Dec 19, 2024 · 1h 40m · lennys-podcast
How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture | Farhan Thawar (VP and Head of Eng)
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Shopify VP and Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar joins host Lenny Rachitsky to discuss the unconventional management systems, hiring practices, and engineering philosophies that drive high-velocity execution in a 10,000-person remote organization.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 23.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 3.6 Guest disagreement 1.3 Lenny pushing back 1.4
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:25:19 Farhan rejects hedging in technical decisions
Farhan forcefully repudiates his own past decision to hedge between Swift and React Native, arguing that hedging is the worst approach when you have the capacity to go all-in.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 7:54 Lenny challenges the hard path doctrineLenny directly challenges Farhan's advice to always choose the harder path, pointing out that joining a toxic company or building a house in a dumb way is harder but clearly wrong.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 36:35 Farhan re-educates on executive pairing vs problem removalFarhan recounts how Tobi Lütke schooled him on leadership, correcting Farhan's assumption that executives are hired merely to take problems away rather than to actively pair on solving them.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 1:28:35 Lenny details the origin and reach of his management frameworksWhen Farhan reveals he runs all Shopify reviews on Lenny's framework, Lenny demonstrates his domain expertise by tracing its lineage to Airbnb management systems and referencing his widely adopted W-planning framework.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Establishing the Core Themes: Hiring, Intensity, and the Hard Path | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Lenny establishes the interview structure based on prep calls with Farhan's former colleagues, grouping themes into hiring, intensity, and choosing the hard path. Farhan enthusiastically agrees and validates the synthesized structure. | |
| Choosing the Hard Path and Maximizing Learning | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Farhan explains his philosophy that taking the hard path maximizes learning even in failure. Lenny provides an informed pushback, pointing out that doing something hard in a dumb way or joining a toxic company is counterproductive, prompting Farhan to clarify that the hard path must be chosen to maximize learning from smart people. | |
| The Superpower of Looking Stupid in Public | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lenny prompts Farhan on his quote about looking stupid in public as a superpower. Farhan shares stories from retail and executive interactions where asking basic questions unlocked deep understanding. | |
| Working for Visionaries and Aligning Career Frameworks | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Lenny identifies a pattern across Farhan's career working for billionaires across three decades. Farhan explains how he pairs his tactical 1% weekly execution with unreasonable, visionary leaders and discusses how having a strict career framework led him to resign immediately when misaligned. | |
| Creating Organizational Intensity and the Power of Pair Programming | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Farhan explains organizational intensity as output per minute rather than total hours worked, strongly advocating for pair programming. He educates Lenny on why two engineers on one computer write less code but deliver better, shorter, and more elegant software faster. | |
| AI Copilots as Modern Pair Programmers | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Farhan details how AI copilots act as pair programmers and outlines Shopify's internal operational rhythm, including six-week project reviews with Tobi Lütke. He reframes micromanagement positively as leaders actively pairing on problems rather than policing deadlines. | |
| Meeting Purges and Reducing Digital Communication Noise | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Farhan details Shopify's annual Chaos Monkey meeting purge and their strategy of migrating company updates from noisy Slack channels to Workplace feeds, reducing IC meeting load to three hours a week. | |
| Prioritizing Infrastructure Over Point Solutions | 4 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Farhan shares the token-gating example to illustrate why Shopify invests two to three months building platform APIs rather than two weeks building a single feature. He emphasizes that infrastructure enables rapid downstream creation. | |
| Sponsor Message: Vanta | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Following the Vanta sponsor read, Farhan discusses Shopify's Delete Code Club and the cultural drive to remove code liabilities, as well as demo culture where PMs generate asynchronous friction logs on test environments. | |
| Remote Operating Model, Bursts, and the Trust Battery | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Lenny synthesizes the operating model of Shopify's 10,000-plus workforce. Farhan explains the 90% remote model complemented by in-person bursts and summits to recharge the company's trust battery. | |
| Executive Impatience and Embracing Productive Chaos | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Farhan explains that executive impatience and keeping multiple projects on fire are signs of appropriate risk-taking. Lenny draws a parallel to Brian Chesky's leadership at Airbnb. | |
| Rethinking Technical Hiring and Expanding Internships | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Farhan argues that standard interviews fail to predict performance, advocating instead for 30-60-90 day job trials and expanding Shopify's internship program to 1,000 interns a year as a scalable real-work evaluation pipeline. | |
| Co-op Education Systems and Cohort-Based Early Talent | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Farhan details the Canadian university co-op education model from Waterloo and explains how Shopify creates in-person intern cohorts in key port cities to accelerate onboarding and early career growth. | |
| Scaling Extreme Labs: 120 Direct Reports and Unscheduled 1-on-1s | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Lenny expresses surprise at Farhan managing 120 direct reports at Xtreme Labs. Farhan explains how unscheduled 1-on-1s and automated unblocking systems enabled extreme flatness until Chamath challenged its scalability at 400 people. | |
| Fail Corner: The 18-Month React Native Decision | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Farhan shares his biggest failure: hedging the POS rewrite across Swift and React Native, burning 18 months of engineering effort. He shares Tobi's critique that hedging was worse than taking an outright calculated risk. | |
| Performance Reviews and Shared Management Frameworks | 8 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Farhan reveals he has used Lenny's First Round Review performance management framework for six years across Shopify. Lenny acknowledges the praise, credits his former Airbnb manager Vlad Loktev, and highlights the broader industry adoption of his W-framework for planning. | |
| Lightning Round: Recommendations, Life Motto, and Hiring Unconventional Talent | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | In the lightning round, Farhan shares book recommendations, his motto 'everything you know is wrong', and the story of recruiting a skilled restaurant waitress into a successful tech recruiting and HR career. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Thawar: Billionaire tech founders share irrational multi-decade visions for the world
“They're mostly different people, but they're similar in one thing is that they have an irrational view of what the world should look like over the next decade or so. They're very long-term thinkers, very rational in that they'll look and say, Hey, 1015, 2025 y…”
Thawar instantly resigns without job offers when his framework is violated
“When I realize that my framework is being violated, I will resign like instantly. And I've done that before. So without even having another job or anything, I just go like, oh, my framework is being violated and then resign.”
