Numbers from GPT Astra - Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026
- Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers.
- GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!
In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish because they seem to have managed to complicate a simple app into requiring thousands of engineers and now maybe millions in cloud spending to Frontier labs. This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, idk what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.
When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had many hundreds of engineers working on it.
Also, you're comparing the number of engineers working on one product, to the number of engineers working at Shopify across their entire company today, which includes far more than just one app.
You're entitled to your opinion that Shopify is a poor app or that it's overengineered, but clearly it's not simple. That's just a fact. If it looks like a simple app to you, that's because you're not seeing most of it.
It's like looking at the YouTube mobile app as someone who watches videos and saying that the app frontend looks simple. You're only seeing 5% of the app. The other 95% is for video creators and advertisers, and it is decidedly NOT simple. I think that's the same here.
I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple.
However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current chrome team or in total if you account for open source contributors as well. If robot is to believed that's also a headcount of windows and macos core teams. What is even going on, I don't even..
And, importantly, this was 2008.
Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.
Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.
Yes, IntelliJ 8 was out in 2008. From my experience most of the progress since then has been keeping up with language and library updates.
And it was a fork.
Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).
The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.
> ...this is Microsoft we are talking about.
Exactly!
More seriously, it not just about building a compliant web browser engine, it is about tracking the dominant browser engine which introduces their own "standards" along the way too.
Microsoft could have easily continued to invest in maintaining their browser engine, but it would have to be comparable to what Google is doing, and yet they'd always be perceived as "behind" due to non-dominant position they have.
I'd say strategically they do not want to invest in tech that's not winning (in marketshare), so when they are not dominant, they'll instead adopt and extend (not just web browsers, look at WSL too).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up
The didn't had to, MS Browser team was incompetent from the beginning of internet
Oh the memories. Took them forever to introduce something as simple as tabs that virtually all other competitors had since years.
File explorer was the same, only recently it got tabs.
We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.
Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.
This is plain wrong. For a browser, a11y doesn't just get handled by the OS automatically. In general, claiming a11y is easy or will be done by someone else is bordering on evil.
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Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
I am very unsurprised by this outcome.
People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.
>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
Spotify or Shopify?
Spotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify.
I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.
You could start a consultancy called Optify to help them optimize their engineering.
I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately
Can’t wait for Sphpoophteefy+ premium subscription to be released!
Shoplifty
Probably both
> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.
Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.
I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.
There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?
That and venture investment has become bane of good.
When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors
I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ
Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.
When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.
The mythical man-month ;)
Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?
Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...
Such book could be distilled in simple essence:
- stay out of it for your sanity
- sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast
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The first comment in this thread drew a comparison between Spotify and Shopify. Perhaps you were skimming and missed it.
I don’t think that AI would have made this confusion (it’s much less likely to overlook things like these), and I’m also not of the opinion that these comments confuse the two companies, it’s rather than Spotify is used by the grandparent as another example like Shopify.
Actually, the first occurrence might have just been a typo (auto-correct?), but the second occurrence looks like slop directed at the previous comment.
Actually, the IAs don’t mess up Shopify with Spotify.
>> This is unfortunately not an isolated issue, Spotify for one has the same issue.
I just brought up Spotify since I have more experience using their app and they have also gone fully into “agents have made us 100X more productive”
AI can do captchas better than humans can
They don’t confuse them, he says both have the same issue.
Perhaps you are the AI slop?
Seriously, it’s funny how confident people can be about something despite their awful reading comprehension.
Aight, I recognize I only skimmed through the comments, I was completely convinced it was a typo because it has to be a big coincidence that in a post about Shopify suddenly they talk about Spotify and it's not by mistake.
This is wrongheaded in so many ways.
To start -- how many of those 3,000 engineers do you think work on the mobile app? And even among those who work on the app -- do you think they're all working on user quality-of-life and just can't get it right? And it's a $175BB company -- do you think it's worth that much based on the quality of its mobile app?
i will bet 175 billion dollars people like that guy are bikeshedding types
What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ?
If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates !
I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works well for me !
Shopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music.
Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.
I can’t tell if we’re trolling at this point with the mixing up of Shopify and Spotify
Poor reading comprehension is more likely than trolling.
Or I just made a typo. I dont think anyone actually has the understanding that Shopify is a music streaming service and Spotify is a shopping plug-in. I was addressing the latter half of gp's comment which was saying that Spotify has had no problems and I wrote (or perhaps got autocorrected, as I had to correct my phone several times writing this comment).
I cant speak for the rest of the commenters.
> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!
Just so it is said: my understanding is it's really easy to not end up on the credits list for games despite having worked on it. I don't know if contractors end up on there for example, at least beyond some team leads or the like. I don't know R*'s policies though, I've heard stories of people not being in credits because they, for example, changed jobs near the end of the development.
