I applied through the career portal after seeing an ad on LinkedIn. I was invited for a technical screening round directly, without any conversation with HR. Information on what to expect during the interview was provided. The screening happened quickly, and I knew of the decision within 24 hours. Based on the expectations provided in the link prior to the interview, you need to solve the given problem.

The interviewer was from Canada, and I was interviewing for a Berlin role. The interviewer didn't know that this was my first face-to-face interview with Shopify without an initial HR screening. So, he tried to break the ice and provided some information about the company for the first 10 minutes.

Then, for the next 45 minutes, he gave me a coding exercise to be done over CoderPad.

He started by saying that the problem was extremely simple and nothing too complicated, and that he just wanted to see my coding abilities. As mentioned in their link, they also said they were looking for how well I collaborate. I asked a couple of clarifying questions before proceeding. I then explained my thought process and presented my option, and he didn't say anything other than "yeah, sounds good." I asked if I should start coding, and he said yes. Halfway through, I was explaining and told him to let me know if he thought I was rambling or unclear. He looked again at my code and said, "Yeah, yeah, I think I understand, keep going."

Then I got stuck and asked, "I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here." He had absolutely no track of the direction I was going in and was just lost. When I asked for hints, instead of guiding me away from the wrong direction, he gave me an approach based on the solution he already knew about. This meant I had to reset my current thought process and start over. I then thought, "Oh wait, it doesn't look like the solution is as straightforward as he said at the beginning of the interview." This made me even more nervous when getting stuck, and overall, I failed to complete the exercise.

Another thing was, he kept looking on a different side of the screen, and every time I asked a question, he would turn his head, meaning he didn't seem engaged in the interview and wasn't collaborating.

In my opinion, I think he just set incorrect expectations right from the start and didn't really try to understand what I was proposing or collaborate with me.

I have conducted several interviews myself, and I know that if I can't follow what the candidate is trying to do and steer them in the right direction, it means I wasn't paying enough attention or collaborating enough.

It was a typical algorithm question. To perform a search in an array.