A Four-Year On-Ramp to Production Engineering

In late April 2020, Shopify celebrated the graduation of its first Dev Degree cohort. That class entered the program in 2016, when the curriculum was still being shaped through trial and error, and finished their studies during a worldwide pandemic that forced a sudden shift to remote work and learning. Their completion of the program is a measure of the structure Shopify built around them as much as it is of their own adaptability.

Dev Degree was conceived as an alternative to traditional co-op education. Instead of alternating between semesters of university study and separate work placements, students spend four years in concurrent tracks: attending university classes while holding a continuous placement at Shopify. They work 25 hours per week at Shopify during the academic year, taking three university courses per semester, and the model is designed so students can apply theory from the classroom to real, merchant-facing work almost immediately.

Universities Own the Degrees, Shopify Owns the Skills

Students graduate with an accredited Computer Science degree, a critical factor for many families evaluating post-secondary options. The universities define the core theory, computer science and math requirements, electives, and all formal assessment, grading, and final exams. Shopify and its university partners—Carleton and York University—collaborate on sequencing so that students encounter core computer science content as early as possible, before their first team placements begin.

In addition to standard courses, universities offer internship courses built around the work students do at Shopify. Learning outcomes for these are assessed through practicum reports and regular meetings with university supervisors and advisors. The supplementary courses taught at Shopify layer hands-on skills—communication, developer tooling, and contribution to real product teams—on top of that academic foundation.

The First Year Is a Skills Bootcamp

A key lesson from the program’s early iterations: students need a solid set of developer skills before being placed with a team. If they don’t have that foundation, they are not confident and cannot contribute. Dev Degree addresses this with a full first year of Shopify-led developer skills training, a feature that distinguishes it from most other work-integrated learning programs.

During that first year, students learn the tools and workflows they will use throughout their careers:

  • Command Line Interface (CLI)
  • Git & GitHub
  • Ruby
  • HTML, CSS, JavaScript
  • Databases
  • Ruby on Rails
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • GraphQL

That breadth of practical knowledge goes well beyond a typical first-year university curriculum and prepares students to join a team and make an impact from day one. The pedagogy is deliberate. Universities tend to front-load theory in a bottom-up fashion; Dev Degree places students somewhere in between that and a purely top-down approach. Students build base skills and write code daily, then gradually discover foundational theory as they go. Because development practice changes quickly, these courses are regularly updated.

Four Placements Across Disciplines

After the training year, students spend their remaining three years on back-to-back team placements. The team placement is the heart of the program’s applied learning. Students interview with teams across back-end, front-end, data, security, and production engineering, guided by placement specialists who look for compatibility between the student’s goals and the team’s needs.

Over four years, each Dev Degree student receives:

  • One 12-month team placement
  • Three 8-month team placements
  • Four different technical mentors
  • A dedicated Life@Shopify mentor
  • Twenty hours per week working on a Shopify team
  • Five hours per week of personal development
  • Actionable feedback on a regular cadence
  • Evaluations from mentors and leads
  • High-touch support from the Dev Degree team
  • Access to a broad workplace culture

Rotating through this range of disciplines is meant to produce well-rounded developers with exposure to new perspectives, technologies, and people.

The Support Structure Behind the Students

A program of this scale depends on a multidisciplinary team. The central Dev Degree group handles logistics, mentorship, and day-to-day student support, but the actual instruction and mentorship also pull in subject-matter experts from across Shopify and the university partners.

Student Success Specialists

Many students join Dev Degree right after high school, which is a sharp transition into a professional environment. Student success specialists help ease that shift by supporting well-being, connecting students with other mentors, and coaching them on effective communication. They serve as the students’ voice within Shopify and protect first-year students from being overwhelmed before they reach team placements.

Placement Specialists

These coordinators oversee every team placement across each cohort. The role is high-touch: placement specialists must build deep relationships with development teams and understand each student’s goals to make good matches. They also support the team leads and mentors, and actively push for a culture of mentorship at Shopify so that teams get a return on their investment in teaching.

Educators

The in-house courses are designed and taught by Dev Degree educators, who bring deep backgrounds in both education and computer science. They develop curriculum for the skills that matter at Shopify and more broadly in the industry, deliver the material, and evaluate students on technical expertise.

Recruitment Team

Shopify’s talent team builds the recruitment strategy for Dev Degree, aiming to attract a diverse mix of students through avenues such as university meetups and mentorship in youth programs like Technovation.

Technical and Life@Shopify Mentors

Mentorship is woven into the culture. Development team mentors guide students through each 8-month placement, provide evaluations, and deliver actionable feedback. That commitment uses about 10% of a developer’s time—an investment Shopify considers worthwhile both for the student and for the developer, who builds leadership skills. In parallel, Life@Shopify mentors, who volunteer their time, act as a trusted guide as students navigate the program and the wider company.

University Stakeholders

Faculty advisors at Carleton and York engage directly with students on course selection and program navigation, and evaluate internship courses and practicums. The integrated partnership between the universities and Shopify is what makes it possible to bridge theory and practice.

The Early Returns on a Long Bet

Dev Degree is a significant investment of time, resources, and cost. The results, by the program’s own measures, are promising:

  • Graduates leave as well-rounded developers with experience across a range of teams and disciplines.
  • 100% of graduates have accepted full-time positions within six months of graduation.
  • Students hired by Shopify bring four years of established relationships and practical knowledge to their teams.
  • The mentorship model is producing future leaders.

The program is not standing still. Shopify is collecting metrics and data to quantify its success and drive improvements. The longer-term ambition, first stated when the program launched, is to create a useable blueprint that other companies and universities can adopt and evolve. External interest already exists; the open question is how quickly the model spreads from an experiment at two Canadian universities into a broader norm for software education.

A Remote Expansion for Dev Degree

Shopify's shift to a fully remote company in 2020 opened the door for potential software engineers from almost anywhere. The Dev Degree program, however, still had a geographic constraint: students needed to live in the same city as their university campus to attend in-person classes.

Starting in September 2021, that changes. The program is expanding to welcome fully remote students from across North America through a new partnership with Make School. The remote 3-year program offers the same hands-on learning and work experience at Shopify that current students receive. Instead of in-person classes, Make School students will attend classes remotely to earn a Bachelor's Degree in Applied Computer Science.

A small pilot program launches in September 2021, with general admission opening the following year. There are two structural differences for Make School students: they will earn a 3-year Applied Computer Science degree rather than a 4-year Bachelor of Science/Computer Science, and they will complete three work placements instead of four. Developer Skills training, mentorship, and team support remain unchanged, as those are considered key to student success. More details on applying for the September 2022 intake are expected later in the summer.

Further Reading