Ever since I took over the Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup 3 years ago, Shopify, which has presence in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), hasn't volunteered a single Ruby/Rails talk nor bothered to contact me to just say Hi and check if I need sponsorship or anything to demonstrate they care about the local Ruby community. Other companies with far less resources have reached out to me to offer talks or sponsorship though, so Shopify has zero excuses here. Shopify lost a lot of merit points because of this.
During the last RubyConf in 2024 (at which I presented), everyone at the conference was friendly towards me except a small group of Shopify people who I met at a social event on the 3rd day. After I said hello, and was introducing myself, one of them interrupted me to claim he knew me, but then didn’t show any interest in talking or getting to learn how I’m doing or how my RubyConf talk went (everybody else at the conference cared to ask me about that). He looked at the other Shopify folks as if they didn't want me talking to them, so I left thinking it was such a weird interaction. It's one thing if they were busy or had to catch a plane, and they informed me of that in a friendly manner, but the way they treated me as not an equal human being who can be talked to like everyone else at the conference was very discriminatory, and only Shopify folks did that. Nobody else at the entire conference treated me that way. I’ve met people from other famous Ruby shops like GitHub, 37Signals, and Cisco Meraki, and none of them acted that way at all. By the way, a shout out to Cisco Meraki's folks for being the friendliest Rubyists at RubyConf, not just in 2024, but in 2023 as well (at which I presented too)! The irony is Shopify folks act as if they're "above everyone" instead of equal to everyone else, and by acting like that, they end up beneath everyone in merit.
Around 2013, I actually applied for a job at Shopify when they expanded to Montreal. Given that I had learned Rails from its birthplace, Chicago, and had worked for Groupon, which was larger than Shopify at the time, I thought it would be easy for me to pass the interview as I had passed tough technical interviews with other Rails companies without a problem around that time. The weird thing is during the interview, the Shopify point of contact didn't ask me any technical questions (I mean first interviews are supposed to be technical usually). He met me briefly at a coffeeshop while talking in a way as if he didn't want to be there, and then had me go up to their office to meet other developers on the team I was being interviewed for. I tried to get to know their developers in a friendly manner (the same way I got to know many devs in Chicago when I worked there as a Rails Agile consultant for 6 years before joining Groupon), but suddenly in the middle of my conversation with them, the tech lead asked me very rudely to stop wasting their time. Wait, what! I'm there for an interview, not to waste anyone's time. And, I have the right to interview them just as much as they have the right to interview me. Perhaps, they're the kind of bad company that thinks rushing work produces better work than actually taking the time to discuss things intelligently, I don't know. Or, perhaps, their staff members are all demented and unethical. The next thing I know is I was put in a room with their HR person, so I started excitedly talking about my Rails tech accomplishments, which were very unique (including presenting at RailsConf a year before), but for a very weird reason, he had this extreme apathetic face with lack of interest to hear about my Chicago Rails accomplishments even though I came from a better place in Rails than Montreal. I mean I am pretty sure I had better Rails tech experience than some of their employees at the time. The whole interview was super weird. After two weeks passed without hearing back from them, I called them up, and their HR guy claimed I wasn't that good and that they found a better person. Wait, what! You guys never tested my Rails tech skills! I was a Rails consultant in Chicago who helped coach many people on Ruby on Rails development! I learned Rails at its birthplace! I presented at RailsConf in addition to RubyConf! I am sure that was 100% discrimination against me. There is no other way to explain it. I mean, eventually, I won 2 Fukuoka awards from Matz, the creator of Ruby himself, and spoke 6 times at RailsConf/RubyConf, which confirms 100% that I am not only highly qualified, but also more qualified to work at Shopify than many of their employees who don't have half my accomplishments, let alone I am friendlier than their staff and don't behave in an elite/aloof way. So, again, there is no way I'd get rejected for a job there except because of discrimination. Discrimination is unacceptable. In my opinion, any company that even discriminates against one person on earth must be shut down by the government immediately until their bad practices are cleaned up completely. I actually wrote about the topic of discrimination in the Ruby community in this blog post.
