How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)

If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still kind of win because you've now done something hard, you've probably worked with smart people, you've learned something along the way that is like valuable. I meet lots of job seekers. I go, "What are you doing to try to find a job? Are you really learning anything from sending out 10 resumes a day? Why don't you look at the API docs and build something? Even if you don't get a job at Shopify, you've learned something."

First I want to talk about another theme, creating intensity in your organization.

Everyone says, "Oh yeah, like work hard and like, do more hours when you're young," whatever. I'm like, "What if you just did more per minute?"

The more I dig into the Shopify way of working, the more fun stuff I never expected emerges. There's been a drive to delete code and simplify.

We have a delete code club. We can always almost find a million plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.

I found this great quote from you. "Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but I believe it's my superpower."

I have been in many situations with many sharp people who have said to me, "That's the stupidest (censored) question I've ever heard." My goal there is not to annoy the person, but it's to understand the content.

I was looking at your LinkedIn and your career history and I noticed that you worked for a different billionaire every decade of your life.

They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an-

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Farhan Thawer. Farhan is Vice President and Head of Engineering at Shopify. Shopify is an incredibly interesting company because they have over 10,000 employees, are fully remote, and even though they were founded almost 20 years ago, they continue to operate with urgency, velocity, and a very first principles ways of thinking, which translates into them seeing record usage, blowing away their earnings calls just recently, and building a beloved product. A lot of this is thanks to Farhan, who in our conversation shares very specifically what he's done to maintain intensity and urgency within the engineering team, including their meeting cadences, the counterintuitive power of pair programming, how they run meetings, how they cancel meetings constantly, and so much more. He also shares his experience with indexing towards choosing the harder option when you have multiple options to choose from and why that ends up making your life easier. He also shares a bunch of great hiring advice and a bunch of hiring stories which are going to blow your mind. He also talks about their engineering intern program where they're going to hire over 1,000 engineers just for their intern program in 2025. I've had a lot of people on this podcast from Shopify, but that is for a very good reason, because this company and its leaders have a lot to teach us about how to run an incredible business and build an incredible product. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Farhan Thawer. Farhan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.