I get your overall point though
https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v/thankyou
They have updated their policies a bit. You may not be in the game credits but you'll show up here.
FWIW the social club team which handled a lot of the online components was small around the time GTA5 released. They built the APIs to handle user generated content, telemetry, accounts, etc. But, there were other team members that made it so the game would call said APIs.
I remember hearing in an old podcast (Dad & Sons), one of the guys there worked at Rockstar in QA in 2012 and he's still listed in the credits for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), so the policies are unclear to say the least.
People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard.
PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.
I am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better.
I wonder what gripes people have.
The website, desktop app, and mobile apps all have different feature sets, for one. There are things that you can only do in one of them, but it is a different one of them for each thing. There is no one feature set. It feels so cobbled together, with each platform doing their own thing.
Also, the website is slow and buggy, and the Electron “desktop” app is even worse. Both gobble up way too many resources and soft-crash constantly. The app does not lock up, but simply stops working. Often it even shows an error like “Spotify cannot play this song right now.”.
It's cool to hate on Spotify now I guess. But I agree with you, Spotify works really well for me.
The article is about Shopify, not Spotify.
I wonder how many of the 100k+ enginners at Google work on that "simple" text box that shows you relevant websites to the input text.
I'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher
It’s not that much about scalling software, as scalling software on highly concentered nodes. Distribution downstream can be its own hell, admittedly, but otherwise having fully independent copy of software copies that run in local terminal is a no-brainer if all that matter is running software at scale.
You're comparing a company (Shopify) to an application (Google Chrome). A better comparison would be the number of engineers at Google (90,000 [1]) vs Shopify, or the number of developers actually working on the mobile application instead of any other area (website, backend database, internal systems and processes, infrastructure management and maintenance, etc.).
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_its-mind-bending-...
Video games are much easier than what Shopify do which will be a long tail of business cases and local permutations for all the countries they operate in.
Commercial software is usually a simple core and a long tail of business exceptions
That’s different difficulties.
Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.
It's externally mandated difficulties vs internally created ones. I think the latter should always be easier, because you can change the requirements.
Comparing Chrome in 2008 to a company in 2026 is a choice.
In the corporate software world, especially anything to do with the web both front and back, most people really don’t know what they are doing. The goal is hiring/firing and agile.
Compare that to companies that release actual software products. The goal is product release at high enough quality. There are real performance and security targets to achieve.
Your typical corporate developer, on the other hand, does not have release targets. The actual goal is compatibility with the industry least common denominator expectations and retaining employment. This is why so many people are needed to do the work and why the result is so slow and bloated.
What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them?
I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams pretty lean too.
We still aim for high quality, and performance and security.
I do agree that many people dont really know what theyre doing and are kinda just winging it, especially with AI at the helm, and many companies are likely overstaffed, but I dont think theres a correlation between headcount and slow/bloated software. Any team of any size can make slow and bloated software.
I worked at Expedia for a bit. Ask yourself if they are a tech company, software company, or travel company. It’s not a trick question. They have a shit ton of software developers that work there. Same with Bank of America where I also worked. In fact BoA has more software developers as employees than almost any other company.
Compare those to a company whose only product is software or is primarily a software service.
The difference is directness to the goal. If you are a big bank you need software and web services just like everyone else, but if you get it wrong it’s not going to bankrupt you. You can always hire an outside consultancy to fix it knowing your employees suck at what they do. If all your business does is sell a retail software product and it turns out to be slow broken shit then you have nothing. That’s the difference and layoffs aren’t a bandaid.
At places like Expedia and BoA you can absolutely suck at what you do. Sucking is actually the expectation because 20% of the people solve 80% of the problems, nobody provides substantive training, and everyone is easily replaceable. If you are the guy building innovative solutions on an original software product for a company that only sells software as a retail product you are still ultimately replaceable, but not immediately so.
One key identifier if the business intends to hire sucky people for a sucky job is degree of abstraction. Is the given job about solving a real problem directly, for example using JavaScript to create a new transmission system that achieves higher availability and lowers costs. Or, is it a tech stack nightmare pretending to not write JavaScript to do the same boring shit everyone is doing in a half ass way?
If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business.
Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.
Shopify is literally selling software.
How many of those 3000 engineers are working on the core engine?
That is vs infrastructure, customer support, partner outreach etc? Then you have all the people working on localisation, not just changing the words, but local regulatory issues.
Chrome only has one customer to deal with, Google itself. And since Shopify is saas and hosted for thousands of customers, vs Chrome running on the users pc, the infrastructure complexity does not compare
Comments like these make me wonder if people don't understand the difference between engineering and business.
That’s what they said about Elon firing 80% of Twitter’s staff. But X is doing pretty well.
