Lenny Distilled

Farhan Thawar

VP and Head of Engineering, Shopify

10 quotes across 1 episode

How Shopify builds a high-intensity culture

Pair programming is the most underutilized management tool in engineering, bar none.

If they did not finish the problem in one hour, they would delete all the code and they would keep the tests and they would start over.

How long would it take to build a platform layer, which exposes APIs so anyone could build NFT gating in one hour?

What are you going to learn from let's say even eight hours of interviews that you're not going to have learned from four months of real work experience?

Everyone says, 'Oh yeah, work hard and do more hours when you're young, whatever.' I'm like, 'What if you just did more per minute?'

My goal there is not to annoy the person, but it's to understand the content.

We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.

If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard. You've probably worked with smart people. You've learned something along the way that is valuable.

You should tell everyone this story... I will always come down harshly on people who do not take risks, and you did not take a risk in this case.

The throughput limiter is not hands-on keyboard. The limiter is where is the good elegant solution? How do we think through the problem and build the right solution for the problem at hand.