service. Many of these people had 20+ years so they would have gotten nearly a year of pay to quit. Almost nobody took it.

What does no equity cliff mean in the context of a layoff?

If you're year 1.5 into a 4 year vest, you get all 4? or 2?

The funny thing is, and it shows in this mail, Tobi built a true profitable Unicorn. And outside of Shopify, and even within eCommmerce, he has such a low profile as a person. Founders here in germany look to Musk, I suspect (and now for a fact) a lot of them don't even know who he (Edit: Tobi) is.

I like that mail, ckear, to the point, factual and self critical. Severence packages are good, really good. All in all, quite a change from other companies firing people over zoom.

> Founders here in germany look to Musk, I suspect (and now for a fact) a lot of them don't even know who he (Edit: Tobi) is.

Fyi for those who don't know Tobi is German, but moved to Canada where he started Shopify.

It's always been interesting to me --- most people dont realize it's way better to be rich and unknown then be known to be rich. Tobi can't hide that he is rich at this point, but I bet he can go into most restaurants or bars outside of CA without being accosted.

I agree. Also I think Shopify is centered in Ottawa, Canada — where I suspect he’s also free from being accosted in restaurants and bars.

Hockey players are more likely to be accosted in Ottawa than a local CEO.

Tobi is a much more admirable CEO than Musk, even though Tobi appears to be a Musk fan.

This is well written. Explains the problem well, and sincerely blames himself for the end result.

"Most of the impacted roles are in recruiting, support, and sales, and across the company we’re also eliminating over-specialized and duplicate roles, as well as some groups that were convenient to have but too far removed from building products."

Important to keep in mind that engineering roles may not be as affected as other departments.

About to find out personally! (applying to Shopify for an eng role as of this comment)

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