For some definition of pretty well which doesn't include human user numbers, revenue, profit, or ratio of humans to bots
Pretty well from an engineering perspective. But they've lost so many advertisers because it's intentionally not very moderated.
The site is currently running, yes. Don't forget it went down quite often immediately following the mass firing though. They seem to have fixed that.
There was certainly a ton of bloat to trim, but the haphazard "just pick 80% of the people and fire them" was incredibly stupid. Should have chosen whoever was producing the bloat, at least.
Pretty well if you don't mind some features being built twice or three times and appearing inconsistently at different screens, or users being able to bypass usage limits by pressing the back button on the usage limit sign...
Twitter was never a profitable business. You actually renforce his point.
(Maybe that was intended I might have missed some irony here)
I'm not sure why people keep repeating this when Twitter was profitable at the point that Elon bought it.
I'd be shocked if a ton of contractors haven't worked for X since then
most people don’t. that’s why they are employees.
They'll be mostly involved with the parts that make money. I worked in a similar situation as one of about 5 people keeping the core infrastructure of the product working, meanwhile about 500 people optimized the ads
How is life at Google nowadays?
Oh you said 500, not 5000, my bad.
I wonder how many of those are there to consult with customers and help them build their stores.
When you see seemingly simple products have too many engineers, most are almost always there to cater for enterprise customers.
Tidal is pretty nice to use. Plus the music isn't compressed.
I love Tidal. That said its UI is remarkably heavy for what it is. You also used to see what quality the songs were in without playing them, but they removed that. They added bpm and key, but that is not as useful to most of us as seeing the quality of the song beforehand.
And you also have to make sure you're getting the most out of it manually. Here are three steps for those who have Tidal and wan't to make sure that they're getting the most (ish) for their money:
1. Hardware Source: If you're using the soundcard in your computer, make sure to bump up the sample rate: on macOS you go to "Audio MIDI Setup" and change the sample rate to highest possible for your output.
2. Software Source: In Tidal itself you have to go to "Settings" and under "Audio quality" choose "Max". Under "Playback" turn off "Normalize volume". If you're having a dinner party and playing the music through a bluetooth speaker, you might want to leave it on. But otherwise off; the normalization causes distortion.
3. Output Device: You have two options here and you can go with both or invest more in the other one:
Note: You have to actually find the high quality songs on Tidal to enjoy all those changes. Aim for the 24-bit 192kHz or at least 24-bit 96kHz (personally, the DAC on my Mac only offers 96kHz anyway). Remasters are often a good source, but sometimes they're from the loudness era and are horrible comparing to the originals.Add to it that they need a compiler team for a Ruby JIT, due to the language choice to run an heavy load server infrastructure.
And now we learn they use Swift and Kotlin to replace React with. So they are not replacing it with Ruby. I think they've hit the limits on Ruby (like twitter had on Scala).
P.s.: I find Kotlin "an acceptable typed-Ruby" with an industrial strength VM (the JVM) and two compiles to native stories (KMP and GraalVM-native).
Shopify is handling customer payments worldwide, 90% of their work is probably localization issues rather than customer-facing feature development.
GTA V developers don't give a fuck whether the game is running on a computer in North Korea or in Sweden.
Extremely ignorant comment.
One word: Ottawa. There's a lot of engineers, most of them underemployed.
> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!
This is so... wow. You think only 150 devs made GTA 5? Despite the fact that rockstar has 10 studios and you think only 150 people in 5 years touch the code of the game? You should learn how those credits work. It doesn't mean what you think it does.
Furthermore, game dev also includes so many artists and other work. It is so insane to claim gta 5 was made by 150 people that I don't think the rest of your comment can be taken seriously.
Shopify supports multiple countries both as a buyer/seller. I assume there is all kind of customizations needed to comply with each country weird rules. Are all of these software engineers doing core engineering? Probably not. But they are probably tagged as software engineers within the organization.
When business is booming, you can do nothing wrong, as with that revenue even big mistakes stop mattering.
All I want from Spotify is API so someone can make better player/plugin to a better player.
>what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.
Engineering is app usability. Theres no other possible thing an engineer might do. Chrome ofc has infrastructure to distribute a binary. Spotify of course having a global content delivery network for terabytes of music. Hey GANG CAN WE WOKK OUT WHAT THESE ENGINEERS MIGHT BE DOING?????? WHY HASNT JIM STORAGE ENGINEER IMPLEMENTED A UI REFRESH YET!!!!
We have no idea how many of these engineers work on the mobile app. This comment is somehow both AI slop and human slop.
its actually not that weird if you consider that those shopify engineers are probably not even exceeding 150,000 usd on average salary wise
canadian dollar is very cheap so you'd likely see 40~50% more headcounts for the same burn rates you get in USA
i definitely dont think those shopify engineers are going to be retained long term however