Shopify Software Engineer interview questions

After some encouragement from a few of their employees, I applied online and interviewed onsite. As Shopify is fond of telling people, interviewing there is different. They don't spend much time reading resumes and cover letters (my interviewer hadn't read mine), but rather they invite most candidates in for a very quick informal chat to gauge if they can take things further. When you arrive, you're given a tour of the office. If you look around, you'll notice that the office is crowded but very relaxed and almost all of their employees are under 25, with most being white men. Given that they now have almost 500 employees, they've managed to push lack of diversity in tech to an unprecedented level. I sat down with the a friendly recruiter, and was asked to tell my "life story" (at least the high school and university parts of it). The two big focuses were: When did you start programming and how many side projects have you worked on? It doesn't matter if you've been working for 15 years, the focus seems to be on your school years. This almost felt like an indirect form of discrimination, as computers were very expensive up until the late 90s, and only the wealthier kids owned them. It also excludes anyone who discovered programming later in life or had to work part-time jobs to pay for their university. Clearly they're looking for the stereotypical wizz-kid programmers, with their eyes shut to people over 30 or from non-web-hacker backgrounds. The conversation became very rushed when we got to work experience and more recent projects (it didn't help that the interviewer was 15 minutes late to start). They seemed primarily interested in ability to push quantity of code, rather than professional development experience. From what their more senior devs have told me, they are spending most of their time fighting fires, as attention to quality continues to slip. In the end, I was told they were pursuing candidates with more <insert technology that could be picked up in 1 month> experience. I wasn't dissapointed, as I'd seen enough to realize it wasn't a fit for where I was in my career. I was also happy that they got back to me when they said they would.