Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up

Re:Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up by echelon on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @11:41AM (#32239826)

> What are they doing?

Microservices.

I haven't worked there, but I've worked at incredibly similar companies with the same scale.

Every single business function split into fine grained services, with teams of size 5-20 (larger teams have split services, oncall, etc.)

Auth, API gateway. Layers of devops teams. Traffic, monitoring, data store, many different analytics support teams. Kubernetes maintenance.

The payments platform is probably huge. The app teams too.

Infosec of various flavors. Vendor integrations...

Think about the sprawling functionality of a company at scale.

Anyone else is sales or support. And other business functions, like various legal departments.

10,000 is the right size for an org like Shopify.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up by ryanbrunner on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:34PM (#32240515)

Needing to have a big team so that you can refactor into microservices, which you need because you have such a big team is a very "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the bureaucracy" sort of thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up by echelon on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @12:40PM (#32240611)

It's a business expanding to fill the market sort of thing.

The people on those teams undoubtedly have plenty to work on.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up by ecshafer on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @01:03PM (#32240915)

FWIW we don't really use Microservices at Shopify.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-up by ibawt on Tuesday July 26, 2022 @04:47PM (#32243762)

cardserver, storefront renderer, remember-me... the list goes on.

[ Parent | on HN ]