Home-based "Gurus" (call centre rep): Horrible training, poor leadership, ageism, high stress, extreme workloads. - Home-based Guru Shopify Employee Review

High stress. Fake-smiling supervisors and trainers who will turn on you at the drop of a hat. - 4-letter words -- that Glassdoor will not allow me to list here, including the big one (!) -- run rampant in company materials and verbal trainings: this is amateurish and repugnant to any professional business person. The use of this word would be a huge HR issue -- up to and including firing -- in the vast majority of companies if it was uttered, let alone published internally or used by trainers and other veteran employees in recorded training sessions, especially in a customer-facing department. But this occurs everywhere and all the time at Shopify. The Society for Human Resource Management reports that it it is disrespectful and "can lead to depression, stress, reduced morale, absenteeism, retention problems [and] reduced productivity [and can] damage the image of the organization." - Poor training with recently-out-of-high-school former "Guru" trainers with all-powerful bad attitudes (and potty mouths) who throw systems, materials and jargon at you without any review of tools and resources: just a bunch of URLs to copy into your browser while glossing over material and requiring trainees to find highly-technical answers on their own via numerous badly-organized and difficult-to-search systems (compared to 1 or 2 with excellent search capabilities at leading companies). The little documentation that is provided in on-line exercises is often impossible to understand due to misinformation, misdirection and jargon. You're essentially thrown into a deep swimming pool without instruction on being taught how to swim. Then they will put you in the dog house and rationalize their bad management if you even hint that something could be done better or say that something was not explained clearly. - Non-divulgence of the actual expected work load during the interviewing process: 3 ongoing chats are needed (along with phone calls and emails), which is 50% higher than the norm in the industry (Amazon has a maximum of 2 chats, for example, which can be overwhelming at times... 3 is crazy and anti-productive, especially when you consider the highly technical subject matter usually involved). Pressure to upsell, even though sales was never part of the hiring conversation. At the mercy of many unhappy customers to award you (or likely not) an extremely high number of "smilies" or be punished for not achieving those metrics. - There are many reports on complaint sites of merchants enduring extremely long hold times and their accounts getting cancelled and/or payments delayed without any reason given (which the company says it can do in their Terms of Service), so the entire operation is extremely understaffed and badly managed. (It says that it will bar some sellers that may reflect badly on Shopify's reputation, so why does it still indignantly host Breitbart News, which promotes US ultra-right nationalism and has links to white supremacists, even after Shopify lost staff over the issue and continues to get lots of negative press about it?) - Your fellow trainees and workers will be mostly early 20-something former minimum-wage call centre and retail employees (which, I'm guessing, are the foundation for all the positive reviews here: they don't know any better compared to those of us over 35). - You have just one week following training to get up to snuff (according to the company metrics) or potentially be thrown out. This includes handling 3 chats on Day One. - It is essentially a company run by the Borg: you will enjoy being assimilated and won't ask any questions or you will be fired. - Do yourself a favour and read the negative reviews which are, by and large, accurate.