Our mistake in tech was allowing lawnmower-managers to take over. It’s caused manager bloat, layers, and 1:1 overload. Let’s undo? 🧵 2/ It’s not uncommon to see 5 layers of « servant leaders » before you find someone actually building your product or who’s immersed in the problem space.

Following the advice in this slide will kill your company. 🧵 This advice is spread all over the internet. Two groups of people (product and engineering) want a nice clean API about who does what.

But it's like being in a marriage and thinking that you'll each clean your side of the bedroom only and then cook half of each meal.

The best things in life are free...🧵 2/ If what you're looking for is inside information on $SHOP you just had to ask. Here's what I know that hasn't made the press or an analyst report yet.

Another common question I’m answering working with scaling tech companies is…

Q. What’s the worst leadership advice you’ve heard?

A. By far the worst is “Hire great people and get out of their way”.

Let me explain… 🧵 (1/32) 2/ After a year leading engineering at Atlassian @scottfarkas told me in my perf review that I was doing ok but wondered why I didn’t talk and involve him more regularly.

Another common question I’m answering working with scaling tech companies is…

Q. What virus infects growing engineering orgs the most?

A. Layerinitis. Let me explain... 🧵 (1/27) 2/ As your eng org grows you have to organize into teams. Companies start with shared ownership of the code base and small project teams that form and disband. It's a good model, but past 50+ engineers that falls apart...

Another common question I’m answering working with scaling tech companies is…

Q. How much of your r&d spend should be focused on platform work?

A. 50%, and most teams are way off what it should be. Let me explain…🧵 (1/21) 2/ This question is a proxy question for many underlying issues…

✳️ Lack of trust in the engineering team
✳️ Lack of understand of your strategy
✳️ Lack of long term thinking and culture
✳️ Lack of understanding of compounding technology investments

This is the most common question I'm answering in recent fireside chats...

Q. How do you handle/manage the stress of working in a hyper-growth company where there's always too much to do?"

A. It's a mindset change: problems upgrade but don't go away. Let me explain... 🧵 2/ The reason this problem mindset is hard to develop is our human bias that gets in the way...

From childhood we are trained to see work equate with problems diminishing over time. You finish your assignment, and it's done. You complete your courses, you finish a sports game.

Congrats to the entrepreneurs who survived and thrived. @ShopifyEng was here for you. A year of BFCM traffic every day with a $5.1B ending.

So much more to build... I’ve decided to double our eng team in 2021 by hiring 2,021 new technical roles. 🙌🏼

shopify.com/careers/2021 1/

https://twitter.com/jmwind/status/1250816681024331777

We’ve hesitated to grow too quickly, we’ve moved fast and scaled with a relatively small team. @ShopifyEng has definitely been lean and mean. But from web stores to warehouses, banking, logistics, shop, fulfillment network we are ready to double down and scale bigger. 2/

How about some nerd stats for #BlackFriday2019 with @ShopifyEng?

128,000 Unicorn workers served 90m unique sessions at a steady 17M RPM (requests/min) throughout the day. Over 1b webhooks sent, transformed 280m webp images at the edge and 34b requests to CDNs. 74m Flows ran. 36% of traffic was http/1.1 and 64% http/2

#BlackFriday2019 with @ShopifyEng

1/ So great, thanks @Eli_White for the being open and honest about how hard it is to build a platform. You prioritized dog fooding and taking the raw/hash feedback about performance and addressing was the right move. Here's why i'm bullish on RN...

https://twitter.com/Eli_White/status/1123490937785782273

2/ Companies that are focused on Apps&Products have to do dev gymnastics to ship anything across the matrix of platforms. It's slow and bad for our entire industry.

1/ Compared to web, mobile CI/CD has been in the dark ages. Waiting 15+ minutes for builds, testing PRs hard, and complex app-store submission. But the amazing team of @sanderlijbrink @pepibumur @markrcote @Alexrs95 fixed this for @ShopifyEng. Let me share the story... 2/ Like for web apps, each mobile commit has its own dedicated @buildkite build and to speed up CI build artifacts are shared between parallel testing steps. This takes developer machines and gives us fast and reproducible environments. More later on what this enables.

Has anyone put in place a structured training program for software developers and data to support that it helped prevent basic preventable quality issues? Most other professions where quality issues result in deaths have improved with training and made mandatory.