Shopify Senior Data Engineer reviews

The work is fake. Giant, multi-month migration efforts where tens of thousands of lines of code are moved from repos in order to... rename tables in BigQuery. I am not exaggerating. Data leadership still found a way to design graphs and charts to show misleading amounts of storage and processing time cleanup. Despite many people understanding this was not real optimization, everybody clapped and gave congratulations emojis. Highly process oriented workflows. Building anything new requires satisfying an enormous set of arbitrary CI/CD rules that are not consistent and have small loopholes. End result is a brittle and bloated data infrastructure. People here wear ballcaps like it's a part of their uniform. Heavy Star Wars fandom. This is a red flag in any post high school environment and I wished it was expressed before I joined so I didn't have to learn so late.

The founder is somehow very extremely hands-on and also very out-of-touch. I got the impression he is just surrounded by sycophants and has kind of lost sight of reality. Every person in leadership I encountered directly was either a competent person who just wanted to keep their head down and collect a check and so allowed terrible decisions to just pass by, or someone who seemed to be aggressively incompetent and toxic. I went to one offsite and the director who was supposed to plan the day for like 50 people was too hungover to function. For failures, there was a constant blame game perpetrated by the source of said failures. Somehow one megalomaniac engineer who was well known to be underqualified and dishonest was allowed to control a major company directive for at least a year making the work of like 100 engineers downstream of him completely pointless. There are talented people there, but they are underleveraged into cynicism. Vibes are culty and weird also They were also doing constant silent layoffs the entire time I was there. After receiving very positive feedback overall, I was laid off before my first performance review without reasonable severance.