Farhan Thawar is VP of Engineering at Shopify, angel investor, and entrepreneur.
Shopify is a public company with thousands of employees, and one of the very few companies of its scale to be remote-first. While other big tech quietly issued RTOs, Shopify doubled down on processes and culture that allowed it to stay remote, or, in their own words: digital-first.
So, today, Shopify has ports instead of offices, does VR meetings, has a unique collaboration culture, and completely embraced AI for productivity. Here is everything we covered in the chat:
(00:00) Introduction
(05:49) Balancing Remote & IRL
(09:20) Remote Communication
(15:15) Remote vs IRL culture
(21:30) Using VR for meetings and work
(26:53) Pair Programming
(39:57) The role of managers
(46:20) Be an AI Centaur
(51:23) Engineering Productivity Metrics
(58:33) Q&A
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