>Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
Lutke's not a hero, he's a mini-Zuckerberg: he still runs the company he founded as CEO, but he has already made more than enough money to comfortably retire. Also like Zuckerberg, his company might be better off without him at this point, since being practically unaffected by success or failure makes continuing as CEO something of a vanity project.
Virtually anybody else who they'd hire as a CEO would also have more than enough money to comfortably retire. Lutke has more reputation/passion/history/identity tied up in the company than anyone else would - where money isn't a driving factor, deep connection to the thing you're working on is probably the most important motivation.
Lutke and Zuckerberg are billionaires. It is literally impossible for them to run out of money. Their grandchildren's grandchildren will be born incomprehensibly wealthy. They have won at capitalism.
But they also captain their first large enterprises: do they know what they're doing? Can they transition these firms into businesses that will endure? Or will they capriciously chase shiny objects while they waste the trust and goodwill of investors, the people who work there now, and the people who will want to work there in the future? They might have seeded the garden, but it took thousands of smart people to build it up, and it takes a constant supply to maintain it.
A new CEO will probably be rich, sure, but not "endow a historical dynasty" rich, and might know how to take a successful company and reposition it for the long term. Maybe the younger guys can do it. But it would just be for vanity at this point.
Tobi took a shitton of skin out of the game when the price was high. And he has a golden share, he can't be replaced, so there's no way for a board to discipline him or fire him. I wouldn't call that skin in the game. He owns the game.
Over hiring in the face of uncertain macro conditions and consumption changes is probably the right choice. If your market expands as you believe it might you're ready to step in and grow. If it doesn't grow you can just lay people off and you're back where you started. The important thing here though is that it's hard to catch up to competitors that have lapped you but it's easy to slow down when you're ahead. If you think there's just a 10% chance that covid causes e-commerce to 10x in size it makes sense to prepare as though it will and then shrink the workforce if things go back to normal.
If the company didn't do a round of layoffs I'm sure the workers would appreciate that, despite what's going on outside of the company. So even if the company hits a rough patch they'll stick with it, instead of abandoning ship. Or as they say, respect is a two way street.
From a business perspective, this is great for Shopify. The labor market for software engineers has seriously softened as a result of all the layoffs. Go look at job openings and their posted salaries.
When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.
Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.
Isn't this frustrating? Employees of course have the bare the brunt, but god forbid its shareholders and executives that need to scale down their payouts.
Feels so incredibly backward.
And yes I know its "stock performance" but what do you think drives this? With executive compensation mostly related to stocks, of course at the end of the day, thats what they want to drive up.
Employees have to bear the brunt of the effects because those making the macroeconomic decisions are part of the capitalist class. Jerome Powell was a partner at one of the world’s largest private equity firms. Is it any surprise that he’s trying to spin a narrative that employees are paid too much? Isn’t squeezing employees to increase profits what those in private equity typically do?
> Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time.
While I agree that this is a naive belief to have (at this point in my career I think there's almost a slightly negative correlation between skill and TC) the general talent pool for software engineers has, at least in my experience, dropped tremendously while TC has exploded.
The most important skills for getting high paying jobs in the last few years has been grinding leet code, then grinding systems design etc, etc. Software engineers no longer have "rare/valuable" skills, they have highly commodified, easily replicable skills (at least at the interview level).
Software engineers today simply aren't that skilled (at least on average) despite what they want to believe. It reminds me a lot of dotcom bubble where anyone with a pulse that could turn on a PC could get a high paying job.
In this case, "too high" = "we haven't figured out how to commoditize it well enough yet because the skill floor/ceiling is too high to scale with cheaper talent." This was one of the primary reasons I began to specialize partially in tech domains that are regarded as "hard" (compilers/perf): much smaller market means employees have a bit more leverage.
Do you feel there is much demand in those areas? I'm interested in more theoretical things but have doubts that many jobs would be available or for them to be valued even though its more difficult
Definitely a tradeoff: much fewer companies, but the ones that are left are higher quality if they are seeking out that sort of thing. It really depends on what you're looking for.
I settled into a role of research software engineer, where I do both applied research and development, applying a lot of compiler-ish stuff to different domains within cybersecurity, such as building out control flow graphs from binaries, thinking about how to instrument assembly code efficiently, fast pattern matching, and static analysis, where I am currently. The role fits me like a glove, but it isn't for everyone. In my job search, I started at, "I want a job doing compiler work," and eventually broadened scope a few times until I landed on, "I want a job where compiler-type approaches are on the table of possibilities." This offers a wider variety of work, which I like.
I can discuss more over email (check my HN profile) if you'd like, but most of what I know is US-centric due to how funding works for these types of research. Larger orgs like FAANGs also have it, but the pool is much more competitive, as you'd expect.
Shopify was never paying top of market in the first place. They might be able to get better talent for the same price, but "a fraction of the price" to me has a connotation of "1 over (an integer bigger than 1)", meaning 1/2 or less what they were paying previously... and this is certainly not the case for them.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
> When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
> When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
this is absolutely not true, I know engineering managers with around 5-7 years of total experience ( aka people under 30 ) making $400,000 CAD in cash compensation at shop. They recently did a cash/equity split where employees could choose their split and not a huge surprise many chose the maximum cash
there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this
Totally not true. My Shopify offer was slightly higher than my Google offer (as a re-hire), both base + stocks, about 3 years ago. However, going with Google really paid off because of the stock performance.
Last September. You now get $X per year and chose how much you want in stocks or cash. Depending on your level, a certain minimum of stock is necessary. Most Sr / Staff engineering had a floor of 10% stocks, but the rest is plain cash.
Shopify wasn't paying like FAANG, but also not like a startup. I would say 75% of a FAANG.
Honestly, it can't. What it will do instead is cause the most abrupt wealth concentration in the history of humankind. This will create 'revolutionary' conditions, although the shape and direction of that revolution will differ from context to context. In some places, it is likely to be fascist; in others, socialist; in still others, unexplored, undiscovered options. It will be a time of experimentation -- or as Gramsci eloquently, and more pessimistically, put it, a "time of monsters."
But what is going away, permanently, is the space between extremes. Pour one out. I miss it already.
To be fair it's extremely hard to make long-term decisions when you have politicians deciding to arbitrarily lock down the economy forcing all small businesses to engage in e-commerce, and when you have a Federal Reverse which alternates between creating financial bubbles and financial crises every couple of years.
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
The notion that this CEO and hundreds of others made bad decisions by over-hiring is sensible, but the fact that so many made the same mistake at the same time makes me second-order think this. As cruel as it sounds, what if over-hiring was a good long term decision? What would that imply?
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
I feel like not hiring aggressively in a _low-interest-rate environment_ is harmful to your business.
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
It just reiterates that on a high enough level, employees are just numbers, resources and sliders to fiddle with, often having a direct correlation with share price.
This is exactly what is taught in business school. It's why you are a human resource, a thing to be used, rather than a human being with skills and a story and a life and needs
A favorite quote of mine about the role of a CEO from the movie Margin Call. Tuld, the CEO of a major bank the night before the housing crisis in 08 starts to fly out of control, after one of the bank's risk analysts discovers they're holding toxic assets:
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
Also the same CEO who joined Coinbase's board last year, and has seemingly fallen down the crypto rabbit hole. Maybe he's lost a bit of focus on Shopify.
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.