The interview process was very opaque, leading to immense frustration once I received a rejection.

I was initially hesitant to go through their interview process, as I already held a comfortable position at another great company in the same town. I decided to accept the challenge, thinking, "Why not? I have nothing to lose except some time and the risk of rejection." Clearly, I had underestimated the potential for significant frustration at the end.

• I was contacted by a recruiter, first by email, then by phone, and was invited for an initial interview at the Montreal office.
• The first interview was with the same recruiter. I shared my "life story" in a very fun and lighthearted experience.
• The subsequent interviews involved a lineup of engineers:
  • The first remote interview was conducted via Skype with a lead engineer from Ottawa. It wasn't a very technical discussion; we mostly revisited my previous experiences.
  • The second remote interview was with another engineer from Ottawa. This was the only technical interview, where I was asked to show some of my previous code and discuss it.
  • The third interview took place at the Montreal offices with a lead from the design team. The vibe was very different from the Ottawa staff, with a definitively different energy. Again, we went through some previous experiences and engaged in some random chatting.
• The pair programming session was held at the Montreal offices with another engineer. This was the most challenging part of the entire process. Somehow, the Shopify staff had convinced themselves that an hour-and-a-half-long coding challenge, conducted in a closed room with someone they had never met before, was meant to "not feel like a test" and "be a collaborative process."

All these steps combined took longer than a month, and each step was eliminatory. I was never told what was expected of me. I did my homework and researched the company values, which I hoped would at least guide the conversations, and that likely helped me make it to the code challenge.

The code challenge was where the entire process's opacity reached its peak. I was sent to the offices for the interview and told I would be pair programming with another engineer. There was no hint of what the challenge would be or how I would be evaluated.

I was told the most important aspect during the pair programming session would be how comfortable the other engineer felt working with me. Therefore, I structured my entire challenge around that, opting for a very basic implementation with many static parts and no framework usage. I made this choice believing I would provide an agnostic and easy-to-follow experience for the other engineer who would be coding with me. Oh boy, could I have been more wrong.

A week later, I received a negative response from the recruiter, stating they had decided not to move forward with my application. My biggest frustration is that the feedback they provided was based entirely on technical issues supposedly identified during this flawed code challenge.

My advice for Shopify is to be much more transparent about how applicants will be evaluated at each stage, especially for the code challenge. Also, please stop deceiving yourselves and misleading candidates into believing that a coding challenge session, where one of your employees evaluates a candidate, is pair programming.

Tell me your "Life Story".

Show me a piece of code you developed and explain the implementation.