Right, but that's not the actual dichotomy. First, if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
Second, realistically the dichotomy, in the short to medium term, is will these people be employed in a skilled job, or will they be unemployed? You might say, that's not Shopify's problem. But let's not pretend unemployed people is "better for society".
That is assuming everyone contributes in a meaningful way. That might not be the case for various reasons: - Incompetence / lazyness - You feel productive, but you impact is actually really low ("I am preparing an alignment meeting") - You are working on a product / component that generates little to no revenue/interest (Hello "metaverse" team from Facebook) - Your skill are not highly required at the moment and don't seem to be required in a short/mid term; someone else surely needs you more.
Sometimes, doing more is not necessarily the right thing. 37 signals is famously known to have far enough revenues to hire a ton of guys and probably launch many new products. Yet, they choose to remain at a fixed headcount for now and return the profits to their shareholders. They do not hesitate to let people / fire them if they feel the need to despite their profits. Why can't Shopify follow the same strategy; albeit at a different headcount ?
The company leadership doesn’t believe that. There is a line where adding more people will not justify enough revenue increase, and that’s up to the company leaders to decide.
It’s worse for the people laid off, but ultimately wouldn’t they want to do something useful? In a new job they will be wanted. At Shopify they are not wanted.
This is difficult to believe. I think everyone sees signs all around them of foolish decisions by firm principals that hamper consumer and worker welfare even in the short term, to say nothing of the effect of various kinds of hysteresis on the long term development path of economies (e.g. detaching people from the labor market in a manner that undermines their health, currency of their skills, etc.)
I think this is something all companies struggle with: at some point you may achieve product/market maturity but the people that could determine this are fundamentally in conflict with ever communicating this because they or their peers would be out of work at that employer. In my opinion, this is when internal politics start to become more prevalent because its human nature to protect your well being/source of money.
How many software products has Google released over the years, which they're able to do so because they have a massive number of employees? More employees will allow for more products.
Whether it would be prudent or profitable to tackle more products is another story, but we're already talking about hypotheticals with 'infinite employees' here.
I do think there is room for 20% of its employees to work on other products that could integrate well with their vision and still be within the ecommerce realm. But that doesn't juice up their stock price right away.
Starting rather recently and suddenly, don’t you think? The company leadership did apparently believe that each and every time they made a hire. And I bet a lot of the people laid off today were hired fairly recently.
> then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy
Are you assuming they'd be put onto the existing projects (which may slow down delivery, yes) rather than doing new projects in parallel (which will not and will in fact let them deliver more because there are more projects)?