I have met ex-Shopify folks that seemed a lot more normal and friendly than current Shopify employees, confirming how there is darkness in Shopify that makes people adopt this mean elitest aloof attitude. It seems after people escape that weird unethical dark environment, they become well-adjusted better people. Some of the people that left Shopify told me that they left it because of weird or disrespectful interactions/practices happening there that drove them away.
Shopify betrayed the Ruby community by not investing their endless resources in building a Ruby based desktop code editor/IDE that would have advanced the Desktop Development story in Ruby, yet lazily defaulting to VSCode even though Ruby as a language could provide a much more productive and maintainable editor building experience than JavaScript. Shopify also betrayed Frontend Ruby options by lazily defaulting to React in the Frontend instead of investing their endless resources into Frontend Ruby, which would have provided leaps and bounds in productivity for everyone in the Ruby on Rails community by comparison. Shopify's actions demonstrate that they don’t really believe in Ruby as they don’t put money where their mouth is regarding Ruby in general outside of standard Rails.
Additionally, Shopify spent a lot of resources optimizing Ruby when in fact Ruby might have not been the right tool for the job in places where performance optimization was needed as Ruby was already fast enough for its appropriate uses at countless other companies. Shopify could have invested in Crystal and improved integration between Ruby & Crystal in ways that made it a no brainer to upgrade Ruby code to Crystal code with types whenever performance optimization is needed given Crystal's code is so close to Ruby's (though some other open-source efforts helped make a flavour of that possible eventually).
Contrary to popular belief and general appearances, the Ruby community has actually degraded, not improved, since Shopify became big about 10 years ago. Gullible devs don't see that, but intelligent devs can see it as clear as day. Before then, Rubyists were very nice (MINASWAN), open-minded, and comfortable with novel unproven open-source projects, supporting countless innovative ideas in the Ruby community while keeping a friendly open dialog about the quirkiness of unproven ideas until proven. Nowadays, probably due to influence by bad examples of behavior that Shopify has inadvertently set for others to copy, Rubyists on Ruby/Rails subreddits meanly downvote any novel open-source ideas that are outside-the-box while openly preferring non-Ruby technologies to Ruby (e.g. React), and Rubyists in the real world often ignore interesting open-source projects without discussing why. I could totally understand it if Rubyists are pushing back because there are valid reasons for why an open-source project isn't a good idea. But, being aloof without being helpful comes across as just ignorant and mean anti-MINASWAN behavior that discourages and kills outside-the-box open-source ideas instead of encouraging them. Especially in cases where Ruby code does provide an astonishing improvement in productivity compared to alternatives in JavaScript or other languages.
In conclusion, Shopify is part of the problem not the solution in the Ruby community, contributing to the Ruby community becoming mean and anti-MINASWAN as reflected by the behaviour of Shopify people towards me. Companies with far less resources than Shopify have contributed talks to the Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup after it was rebooted by me and another organizer post-Covid-lockdowns, which is quite embarrassing to Shopify. In summary, the Ruby community was way better, friendlier, and more open-minded toward innovation before Shopify became a big thing.
By the way, everybody makes mistakes. The difference between bad people and good people is that when bad people make mistakes, they don't own up nor apologize for them. When good people make mistakes, no matter how big, they are always humble enough to own up to error, apologize, and resolve to correct their mistakes. I don't mind it if I stand corrected by having Shopify folks reach out to me to show they care, tell me they think of me as equal to everyone else, agree I deserve to be treated nicely by everyone there, apologize for past unnice behaviour, propose Ruby talks for the Montreal.rb Ruby Meetup, inform me they are willing to support Ruby in Desktop Development and Frontend Development, and confirm they care about upholding MINASWAN in the Ruby community. I’d gladly apologize and remove my posts about them if that happens. Alas, if it doesn't happen, as they say, not making a move is a move. Just like in timed chess, not making a move can result in losing the game, the same thing would happen in real life if Shopify doesn't react at all as that would ding their merit very badly and confirm that I am right all along.
