Farhan Thawar
Vice President and Head of Engineering at Shopify
VP and Head of Engineering at Shopify leading engineering for the fully remote 10,000+ person company, known for maintaining urgency, velocity, and first-principles thinking at scale.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Farhan Thawar reveals how Shopify maintains urgency and velocity at scale across 10,000+ remote employees, including their meeting cadences, the counterintuitive power of pair programming, the Delete Code Club for simplification, and their approach to hiring over a thousand engineering interns. He shares his philosophy of choosing the hard path, doing more per minute rather than more hours, and treating 'stupid questions' as a superpower for deep understanding.
Leadership Principles
- → What if you just did more per minute? — intensity is about throughput per unit of time, not hours worked
- → If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, you still win because you've learned something valuable
- → Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but asking 'stupid' questions is a superpower for understanding deeply
Notable Quotes
"Everyone says, 'Oh yeah, work hard and do more hours when you're young.' I'm like, 'What if you just did more per minute?'"
— On his philosophy of intensity over hours
"We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane."
— On Shopify's practice of simplification through code deletion
"If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, 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."
— On why choosing the harder option makes your life easier long-term
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