I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Shopify (Toronto, ON) in Oct 2021
Interview
1. Apply
2. Apply again through 2 referrals
3. Get referral to follow up
4. Do a recruiter screen (0.5 hours)
5. Do a tech screen?? This was really odd because it's a manager position, you can measure technical ability through more than coding. (1.5 hours)
6. Do a "Life Story" interview (1.5 hours)
7. Do a HR interview (0.5 hours)
--- At this point I decided to drop out of the process
8. Do another tech interview (2 hours)
9. Do a behavioural interview (2 hours)
The process was extremely long and frustrating. I applied through multiple channels and didn't hear much back. When I did finally hear from a recruiter they only had availability to chat in 2 weeks. Between steps there was always a 2-3 week delay in scheduling because they had no interview slots open.
I dropped out of the process after I accepted another offer.
Throughout the process I did not know what job I was interviewing for, or for what team. Which is ridiculous considering I had spent 8 hours with them and they wanted at least another 4.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Tell me your life story
- Write an short algorithm that counts an increase or decrease in numbers given an array of numbers
- Test that algorithm
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Shopify (Toronto, ON) in Feb 2022
Interview
Process consisted of two rounds, five interviews total. The interviews were:
Life Story - what with a recruiter about the path I took that lead me to where I am now.
Manager Life Story - managerial behavioral interview
System Design - fairly standard system design interview
Reverse System Design - I talked about a couple projects I've worked on in the past.
Coding - non-LC coding interview. Variables and methods should be well named and the code should be well tested.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a team you built. How did you hire for it, how did the team come together, what was the mission and how did you get the team to rally around it.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Shopify in Sept 2021
Interview
This was a coding exercise for a Senior Manager position. The interviewer was very pleasant and we worked through the exercise quickly and easily, despite the fact that CoderPad's intellisense was broken, I dropped into an IDE and shared my screen to work through build issues, progressing as quickly as possible through the exercise and having a nice conversation as we went.
I felt that the coding challenge was easy and straightforward and yet I received an email the following day stating: "Following your coding exercise interview, we’ve decided not to advance you in our interview process". Huh?
I get the premise of having a coding exercise; as managers we should be able to interact with our teams in the languages they are writing every day. I totally agree with this premise and have lived by it for years and years now. But to feel good about your showing in the coding exercise and to be rejected specifically on that premise without being asked a single question about your management experience or on anything specific about you other than: what is your background? Didn't feel right at all as a candidate.
It's altogether possible that I was just there to make up numbers vs an internal hire as many organisations now have to do, but if so, what a waste of mine and Shopify's time. Either way, they are now firmly off my list. I am sure they are devastated etc. j/k, but this was a pretty myopic experience overall.
To Shopify: you might want to ask managers about their management experience with at least one single question before rejecting them based upon syntax.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Simple array manipulations to form aggregate data sets.
