The art of giving a shit: Why we dismantled HR and built something better

My father is a blacksmith. Has been my whole life. Growing up in rural Canada, I'd watch him take cold, unyielding raw materials and craft them into beautiful, functional art. Heat, hammers, and patience. The best things are forged under heat and transformed under pressure. The same is true for people.

For most of its history, HR has been designed for factories. It was built on the assumption that people are resources to be managed rather than crafters to be empowered. It existed to manage the operational drag of running a company, the approvals, coordination, process, compliance. That drag was real, and managing it mattered. But AI is absorbing it fast. The friction that justified most of those systems is evaporating. Which forces a question most companies aren't ready to answer: if your talent system no longer exists to manage friction, what is it actually for?

At Shopify, we think the answer is craft. Shopify was founded on the idea that great craftsmanship is the load-bearing property of all the best products in the world. So we rebuilt our entire approach to talent around one bet: give crafters the environment and the trust to do their best work, and then keep raising the ceiling from there.

Company-building as engineering

Most companies inherit their talent systems. They get an off-the-shelf HR platform, performance review framework, and compensation structure. When you do that, you adopt someone else's principles. And you often don't realize it until those principles start working against you.

We took a different approach. We started from a question: what does the world's best commerce software company actually need? Then we codified the answer (org structure, team sizes, role expectations) as data, not documents. We compare that model against reality. We make principled decisions about how fast to close the gap. We debate principles, not politics.

We call it ShopifyOS. It's version control for how we build the company. And every system we've created: where we work, who builds, how we grow, how we reward, was produced by this approach.

Where we work. We went Digital by Design in May 2020 (not hybrid, not "remote-friendly"), and we've held that position ever since, with intentional in-person time when it matters. That decision opened our talent pool, making it possible to hire the best people regardless of where they lived. Today, 58% of our workforce lives outside commuting distance from our offices. Remote work satisfaction: 54% in 2021, 85% in 2025.

Who builds. We build software for entrepreneurs. The people who do that (engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists) are crafters. Everyone else, including managers, plays an important but supporting role. So we built two equal tracks: Crafter and Manager. We stopped forcing people into management just to give them a promotion. Today, 88% of employees are Crafters. Regrettable attrition on both tracks: 6%. And average tenure has trended upward since 2020. The best people are staying longer.

How we grow. Mastery is our system for measuring craft excellence and recognizing the people who are relentlessly improving at what they do. No weird corporate ladder that funnels people into responsibilities they don't want. Growth is measured by deepening craft and increasing impact on the mission, not by how many people report to you. We don't believe limits on potential exist. Most environments just impose one.

How we reward. Compensation at most companies is a negotiation. Through FlexComp, we gave people agency to choose their own structure. Employees pick their cash-to-equity split and rebalance quarterly as personal priorities require. The point isn't what they choose, it's that they have the choice. That's agency.

Every one of these started from the same place: first principles, codified as data, measured against the desired state. Culture becomes machine-readable, not just human-readable. 

We built the entire OS on our own stack. Every piece of company data is housed in warehouses we built ourselves. That was always intentional. And it matters more now than ever. AI is automating the operational work that used to define how companies were run. The systems that survive aren't the ones built on borrowed infrastructure, they're the ones built on original thinking. We didn't design for the AI era on purpose. But because we built from first principles, we didn't have to start over when it arrived.

This only works with trust

This approach requires a different type of team to run it. Our talent team looks very different from when it started. Much more data science, much more R&D, much more behaviorally-based. People who really give a shit about other people doing well.

This team is good at spotting greatness. That’s why the core of this company is craft. Crafters have mastery over their discipline and understand what exceptional looks like. 

The mechanism that makes this possible is trust. Autonomy is a tradeoff for trust. We call it the trust battery. The more you build, the more autonomy you gain. Deliver on commitments, build in the open, your battery stays charged. Break trust, it drains. Good people do great work when they're in an environment that incentivizes building and growth. If you optimize for control, you get compliance. If you optimize for craft, you get greatness. We chose craft.

In talent, our job is to give our people every tool, every bit of wind in their sails so they can have the best chapter of their career.

We don't have time for bureaucracy or pretenses. The world is moving too fast. The mission is too important. The best people want to work on hard problems surrounded by people that inspire them. That's it. Any friction outside of that will make them leave.

The best crafters have a choice

Why does all of this matter now? There's a Cambrian explosion of new entrepreneurship happening right now. Our mission is to support them, to lower the complexity curve so more people can choose entrepreneurship as a career. To do that, we need the best crafters in the world.

But the best crafters in the world have a choice. They can join a mission where their craft powers the independence of millions of entrepreneurs, or they can build somewhere else. We need to make sure that choice is obvious.

AI is fundamentally rewriting the physics of company-building. It is raising the floor for everyone, automating the toil that used to slow down building amazing products. Since the floor has been raised, we are now exclusively hiring for the ceiling. What matters most is what AI can't give: taste, judgment, and the willingness to own outcomes. That's why we build for crafters.

Early signals say this approach is working. We're attracting talent from nearly 200 countries, we’re sitting at a 90% offer acceptance rate, and 82% of our top performers would recommend Shopify as a great place to work. That's what rejecting traditional HR looks like. 

What you can copy

Honestly, none of this is proprietary. Here's where to start.

Look at what your systems are actually optimizing for. If your performance reviews, career ladders, and compensation structures exist to manage risk, they're working. Just not for the people you want to keep. Redesign them around the assumption that your people are capable, and watch what changes.

Separate craft from management. As long as the only way to grow is to manage, your best builders will either leave or become disinclined managers. Create two tracks. Make them equal. Mean it.

Stop measuring attendance. Measure trust instead through real, observable behavior like commitments met, work shipped, and problems solved. The output speaks louder than the hours. 

And rethink how you reward people. Does your compensation system treat everyone the same regardless of what they value? Find ways to give people real agency in how they're rewarded, even if it starts small. 

In his shop, my father never stops iterating. Every piece teaches him something about the next one. Building a company works the same way. And the forge has never been hotter.

The companies that figure this out will attract the best. The ones that don't will wonder where everyone went.