I'm really sorry to about how this played out for you. I can see some similarity to the bumps I faced when I joined Shopify.

> I don't doubt that more frontend work was coming down the pipeline for my team - even greenfield work - but I felt the months ticking by and my frontend skills degrading. In order to triage this, I worked on a number of frontend projects in my spare time at a pace that was admittedly draining.

With me, it wasn't so much that I wasn't learning at the start, it was that I wasn't really working on meaty/challenging tasks/projects. This was several years ago. It took a while probably more than a year after having shipped a major feature from beginning to end with a team to understand what 'scale' means at Shopify. Normally when we think scale, we think users, servers, requests/sec. Shopify scale is more like shipping via ocean tanker vs 1-day delivery drone. Imagine my shock finding myself accidentally (that's another story) at Shopify coming from a series of startups and missing the pace of work. To be clear, I didn't ship anything part of a whole project in my first 5 months either. I think this got dealt with in my case, because my attempts to make faster/greater impact was conflicting with established process standards. This was fortunate as it led to discussions about mindset. It was still hard to internalize: we design, build, and ship the right thing, only when it's ready, to millions of customers. It only makes sense if you think about it in a year+ timeframe.

> I asked myself the question, "Am I becoming a better frontend developer through this experience?" and the answer was of course no. These things are complex though and I could see how maybe six months or a year from various points I might be working on some exciting frontend work. This line of self-questioning mutated into, "Do I care about eCommerce?" It was a question I never had the bravery to ask myself before. I've worked almost exclusively in eCommerce of one form or another since I started working in tech. I began to wonder if it might be time to try something different.

When I started I didn't even know what Shopify was really, only that they made web storefronts like many other website/checkout product/companies. As I worked there I realized that there's a big difference. Shopify's storefront/checkout is only the tip of the platform, the rest you can't see are the parts used by the merchants.

I did also think, is this the place for me? My asking was about the tech stack. I only had one Rails job before and it wasn't my cup of tea. I did stick it out though, for the reasons of working with great people, both peers and management. One thing I didn't take for granted was that Shopify is a good company. Perhaps I didn't start interested in Commerce (no 'e' Shopify does Retail too, the team I started on :-), but I did understand that trade, in particular international trade, and also at all levels and not just megacorps, can actually make the world better. I think getting and shipping international orders is a pretty eye-opening moment for merchants. Eventually I also got to work on very challenging technical problems, which do regardless of tech stack.

> Everything on the surface was good for me at Shopify and I want to take some space to recognize that.

I'm sorry that this didn't work out. I do agree that there are layers, but also that there are more than two layers. DM me for anything.