Shopify hired 1,000 juniors (degree graduates) for intern positions so that *they* would teach Shopify how to work! You understood correctly even though it soun
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Shopify hired 1,000 juniors (degree graduates) for intern positions so that *they* would teach Shopify how to work! You understood correctly even though it sounds confusing... In a fascinating video by their Head of Engineering he explains the change in the world of work and the need to change the whole company for the new AI era
In the video, he says that in 2025 and 2026 Shopify employed a thousand interns, a crazy jump in hiring - compared to only 75 interns they had in 2024.
The goal of the move was not a contribution to the community or charity work, but exactly the opposite. They wanted the interns to come and teach the company how to work.
How does that make sense? The main reason is that the current generation of students, the 2026 graduating class, lived and operated in an environment where AI tools like ChatGPT were available throughout all their academic years.
Shopify wanted these young people to come to the offices, question all the existing ways of working and ask why things are done the way they are. The company wanted to use the interns' hunger and intensity to change the organizational culture end to end and lead innovation.
After all, a company that wants to change how its development teams work and how its departments work can't always do it top-down. Management knows it needs to work differently, but it doesn't necessarily know what that looks like day to day and doesn't really have the ability to make that change. The ones who do know and can are those who never worked without these tools, because they were there from the first day of school. And when they arrive as guests for a moment they immediately see all the problems and gaps.
That's why Shopify didn't put the interns in side support roles, but put them straight into the existing development teams and explicitly asked them to question long-standing processes. The usual direction of learning in an organization was flipped. The veterans didn't teach the young ones how things work at the company, the young ones came to teach the veterans.
It's a role that most organizations haven't yet built any process around. Hiring a whole generation as an engine for cultural change, not just as a cheap labor layer, is also a decision that requires the existing teams to agree that they will learn more than they teach. To shed the ego.
Is there room for hiring juniors? Shopify proves that not only is there room, it's necessary in order to survive the new era.
The video: