Shopify CEO Says Long Hours Aren't Necessary For Success (businessinsider.com) 35
Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO of $48 billion e-commerce cloud-software company Shopify, took to Twitter to remind us all that we don't need to work 80 hours a week to be successful. Business Insider reports: "I realize everyone's twitter feed looks different. But I'll go ahead and subtweet two conversations that I see going by right now: a) How the heck did Shopify get so big this decade and b) You have to work 80 hours a week to be successful," he tweeted. He says he and his cofounders have grown this company from a profitable bootstrap to its multibillion-dollar status without him ever sleeping under his desk. "I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not," he tweeted.
Shopify has had a spectacular few years. Its revenues have doubled since 2017, solidly beating Wall Street estimates quarter after quarter, growing from over $171 million in Q3 September, 2017, to over $390 million in Q3 September 2019, its latest complete quarter. It's expected to finish the year at about $1.5 billion in revenues. And Wall Street has noticed. Shopify went public in 2015. In the past year, the stock has soared over 200% from around $134 to about $407 giving the company a $47.6 billion market cap. But even at the scale of its current operations, he says he doesn't let his job overshadow the rest of his life. "I'm home at 5:30pm every evening. I don't travel on the weekend. I play video games alone, with my friends, and increasingly with my kids. My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he tweeted. "For creative work, you can't cheat. My belief is that there are five creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that four of those are channeled into the company," he wrote. "What's even better than people are teams," he wrote. "We don't burn out people. We give people space. We love real teams with real friendship forming." He adds: "None of that is even about product, or market fit, or timing. It's all about people. Treating everyone with dignity."
"We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome."
Shopify has had a spectacular few years. Its revenues have doubled since 2017, solidly beating Wall Street estimates quarter after quarter, growing from over $171 million in Q3 September, 2017, to over $390 million in Q3 September 2019, its latest complete quarter. It's expected to finish the year at about $1.5 billion in revenues. And Wall Street has noticed. Shopify went public in 2015. In the past year, the stock has soared over 200% from around $134 to about $407 giving the company a $47.6 billion market cap. But even at the scale of its current operations, he says he doesn't let his job overshadow the rest of his life. "I'm home at 5:30pm every evening. I don't travel on the weekend. I play video games alone, with my friends, and increasingly with my kids. My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he tweeted. "For creative work, you can't cheat. My belief is that there are five creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that four of those are channeled into the company," he wrote. "What's even better than people are teams," he wrote. "We don't burn out people. We give people space. We love real teams with real friendship forming." He adds: "None of that is even about product, or market fit, or timing. It's all about people. Treating everyone with dignity."
"We are not moist robots. We are people and people are awesome."
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The Earth is over populated. You should close your legs and stash your penis in your pants.
Please stop making more people. The Earth can't support this Please close your legs.
http://vhemt.org/ [vhemt.org]
Will all people who believe that God's a-coming, or the various leftist versions of the same thing, PLEASE sign up for vhemt.org and refrain from leaving a ring around the gene pool! The Earth should be inherited by people who believe that we have a future.
Here's how you can do the same! (Score:3)
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Look, if Henry Ford could figure it out ~100 years ago. These retards could figure it out today, Ford went from a single 12hr day to a day and night shift of 8hrs with 8hrs of maintenance time. The problem with today is companies are chasing higher profit by downsizing people or replacing them with tech, while forgetting that while 2 people might be more expensive it also means they have more disposable income for their to blow.
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Ford went from a single 12hr day to a day and night shift of 8hrs with 8hrs of maintenance time.
That works for assembly line workers who are interchangeable. It isn't going to work well for software developers.
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That works for assembly line workers who are interchangeable. It isn't going to work well for software developers.
Works fine for software developers too, but much like assembly line workers you have to pick people who can be adaptable and can fill the gaps of people who aren't there at the time and understand the point of "document everything." The company I work for does this as well, not only on the software side but inside engineering as well. It's the guys in manufacturing who are now on a 8hr day.
