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Comment by quadrature | Hacker News Reader

Shopify | Canada (Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Waterloo and now San Francisco!) | Full-time | Onsite | Remote | VISA Shopify is a platform that allows entrepreneurs to easily setup an online store. We build solutions that empower merchants at every step of their journey. Our product help merchants who are just starting as well as established brands that need a solution that can scale with their traffic. We're always working on products that make it easier for entrepreneurs to reach their audience and help them make data driven decisions. Shopify is built in Ruby on Rails running on a stack composed of Docker, Golang, Python, Mysql, Kafka, HDFS and Apache Spark. If you're interested in building tools that empower Entrepreneurs come take a look at who we are and what we're doing https://jobs.lever.co/shopify?lever-via=XBuWsYM_Q2 https://github.com/Shopify.

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Heads up: developer interviews with Shopify are a sitdown with 2-3 HR people who do not have an ounce of experience in development. You will not meet the CTO, the local office's technical director, or even a team lead developer. The interviewers will not be impressed one iota with your experience, as your interview is purely designed to judge you on a first impression culture fit.

If you are not a smooth-talking, 18 year old, ass-kissing fake personality, skip this interview and go to any other company where you will find an interview judging you on merit rather than whether the interviewers want to go to the club with you at midnight on a Friday night.

Source: my own 25+ interviews over the years, with 4 employers over a span of 13 years; in addition to two truly senior developer friends who found themselves in the same situation with them. Shopify is 95th percentile worst interview process for software developers and engineers in Canada.

That is deeply discouraging.

I’m a technical recruiter at Shopify (focused on R&D roles), and we work hard to make sure everyone who meets our team feels like they’ve had an opportunity to express their abilities.

Our talent acquisition team is not interested in making hiring decisions for a multi-billion dollar company based on age or whether you want to go clubbing.

We base our hiring decisions on some of these things: a) impact at previous companies/projects and ability to get shit done b) complexity of projects you’ve tackled c) potential for growth d) domain knowledge/technical expertise for the project we think you would be a match for e) and yes, values alignment

We value people who have had a big impact in their previous companies or roles, who have been super engaged in past projects, and who can reflect on past experiences to learn what worked, and even more, what didn’t work. These are all positive signals for us and are important to being successful here.

Hopefully this clears some misconceptions up, even if your experience wasn’t great.

So is it true that the screening interview is with 2-3 non-technical HR people?

If so, that's completely incompatible with the procedure you've outlined. Non-technical people are by definition not capable of evaluating points a), b), c), or d) on your list.

I sent in an application last month and did an initial interview. It was my understanding that I'd be scheduled for two more interviews, at least one of them technical. Maybe I misunderstood, but in any case no one ever got back to me to say they weren't moving forward with my application.

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