Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

December 19, 2024

AI Summary

5 min read

Farhan Thawar, VP and Head of Engineering at Shopify, discusses principles for maintaining urgency and velocity in a 10,000+ employee remote company, drawing from his experiences building teams at prior firms like Xtreme Labs. Key themes include favoring harder paths for learning, engineering practices that maximize output per hour, and hiring via real work over interviews.

Choosing the harder path

Thawar advises selecting the more demanding option among choices, as it yields learning, exposure to smarter people, and progress even if it fails—unlike easy paths that teach little. Examples include job seekers building a Shopify app instead of mass resume-sending, or Thawar pursuing electrical engineering alongside computer science at Waterloo for better peers. He qualifies this: focus on paths with high learning potential and strong people, avoiding dumb hardness. Embracing discomfort, like asking "stupid" questions publicly (his "superpower"), builds resilience from early retail rejection experiences. He pairs execution strengths with visionaries like Joe Lemond, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Toby Lütke, using a personal job framework to align opportunities.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (00:00) **Intro and choosing the hard path**`
2 `* (05:43) **Embracing looking stupid as a superpower**`
3 `* (13:20) **Career with billionaires and job framework**`
4 `* (19:20) **Creating intensity: more kilojoules per hour**`
5 `* (28:01) **Intensity rituals: GSD, reviews, meetings**`
6 `* (41:03) **Infrastructure, code deletion, demo culture**`
7 `* (57:46) **Remote work, trust battery, leadership energy**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Farhan Thawar is the head of engineering at Shopify, where he oversees more than 1,000 engineers and a platform that powers over 10% of all U.S. e-commerce. Before Shopify, he was VP of engineering at Pivotal Labs and Xtreme Labs, and co-founder of Helpful.com. In our conversation, Farhan shares:

• Why choosing the harder path leads to better outcomes

• How to create intensity within your org (without burnout)

• Why every company should be embracing pair programming

• How he hires without interviewing

• How he built the world’s largest internship program

• His mission to create a “crafter’s paradise” for engineers

• Much more

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-shopify-builds-a-high-intensity-culture-farhan-thawer

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Where to find Farhan Thawar:

• X: https://x.com/fnthawar

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fnthawar

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Farhan’s background

(05:38) Choosing the hard path

(09:37) Getting comfortable with looking dumb

(13:20) Lessons from working with visionaries

(19:19) Creating intensity in organizations

(22:06) The power of pair programming

(29:18) Shopify’s culture of intensity

(37:18) Meeting Armageddon: revolutionizing company meetings

(39:46) Reducing distractions

(41:10) Deleting 1M+ lines of code

(49:05) Three buckets of building

(57:45) Remote work and trust battery

(01:00:29) Finding stability in uncomfortable times

(01:03:14) Hiring philosophy

(01:11:41) Internship programs and co-op systems

(01:15:32) Lessons from managing 120 direct reports

(01:20:40) Failure corner

(01:27:46) Lightning round and closing thoughts

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