I directly applied to Shopify and was excited with their initial acknowledgement of the application, and that they were willing to invite me to the interview process.

The first round was the technical pair coding round. They asked me to come on a Codepair link, which was set up with a video call provision.

The interviewer was a calm, decent guy who explained the problem statement clearly and also sort of helped me where he thought I was stuck.

Regarding the problem statement, I was able to get a good grasp of it and made sure the requirements were clear before jumping into coding. I suggested a couple of solutions and, with proper justification, went ahead with one. I commented my code wherever needed and solved the problem completely. There was absolutely no doubt that I did not complete it improperly or that I timed out, etc.

After 3-4 days of not hearing back from them, I sent a follow-up email. They promptly replied, saying I could not make it, with the usual template email for absolutely no specific reason.

I was pretty shocked knowing that and later felt it was a waste of time introspecting on why they might have rejected me.

In short, I must say it might be a big-time waste to apply to Shopify; they could reject you even if you build a cloned Shopify in the test.

Write a program that sorts a list of comma-separated products.

The product data is structured as [name, popularity, price].

Example data.

'Some item', 98, 14

Sort the products by popularity in descending order (most popular first). If products have the same popularity, sort them by price in ascending order (cheapest first).