Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) produced a 4 episode TV mini series dramatizing the birth and death of the Avro Arrow plane (can be found on YouTube)
Former Shopify employee here. The company loves narratives like this where there is an enemy and there is a cause to unite the team behind it to battle with the said enemy. In my time there, the enemy was Amazon, and the cause was “we are arming the rebels against the Empire”. The had ambitions plans to fight Amazon at their terrain (shipping and logistics), made significant acquisitions (Deliverr, 6 River Systems). But at the end they had to shut down those divisions. In my last year at that company, I noticed the mission moving away from “mom and pop businesses” and towards enterprise. To me this fills like yet another narrative engineering by the execs to sustain the significant growth they have seen in the stock valuation.
That's funny, as Salesforce used a similar tactic when they first started with their 'End of Software' campaign against Siebel. Benioff himself detailed this strategy in Behind the Cloud, where he suggests, 'Always Go After Goliath.'
Tobi Lütke doesn't do these kinds of things just because he likes games and nerdy stuff or because he just wants his stock to go up (who doesn't).
Yes, except Shopify is very intentional about us vs them narratives like this. The CEO is an avid consumer of Video games / SciFi / Nerd culture, and the leadership finds ways to inject these themes into the mission statements.
Curious if your experience of this is good or bad?
Setting up a clear us vs. them mission at least makes it clear across the company what you should be focussing on.
My experience at bigcos is that the mission is some hand wavey 'we exist to make life better for our customers' statement, and no one ever could agree on what that meant.
Neither good or bad to me. Mission is important some people, I have been in the industry long enough to realize companies will change their mission if the business is no longer viable / profitable, so I have taught myself to be indifferent to it. As long as I am working with smart and easy to work with people, on a business that is legal / ethical, I’m good.
The author of the article assumes too much on the interviewers’ ability to deeply reflect on open ended questions, and clearly articulate the response (in a short period of time, because tables are turned when there is only few minutes left on the clock).
As a tangent, when I am interviewing someone, I try to find additional signals about the candidates communication skills / behavioural traits as well as their motivation in seeking the role.
Candidate: “how is this role going to change in X years?”
Me (internally): This person is likely growth oriented, and their growth may have stalled at their current role.
Candidate: “How is the on-call load?”
Me: This person may be burning out and looking for a place with some stability.
Of course, these are only assumptions and I try to be self-aware not to be biased in my decision by them.
If I'm interviewing someone and I call their old HR for a reference, they will never say anything other than employment dates to avoid lawsuits. This tracks along the same lines. I can't imagine actually getting a response to this.
I imagine most hiring managers don't have a close enough working relationship with the last 3 people to leave the company to give good, clear, insightful, unbiased information.
Putting aside whether the company's policies would allow them to do so.
> Candidate: “How is the on-call load?” Me: This person may be burning out and looking for a place with some stability.
Or this person has encountered companies that massively overwork people and is looking for a place that isn't constantly in emergency crunch mode. Hearing this question, I wouldn't assume a person who's burned out; I'd assume a person who has been burned or knows someone who has.
Or, I dunno, they want to know what the on-call load is like because that tells one a lot about the level of problems in an org (though not so much about the cause.)
Yeah, for some of these open ended questions that you’ve never thought about its unlikely to reveal anything useful or accurate with an improvised response.
Any answer to “What kind of people succeed here?” Is more likely to reveal how well the interviewer can BS business speak than anything
You are missing the point. It may look like protests are about having a fair shot at getting government jobs on the surface but it is more than that:
1. Corruption / Nepotism - Quotas in gov jobs are exploited by the powerful to hire people in important positions who will keep them in power.
2. Violence against Peaceful Protests - The protests started peacefully until the police + the govt backed student org (who work as hired goons for the ruling party and do the dirty job cops are unable to do) started violently suppressing them.
3. A Head of State who appears to be inconsiderate - The PM referred to the protesters with a term that is _extremely_ offensive. There is a track record of this Head of State using language that is unbecoming of their station, or simply unacceptable (think MAGA but 100x worse). Power keg exploded.
