I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Montreal, QC) in Apr 2019
Interview
This first interview was a phone interview with a recruiter. She was really nice and I enjoyed my talk with her. It was a really high-level interview, just to know if the position would be a possible fit with me. I guess that interview is more to filter out candidates who didn't really had a look at the position and just randomly sent their CV.
The 2nd and 3rd interview were at Shopify Office.
The 2nd interview was an 1h talk with the recruiter, called the 'Life story'. The recruiter was really nice and our discussion was enjoyable. I'm not sure how they can decide if an employee will fit at Shopify based on this discussion though.
The 3nd interview was a coding challenge with another developer watching you code. I found this interview to be really awkward and stressful. Most companies I know don't do this kind of interview because they know they can't really see how a programmer code if someone is monitoring them coding. I think interviews should be based on real work situations, and AFAIK, you'll never need to code with someone watching over you in actual job. Nevertheless, the interviewer seemed like a great guy, even though he doesn't seem interested in me at all once he saw I had a hard time coding in front of him.
I received an email a week later telling me they would not continue the process with me. They told me I could still apply online if I found other positions that would interest me, which was kind of weird to say, considering that they knew I was a developer, so the only position I could apply was developer. The email felt a lot like copy/paste.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Code a function that will calculate a cart total price, based on various items prices and conditional discounts based on items type and quantity.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON) in Feb 2019
Interview
After a brief and pleasant phone screening interview a 1:1 interview with the recruiter was scheduled, followed by a technical interview. The 1:1 was great, I felt that what the company was trying to do in terms of finding a good culture fit was very reassuring.
It was, unfortunately, the technical interview that made me second guess the process. I had to solve a series of algorithm challenges on a platform that neither the recruiter or I were familiar with. I felt that the questions were highly irrelevant for the job and didn't measure my programming skills at all. If you are the type that read books like "cracking the code interview" or spend time in sites like leetcode, these questions will be trivial. I've been working in the industry for many years and I don't remember ever having to print out geometrical shapes in the screen.
This was a bit disappointing. It was explained to me that this was a new step that they were introducing to the interview process, and I truly hope that they get to rethink it (specially because this initial technical test is followed by two other more complex tasks where you actually have to build an application - a lot better approach in my opinion).
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify
Interview
Applied and completed online coding challenge and was called in for a life story interview. The life story interview was a phone call / share screen type of process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Life story interview was basically a get to know you about your past. They describe this section of their interview on their website: https://interviewing.shopify.com/pages/philosophy. It's very casual and friendly!