I have over 500 commits in Rails and I failed the Shopify coding interview | Hacker News Reader

I have over 500 commits in Rails and I failed the Shopify coding interview

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47 pointsmooreds26 comments

It is unfortunate that “for some folks any form of a test/quiz can be triggering” as quoted in the tweet. And I’m not advocating for archaic coding interviews or on-the-spot exercises.

But our lives don’t always follow a project plan, work isn’t always planned well in advance, and our careers and experiences will always have a degree of randomness/variance.

Have we considered that Shopify wants to filter out people who can’t handle this type of experience? At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.

My point is Shopify can adjust work and policies all we want around peoples mental health but the company may not be able to guarantee that this person never encounters a triggering moment, and therefore they may have decided that is may be in their interest to “not be inclusive” of this type of personality.

Author of the tweet here.

I don't think that companies do this consciously, but I think the problem with your take is that your comment seem to assume that performance anxiety is somehow related to being "triggered" when people do the actual work. I can recall no situations whatsoever when something like that affected my performance at work. I am on an on call rotation, I deal with various production issues and incidents frequently, here and there I'm working on the infrastructure where mistakes can have very bad consequences. None of this is in any way comparable to the interview.

Another point here is that I've talked to a friend working at Shopify and he said that if he puts me in the system they would skip the coding interview, because then they don't need to check if I really can code. So no, in this particular case I don't think that this was a way to filter out people with performance anxiety.

Also, this kind of anxiety doesn't seem to be connected with actual performance when doing the work, it's just about working with an audience that judges you vs working in private. Here is an article about an interesting study: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

Thank you for clarifying. I don’t mean to critique your work or your ability to complete the interview, i was specifically quoting the tweet you were quoting in your post. In that tweet it mentions the triggering aspect of such interviews. To your situation in particular, my point in a comment further down was that it’s possible that employers like Shopify still see the “on the spot coding exercise” as a natural filter for certain personality traits. Wether they do this consciously or not, i have no idea. Wether it’s good practice or not, also debatable. Probably not as it excludes a lot of potentially good developers. Nevertheless it is a behavior that continues to filter out the types of people who can’t/won’t do the exercise. Your ability to deliver great work is almost definitely completely unrelated to the exercise itself. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t progress as a result, and hopefully your friend can help you out with resetting the process.

Thanks for clarifying too!

Regarding progressing I think it's for the better. It was about two years ago I didn't have much issues with finding something else (I brought it up only cause Shopify was mentioned in a tweet that started the whole thing). Also, in general I feel uneasy about doing this kind of thing - why would I work for a company that would hire certain people only if they have connections there?

I think it’s less likely that companies like Shopify are purposely filtering out candidates who have interview anxiety and more likely that it’s simply not a factor they take into account.

Assuming that:

1. Companies like Shopify do not have a shortage of qualified candidates

2. The cost of hiring a “bad” candidate is outweighs the benefit of finding the best possible candidates.

3. Tons of people who aren’t qualified also apply

The optimal strategy is one that focuses on weeding out as many bad candidates as possible, even if there are some good candidates that get dismissed as a result.

This is of course a gross oversimplification, but the key takeaway is that there seem to be enough candidates that are both qualified and able to get through the stressful interview process, so there’s little incentive to change it.

However, I think starting a conversation about it as the quoted twitter user is doing I might change it. If companies start wanting to take (real) steps to be more inclusive, they might have enough reason to change their hiring practices.

I get what you mean but I think you’re missing the point of what I said

Shopify may not WANT to be inclusive of candidates triggered into paralysis by an interview quiz/prompt.

> At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.

The guy has 500 commits to Rails, do you know how rare that is? I find it very hard to believe he wouldn't be a good addition to 90% of teams there.

I passed the shopify coding interview. The interviewer said the toughest engineering problem at the moment was hiring enough developers.

And then I failed the "life story" interview.

Failing any interview is a real kick in the balls, particularly if you happen to be out of work at the time. But somewhere down the road you're going to laugh at the fact that you failed telling them about yourself. Like they would know.

> Failing any interview is a real kick in the balls,

I used to think that, but then I got laid off. That was a real hit to the ego, let me tell you.

The fact is that the right job is a matching problem across so many dimensions that change over time (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) between many parties (employers are not monolithic!).

what is this mean? You don’t have a compelling enough life story for a software company?

Pretty much, interviewer clicked more with other candidates I guess. That does sound extremely frustrating to go through the whole ordeal just to have some guy weed you out because you don't look or speak like he expects.

Dumb question, what is a 'life story' interview?

No way of interviewing is inclusive. Whether you choose a test, just a conversation, working through a practical problem together or something else. There will always be people who will be great employees but struggle through your particular interview process. The way I see it I would do very simple interview and then just sort it out during the probation period. It's easy to see after a few weeks if someone knows what he or she is talking about.

If you EVER feel that you aren't able to put your best foot forward in an interview, just STOP, politely tell the interviewers what's going on, and inform the interviewers that you're going to stop then interview, and will reschedule at another time. Apologize for starting any inconvenience this causes them. The interviewers will be thrown off by this, because likely nobody has done this to them before, so you may have to overcome their objections, but stick to your plan.

Then re-evaluate the interview. What made you nervous? Were you just having a bad day? Not enough sleep? Low blood sugar? Dehydrated? Did something about the interviewer(s) put you on the defensive? Try to come up with a plan to avoid this situation in the future. Reschedule the interview if you feel like it.

I had somebody stop an interview like this once. I asked them how they could write a computer program that counted things (typically looking for a hash table with count values) and they immediately stopped and said they weren't expecting a leetcode interview. They later complained to my manager out of band. We offered them a chance to return, but if I'm gonna hire my boss, a head of computation, they are going to be able to use a hash table.

Interesting, I suggest that people not be rude about it or go above people's heads, but be polite and explain the situation truthfully.

But now I'm curious, if the person was having a bad day, and thought they would do bad with either the hash table, or some second question you're likely to ask next, and they left the interview, and you offered to let them come back, and they rescheduled at a later date, would you still consider it a bad signal?

If that's the case, then I think my advice still stands, but it's better to move on to another company's interview process once you stop the interview. There are a lot of companies hiring out there.

we politely offered to reschedule the interview and they declined. later, they "failed up" to a role at another company that didn't interview as carefully.

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