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Old timer advice... (Score:1)
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In other words - work smart and hard, not long hours and hard.
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In other words - work smart and hard, not long hours and hard.
Some people have to put in a lot of hours to produce as much as someone who works smart and hard.
If you're working smart and hard and (except for crunch time) working way too many hours, you're doing it wrong and should consider an different job, or a different company.
5:30 (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, he goes home at 5:30, but i'm sure the rest working for him don't.
Lets see how many greater than 40 hours a week they work...
Re:5:30 (Score:5, Informative)
In any company with that many employees there will be people working crazy hours. I know I did so for 27+ years and that was not because the company or my boss expected me to. Neither did I ever expect it from my team members once I became the boss. I just loved doing all my jobs in all directions - and yes I will indeed admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist as far as my own work is concerned.
But I'm sure Tobias is telling his team not to work extra hours unless they want to or - of course - if there is a kind of emergency or a critical deadline. I've been following his company closely for a long time (disclosure: that's because I own Shopify stock since a long time and I want to know why/when I invest or divest. From what I have seen, he's the kind of leader who creates an environment in which his team's well being truly matters next to building/providing a great product/service, as his 92% approval rating from his employees also indicates (cfr. Glassdoor). Surely, he's not the CEO who works 40 hrs per week but who makes "(all) the rest work much more" as you wrote/implied. Not with that kind of rating. That comment just shows that you're blabberring about without any factual basis or even just some critical thinking about your own words.
(I do not work for Shopify and never have.)
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You can bet that when he was getting it off the ground he was putting in 100 hours a week or sometime even more. I've known a few startups and small machinist shops that grew to be large with 300-600 people and the CEOs when starting out put in a crazy amount of hours. Even my buddy(mechanic) who owns his own business repairing only automotive electronics(i.e. internal fun/nav systems) was putting in 90-100hrs/week the first year he went into business. It dropped off significantly over the next decade an
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Companies should enforce 8 hour days, no regular overtime. You might be happy to do it but it puts pressure on others to do likewise. Their performance is going to look bad compared to someone who works and extra 50% of their hours.
If you really want to do those hours you can always get a second job or find a hobby.
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Heroic Measures Don't Measure-Up (Score:2)
"We are not moist robots." (Score:2)
moist robots
Ew.
Re: "We are not moist robots." (Score:1)
Moist robots are the unfortunate byproduct of an otherwise fantastic decade of innovation.
Probably have cause and effect reversed (Score:4, Insightful)
Somehow people have gotten the notion that more hours worked (A) is what causes you to be more successful (B).
The people I know who are very successful (including one who owns a multi-million dollar company) love to work. They love what they're doing so spend inhuman amounts of time doing it. The wife of the multi-millionaire complained to me that when they go on vacation, she has to confiscate all his electronics, and still has to keep pulling the kids' phones and tablets out of his hands because he keeps trying to use them to get online and do more work.
So I suspect what's really going on here is that people who've been fortunate enough to find jobs that they love (factor C) will tend to be successful at it because they love it (B), and will work a huge number of hours at it (A) because to them it's play, not work.
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Amen!
Many people used to tell me that I should get a life because they thought that I worked too much and would crash as a result. What most of them never understood is that I already had a life, doing exactly what I loved doing. Simple formula: Pick a "hobby" that you're good at, make it your passion to become better at it, and then make it your goal/job/career. And that is em not incompatible with enjoying life in the more traditional sens of the expression. For one, because if you're good at what you
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Indeed. Most people do not get implications though and think in fuzzy associations roughly modeled on equivalence. Hence most people are not equipped to even understand the argument but think that somehow long hours and success are associated and by doing one you can cause the other.
Of course, working long does not make you successful. It just makes you turn in shoddy work and have no live. This changes when you love what you do and working long hours is effect, not cause. But, as I said, most people are no
BS if you've used the Shopify platform... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this explains why Shopify is such a piece of crap platform.
