I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Shopify (Montreal, QC) in Aug 2019
Interview
I interviewed three times in 2014 (applied online), 2017 (referred by a friend) and 2019 (approached by Shopify recruiter), and always failed in the life story interviewing with a white interviewer.
Technically, my coding, problem-solving and knowledge were never tested, except a 45m coding challenge that I finished in 20m and the interview gave positive feedback.
I sent a pretty long email to three recruiters that I interviewed with and explain to them why I think the life story interview causes uncautious bias and discrimination (racism?).
One of them bothered to respond (with a pretty detailed explanation of why I was not chosen) but didn't really answer why the life that I lived can make me incapable of the job that they ask me to do.
typical interview process, one round with hr. followed by a 75 min coding interview pair programming with one of the engineers. In the coding interview it was encouraged to use ai.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
create a autocomplete system for search based on a list of search frequencies.
There was a first round with hr followed by a 1hour interview, use of AI was encouraged. Interviewer was not very knowledgeable and I had to discover a solution that she understands
The interview was intense and definitely exceeded my expectations. The technical rounds were particularly challenging, but I felt prepared. One of the system design questions was about creating a webhook delivery system with various complexities, and I was relieved because I had explored that exact topic on PracHub just days before. After tackling some coding problems, I faced some behavioral questions that tested my thought process. Overall, the experience was demanding, but I was thrilled to receive an offer, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a webhook delivery system that retries on failure with exponential backoff. Cover idempotency, ordering guarantees, dead-letter queues, and how you'd handle a downstream consumer that's been offline for hours.