"Fully remote can work at scale with intensity -- but requires deliberate practices"
Evidence from the Archive
Shopify
IC meeting time dropped from ~5-6 hours/week to 3 hours/week; manager time from ~10 to 6-7 hours/week
Shopify's annual 'Chaos Monkey' meeting purge: all recurring meetings with 3+ internal participants deleted, two-week moratorium on recreation
Farhan Thawar leads engineering at Shopify, a 10,000+ person fully remote company that continues to operate with startup-like urgency nearly 20 years after founding -- delivering record usage and consistently beating earnings expectations. Their core argument: Intensity is about output per minute, not hours worked. Sustainable intensity comes from compressing more work into the same eight-hour day by eliminating coordination overhead, not from expanding the workday.
The evidence is specific: Shopify's annual 'Chaos Monkey' meeting purge: all recurring meetings with 3+ internal participants deleted, two-week moratorium on recreation. Furthermore, iC meeting time dropped from ~5-6 hours/week to 3 hours/week; manager time from ~10 to 6-7 hours/week. Delete Code Club regularly removes 1M+ lines of code to reduce codebase complexity.
In Farhan Thawar's own words: "Everyone says, 'Oh yeah, work hard and do more hours when you're young, whatever.' I'm like, 'What if you just did more per minute?'" (Redefining intensity as output-per-minute, not hours worked.)
Shopify
Shopify's GSD (Get Shit Done) tool requires weekly company-wide updates creating Parkinson's Law at scale
Shopify's Delete Code Club regularly finds 1M+ lines to remove, extending the deletion mindset to meetings and processes
Oversees engineering for 10,000+ fully remote employees at Shopify, previously ran the largest pair programming shop in the world at Xtreme Labs/Pivotal, and has worked directly with billionaire founders across three decades of his career. Their core argument: Fully remote can work at scale with intensity -- but requires deliberate practices.
The evidence is specific: Shopify's Delete Code Club regularly finds 1M+ lines to remove, extending the deletion mindset to meetings and processes. Furthermore, tobi Lutke and CTO Cody pair programmed with 1-hour timers, deleting all code and keeping only tests if they went even one minute over. Xtreme Labs (Farhan's previous company backed by Chamath) ran 40-hour/week pair programming building mobile apps for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the NFL.
In Farhan Thawar's own words: "We're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think it's six or seven hours per week." (Metrics for remote productivity at Shopify.)