Thawar calls pair programming the most underutilized engineering management tool
“It is the most underutilized management tool in engineering. Bar none. Like, it is just not used as much as it could be.”
Shopify founders deleted incomplete code after one hour of pair programming
“You know, Toby famously built a lot of Shopify pair programming, and what he would do is he would actually set a timer And him and his, the CTO, Cody, would pair program for one hour, and if they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all th…”
Shopify engineers average four to eight hours of pair programming weekly
“Shopify is much more of like a four to eight hour a week pair programming culture where you're gathering together on a problem and saying, hey, let's pair for half a day or let's pair every Wednesday.”
Two engineers pairing with an AI copilot outperforms solo AI coding
“I would still contend take that experience and add two humans together. So you've got like an AI co-pilot and humans, because what's happening is generating code and the two humans can look and say, oh, I know what it's trying to do. And either delete the code…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke reviews every project in-person every six weeks
“And now we do six week reviews. So teams have this notion of like every six weeks actually coming together and walking through the roadmap, the resourcing and what they're working on with their immediate leadership, but then also with Toby. And so what's cool …”
Shopify executes company reorgs in two weeks without formal change management
“So if you're doing something monumental, like, I don't know, you're doing like a reorg or something, right? You can do it the slow way. Let's like sit down and plan and roll it out. And it's probably like six months in most companies. Shopify, this is like a w…”
Shopify randomly deletes all recurring internal meetings with over two people annually
“Once a year at a random time, we will delete All recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on-ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowe…”
Shopify individual contributors average just three hours of meetings per week
“So we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is Phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think it's, I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours pe…”
Shopify moved all large group announcements off Slack to Meta Workplace
“What we did was we moved all announcement information. So like anytime you're sending a status update or large group announcement, we moved all of that to like Facebook meta workplace, like Facebook for work, basically which is now being deprecated. So we'll h…”
GitHub Copilot generated over one million lines of code at Shopify
“Last year I tweeted out you know, maybe a tangent, but I tweeted out that GitHub Copilot has written over one million lines of code for Shopify”
AI coding tools will reach engineer-level only when they delete code
“What I want to see is GitHub Copilot deleting one million lines of code. Like that's when, you know, we're actually at this point where this is close to an engineer.”
Shopify's Delete Code Club removes over one million lines during hack days
“We routinely, we have like a, we have a delete code club. We have hack days, which happens two or three times a year where there's always one team that is focused on deleting code. They even have like a manual. Here's how to find things to delete. And it's ama…”
Shopify operates 95 percent remote with intentional in-person annual summits
“So I like to call it like 90% remote or 95% remote because we have these intentionals, intentional IRL experiences. So every summer we just started last year, like, sorry, this year, we're doing this thing called Shopify summit, where we bring the whole compan…”
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke starts every new employee at fifty percent trust
“I've seen people use it as a, like, I'm pretty sure Toby says he starts everyone at 50%
and then he gets to know you.”
Thawar: Companies without multiple projects on fire are not pushing hard enough
“I think if you don't have like two or three big projects that are on fire, you're probably not pushing hard enough because you're not really trying things that are outside of your, like, if everything's going well, are you really trying, are you really taking …”
Startup job trials yielded twenty percent attrition initially but zero percent thereafter
“In the first 90 days, like, 20% attrition before 90 days, because it just didn't work out. But those, after 90 days, we had less than one percent attrition, because they knew exactly what they were getting into, and we knew exactly how they were going to fit.”
Shopify will hire one thousand interns in 2025 as full-time job trials
“Like, 25, we're gonna hire a thousand interns, and, like, that is gonna give me a thousand job trials to pick, like, the top, you know, x percent of those to come to Shopify full-time.”
Shopify requires its interns to work in-office three days a week
“There's one, I would say one or two big differences with our intern program. One is we're making them come in three days a week. Versus full remote. And the reason for that is early, and we're doing it just in three offices right now, Montreal, Toronto, and Ot…”
Thawar eliminated scheduled one-on-ones while managing 120 direct reports at Xtreme Labs
“I did two things famously. One, I had a lot of direct reports and two, I did not do any scheduled one-on-ones because you can't have a 120 direct reports and do scheduled one-on-ones cause you're never doing anything but one-on-ones. So I said, I'm going to be…”
Shopify engineering managers target 8 to 20 direct reports for flat hierarchy
“In engineering you should have between eight and, like, 20. There are definitely people who have more and people who have less, but we do try to keep things as flat as possible, because we do believe that, like, it doesn't make sense to have, like, three peopl…”
Internal data shows employee alignment degrades with distance from Shopify's CEO
“The farther you are from Toby, the, like we can see things in like the survey results, like the alignment gets out of whack. And so you do actually see that you want to be closer. You want to have a flatter org in general, and that can be achieved by just havi…”