One day, I randomly received an email from a Shopify recruiter, despite never having applied to the company before. I decided to give it a go, figuring I had nothing to lose.

I spoke with a different recruiter for a 30-minute phone call, who then scheduled me for the Life Story & live pair programming code test.

The Life Story portion felt really well and was an enjoyable talk. However, things went downhill when it came time to do the live code test.

My interviewer for this had a terrible audio connection, and I couldn't hear them at all. When I finally could, they gave me back 10 minutes, but for the remainder of the interview, their voice sounded like a robot and was hard to hear.

For the actual code prompt, I chose to code in JavaScript since I am a front-end developer and was told I was interviewing for a front-end position.

My interviewer was an engineering manager with a background in backend code who was not familiar with JavaScript at all and didn't know methods such as map or that unquoted property names are valid in a JavaScript object. The interviewer kept asking me to explain JavaScript basics like this, which wasted time. Ultimately, although I knew how to solve the prompt, I didn't get a chance to fully implement my solution due to running out of time.

I was instantly rejected afterward, which is a shame since I'm pretty sure I would have moved on had I had a better interviewer who knew JavaScript and didn't have technical audio issues.

The "Life Story" portion involved discussing my journey from my very first job to my current role. You had control over the conversation and could choose how much you wanted to reveal.

The "Coding prompt" was a typical algorithm LeetCode question. You could choose to answer it in the language of your choice.