There aren't a lot of good companies in Canada, and Shopify is among the rare good ones that exist. This means a lot of people are probably trying to get in.

I have to preface the review by saying what I think about interview processes as a whole. I believe the number of people interviewing for software jobs is an order of magnitude higher than what "good companies" can hire. At the same time, the number of software jobs that exist is probably around the order of candidates. This means that getting into a good company is hard and competitive, but finding some job isn't.

Also, the amount of skill that is needed at a job isn't necessarily a lot. I would imagine only 0.1% of people work on anything groundbreaking. There's nothing new to solve; that belongs to the research department.

What this creates is a unique situation where the job has just enough barrier of entry for normies not to enter, and at the same time, isn't specialized enough. Anyone with a decent brain and a decent background can work at any software company and do well if they want to. The amount of skill needed to work at Facebook, Google, or Shopify isn't much different from any of the hundreds of companies that would be a couple of tiers below them.

So, what do top-tier companies do in this situation? They create artificial barriers of entry. You need someone to write an API and move a bit of data around?

Facebook, in this situation: "Well, why don't you tell us how you would solve these 5 DP problems within 45 minutes, because that's what the remaining 285 candidates can do, and we can hire you."

Shopify, in this situation: "Here are some easy questions for you about day-to-day stuff. Show us how you would write production-ready code."

The interview at Shopify is "easy" in this regard because it mimics the job. The job is really effing easy! You write some code, make it pretty, readable, and modular, you write tests, you name variables well, and you're good to go.

But we're back to square one! Any of the 285 candidates can do this. Ooof. What a nightmare.

So, what can Shopify do in this situation? Barriers of entry. Sprinkle in some culture, sprinkle in some arbitrary conditions, sprinkle in some "life stuff." I'm guessing any of the 5-6 interviewers have a veto to not taking you in. They only need the very strong positives.

So there you have it. The questions, the answers, the preparation isn't what's important. There's nothing to do. There are a few coding rounds, one technical deep dive, and one "life story" round. On the day of the interviews, the impression you leave and whether the things you said sat right with ALL the interviewers is more important. Ultimately, you're up against 285 other candidates in an interview process that cannot distinguish anyone based on skill (neither can Facebook, by the way; solving hard DP problems in 30 minutes isn't skill, it's rote learning).

There's no perfect answer to this dilemma. But I would choose Shopify's interview process, where I can come in with little preparation, over 6 months of solving LeetCode problems.

Tell us your life story.