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?
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?
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
But they also captain their first large enterprises: do they know what they're doing? Can they transition these firms into businesses that will endure? Or will they capriciously chase shiny objects while they waste the trust and goodwill of investors, the people who work there now, and the people who will want to work there in the future? They might have seeded the garden, but it took thousands of smart people to build it up, and it takes a constant supply to maintain it.
A new CEO will probably be rich, sure, but not "endow a historical dynasty" rich, and might know how to take a successful company and reposition it for the long term. Maybe the younger guys can do it. But it would just be for vanity at this point.
Musk has reminded me that even billionaires are one accidentally legally binding agreement away from pissing away $40B
There is no tangible difference between being worth $1B and $100B beyond social cachet. It is impossible to spend meaningful money at that level.
Then why are they compensated like they're gods?
"Back where you started" with a now highly demotivated team isn't quite back where you started.
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. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce...
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
source: I was a Shopify employee until today and can confirm my salary was closer to FAANG than not.
there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this
Shopify wasn't paying like FAANG, but also not like a startup. I would say 75% of a FAANG.
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.
Feels so incredibly backward.
And yes I know its "stock performance" but what do you think drives this? With executive compensation mostly related to stocks, of course at the end of the day, thats what they want to drive up.
I settled into a role of research software engineer, where I do both applied research and development, applying a lot of compiler-ish stuff to different domains within cybersecurity, such as building out control flow graphs from binaries, thinking about how to instrument assembly code efficiently, fast pattern matching, and static analysis, where I am currently. The role fits me like a glove, but it isn't for everyone. In my job search, I started at, "I want a job doing compiler work," and eventually broadened scope a few times until I landed on, "I want a job where compiler-type approaches are on the table of possibilities." This offers a wider variety of work, which I like.
I can discuss more over email (check my HN profile) if you'd like, but most of what I know is US-centric due to how funding works for these types of research. Larger orgs like FAANGs also have it, but the pool is much more competitive, as you'd expect.
Those parts you mentioned like the static analysis or control flow graphs sounds cool
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/25/britons-nee...
While I agree that this is a naive belief to have (at this point in my career I think there's almost a slightly negative correlation between skill and TC) the general talent pool for software engineers has, at least in my experience, dropped tremendously while TC has exploded.
The most important skills for getting high paying jobs in the last few years has been grinding leet code, then grinding systems design etc, etc. Software engineers no longer have "rare/valuable" skills, they have highly commodified, easily replicable skills (at least at the interview level).
Software engineers today simply aren't that skilled (at least on average) despite what they want to believe. It reminds me a lot of dotcom bubble where anyone with a pulse that could turn on a PC could get a high paying job.
AI is already displacing some people from their work. I hate both absolute capitalism and socialism/communism. How can AI help us find a sweet spot?
But what is going away, permanently, is the space between extremes. Pour one out. I miss it already.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
Is there evidence of this now?
What I see is a small fraction of the open roles I'm used to seeing.
Compensation, on the other hand, is the same at these big companies. If not even higher than it was a couple years ago.
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.