No matter how much talent or coding chops you have, you can't thrive in a society where the powerful are unchecked, unaccountable, and your right to protest peacefully are met with extreme violence. Try to see the world without the lense of SV.
Skepticism aside, I would like to see other cities and provinces playing larger roles in Canada’s economic future. I myself immigrated to Atlantic Canada, but it was frustrating finding a fulfilling opportunity in the local tech scene (this was before remote work was seen as mainstream), and eventually moved to a bigger province / city.
Agreed. IMO, the government should strategically move government offices to smaller towns, to both encourage those towns to grow while freeing up space in bigger cities for private enterprise. Historically, many small towns have grown into cities this way. For example Denver, and of course Ottawa.
They kind of already did this, for a long time the firearms registry was in a random town in New Brunswick and a huge IRCC immigration case processing centre was in Vegreville, AB.
Are you working remotely and have you successfully made one or more job transitions without losing your mind to stress? My deepest fear is moving out far somewhere, the remote job I do have going tits up for reasons I can't control and then realizing after 6 months of job hunting that I've made a huge mistake.
This was my thought exactly. Author talks about Goodheart’s law and how it is bad for the team, but then somehow their concept of “velocity” is not an example of the said flawed logic?
Quantum By Manjit Kumar: Traces the scientific discoveries leading to quantum theory, relationships among renowned scientists of 20th century, with a focus on Bohr-Einstein debate.
Incredible History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal: Abbreviated history of the Indian subcontinent, starting with the Indus Valley civilization, ending with the conflicts between India - Pakistan.
Sea Stories by William McRaven - An autobiography of a decorated Navy SEAL officer, who was involved in planning and execution of historically significant special operations (rescuing Captain Philip, and killing Bin Laden).
Masters of Doom. It’s the story of two renowned game developers, John Karmack and John Romero, and how they built id Software, the video game company that profoundly changed PC gaming and graphics. I was writing software for enterprise / consulting companies at the time (early phase of my career). This book opened my eyes to the crazy/wonderful/scary world of ‘startups’, the idea that people can bring their passion into writing software and start a business or movement. I joined a startup (nothing to do gaming) and never looked back.
Very motivational book. It's a good illustration for the value of technical excellence and, well, single-minded obsession when building something great.
In a similar vein: the making of prince of Persia.
You really see the highs and the lows in this book about the developing of prince of Persia. It is structured as a diary, so you can see other interests (learning Spanish, becoming a script writer). It is a good insight at how long developing something real feels IMO.
Highly recommend masters of doom. I’ve read through it a couple of times and find it motivational.
I grew up playing Wolf3D and quake games, and in general have admiration for what they were able to build. So I am not sure if people without that context will feel the same way about the book though :)
After finishing this I have been reading Fabian Sanglard’s books on Wolfenstein and Doom which helped make some of the ideas concrete. I’m not even that into games but just reading about how they had to optimize games for slow hardware is really interesting.
This is also one of my favorite books. As someone who grew up playing Quake this book has one of the best possible combinations of material combined into 1 book (business, life stories, relatable games, nostalgia, etc.).
We are the the world’s fastest growing commerce platform, helping over 1.7 million independent business owners around the world start and grow their businesses. We’re looking for a Staff Developer, with an interest in building highly scalable streaming systems and data pipelines, to lead the technical direction and help build a new discovery service from scratch. The service will power our information retrieval system and will help our merchants and their buyers navigate the ever-increasing complexity of their business. Tech stack: Java/Kotlin, Apache Beam, Google Dataflow, Apache Kafka
Shopify | Staff Software Developer (Apache Beam / Google Dataflow) | REMOTE (EST / CEST Timezones) | Full-time
We are the the world’s fastest growing commerce platform, helping over 1.7 million independent business owners around the world start and grow their businesses.
We’re looking for a Staff Developer, with an interest in building highly scalable streaming systems and data pipelines, to lead the technical direction and help build a new discovery service from scratch. The service will power our information retrieval system and will help our merchants and their buyers navigate the ever-increasing complexity of their business.
Tech stack: Java/Kotlin, Apache Beam, Google Dataflow, Apache Kafka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arrow_(miniseries)