It's great for very rudimentary stuff. If you're selling 10 items that are roughly the same size, no problem. Otherwise, it's a real pain in the ass.
For example: no volumetric shipping. You set one 'default' box size, and all shipping prices are based on that box size.
Took those wizards 5hrs to accomplish that no doubt.
Found someone who was literally mirroring our Shopify site - somehow they were pulling the data straight from the site (you could tell because if I made a change on the site, it updated on the other site immediately, so wasn't just a static copy), Shopify was useless in trying to block access to whatever they were doing to accomplish this, and didn't even seem concerned that people could just duplicate your site, including the checkout page (and presumably fraudulently harvest customer CC info, etc..) There's no way to verify if a site you're looking at is a valid Shopify-hosted site or not.
Want to use the Point of Sale (POS)? Prepare yourself to hate life. Buggy app you're locked into that's missing a number of key features, and will change significantly without any warning. (And lots of other features/bugs to keep you on your toes.)
Doesn't even do taxes right. Shopify is a Canadian company, and our provinces all have different taxes, some have a combined GST, other's have a Provincial tax, and separate GST. How do you differentiate? By creating a special 'action' with a #tag. Seriously. You give items a tag (same tags that appear on the website as well) as a way to add another tax. And none of this is clear on their billing/invoicing, so customers (and staff) never really know what is or isn't taxed, either online or with the POS. (And no, you don't use tags to create any other actions either, it's literally just this one thing. They're supposed to be used like hashtags on the site to help with collections, etc..)
More 5hr brilliance.
They call their support 'gurus', which is apt, since a guru is typically full of shit and living in some fantasy world. 3/4 of the time I get support from someone who has no idea what I'm asking, and I have to keep telling them to read my original question.
I could go on and on and on..but this article makes sense.
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I'd lighten up if they didn't pretend they were amazing instead of making my life endlessly challenging with their platform. Their gurus are often quick to make it seem like you're doing something wrong, instead of there being a shortcoming with the platform.
They're very shiny on the surface, and attract a lot of people, but once most dig in, you're committed (it is a pain in the ass to switch systems, especially if you've invested in it, populated a large product range and dug into their system, etc..), an
Except there's a secret tiering system... (Score:1)
Not about quantity (Score:2)
This is just speculattion, but I wonder if it's about having the passion for something to be willing to work on it for an 80-hour week. Actually working that many hours could be unnecessary and likely counter-productive.
Combination of luck and sweat (Score:2)
Mean, Median, or 95th percentile? (Score:2)
Preface: this post is all anecdote from about a decade of experience in Silicon Valley. It's not science, YMMV, just sayin . . .
ISTM that the nature of tech work necessarily has significant fluctuation in the amount of time any particular team or group needs to work, and that this variation can be mitigated but never completely avoided. And of course, any boss worth their salt will do their best to minimize it and to be personally responsible for ensuring that the mean is stable and that crunch weeks and sl
Agree on the 'five hours of creativity' ... BUT (Score:2)
And it's likely a physical, biological thing ie. your brain can't be in overdrive 24/7.
BUT there are always factors that get in the way of the 'perfect plan' and while it may be feasible for the very wealthy 'big picture' CEO to only work 5 hours a day, those at the product delivery end likely cannot bask in that luxury. When it's 'crunch' time for any of thousands of reasons, it's all hands-on-deck until the product ships ... and sometimes it seems that it's always crunch time.
I agree. (Score:2)
I started a software company in 1999. We didn't grow to anywhere near the size of Shopify, but we were profitable and the 12 people working there enjoyed their jobs. Nobody did overtime, ever. We never announced release dates; our software was released when it was ready.
A year ago, I sold the company for enough to retire on very comfortably (though I choose to work still, but no overtime!). In my book, that's success. I would never have given up time for more money; that would have diminished success as