Running a Remote Big Tech 🏢 — with Farhan Thawar (Shopify)

Today’s guest is Farhan Thawar — 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 you will find in the chat:

• 💻 Balancing Remote & IRL — how Shopify optimizes for a remote experience while still helping people get together in real life.

• ✏️ Remote Communication & Culture — workflows and principles to make engineers productive in a remote environment.

• 👯 Pair Programming — betting heavily on collaboration.

• 🎽 The Role of Managers — how Shopify’s managers stay technical and optimize for unblocking people.

• 🤖 Be an AI Centaur — fully embracing the AI revolution by writing 1M+ lines of code with Copilot.

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🎙️ Episode

You can watch the full episode on Youtube:

Or listen to it on Spotify, Apple, Overcast, or your podcast app of choice.

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🙏 Thank you

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See you next week! 👋

Luca