This one really was a unique interview experience.
First, the referral doesn't go to a specific role — the referrer just submits the candidate's resume into their system, and recruiters periodically screen resumes and reach out. Two days after my referrer submitted me, the recruiter emailed to set up an informational chat — just a quick self-introduction and a walkthrough of the hiring process — and then quickly scheduled the first round of pair programming. Their pair programming format is also very unusual: you're allowed, and even encouraged, to use AI (though there's a hidden trap here, more on that later), and the question itself wasn't hard. My first pair programming round tested a fairly classic-style problem, I don't remember the exact type. I basically used Cursor the whole time — first giving the requirements, then reviewing the generated design doc and giving clarifications, then generating the code, reviewing the code, and finally writing a runner to run the test cases. The interviewer for this round was really nice, gave a lot of feedback, we talked a lot, and the overall energy felt very positive. The next morning I got an email from the recruiter scheduling the next round.
The next round they directly scheduled all the remaining rounds at once, including a life-story round and a back-to-back pair programming + shortlist round. The life-story round: you look at the company values page linked in the email beforehand, the recruiter asks how you feel about it, then asks how you got into tech, a memorable project from your school years, and goes into detail on your work experience. Apparently a lot of people get cut at this round, so it's worth actually reading the material carefully. I don't think I was cut at this round, though I'm not totally sure lol.
The back-to-back round was pretty interesting. For the pair programming part, the interviewer gave a very simple question, but one I hadn't seen on the forum before. Input is a CSV-format list of people and their emails; you need to write a gift-exchange system that randomly assigns each person in the list someone to give a gift to, with the constraint that no one can be assigned to themselves, and then print the result. Because the requirements were given very sparsely, I spent quite a while asking clarifying questions, and I felt like the interviewer was in a hurry for me to start writing code. Then when I used Cursor to generate the implementation, he kept asking whether we normally write code with AI like this, with a faint tone of contempt, and at that point I started to feel something was off — but by then I was already in it, so I just had to push through and finish. Still, when I talked he mostly did respond. In the end running the given test files worked fine, but he didn't ask any follow-up (there were still 15 minutes left), and instead got very impatient, said okay let's move to questions, and immediately turned off the screen recording (because Shopify recently started requiring interviews to be recorded).
Once the recording was off, everything felt off. The interviewer started looking around, seemed to be doing his own thing, and when I asked questions he didn't seem to want to answer them. Since Shopify's values page says everyone at the company is expected to use AI a lot, I wanted to hear his take, so I asked how he uses AI in his own work day to day. He said just to summarize docs, then said AI lowers the barrier, and then added, unprompted, that it also lowers the barrier for attackers (he's on the security team, so I guess that's a fair point) — but the whole vibe was just off, like he'd basically given up pretending, like, let's just wrap this up, I need to get back to work. Having to keep making awkward small talk while the other side was so obviously checked out was a genuinely unique feeling. He ended the interview 5 minutes early even though I tried to keep asking questions. This is also the hidden trap I mentioned earlier: this interview format depends a lot on which interviewer you get. If you run into someone who looks down on using AI to write code, there's nothing you can do about it. He never said it outright, but that flip in attitude partway through the interview really stuck with me.
The next round, shortlist, is just picking a project you've worked on for a deep dive — you can bring one or two diagrams, and the whole thing is basically conversational, with the interviewer asking probing follow-up questions. I didn't feel much one way or the other about this round, since I've already talked through this same project in interviews at several other companies, so the content itself shouldn't have been an issue, though again I'm not totally sure...
Two days later I got the rejection. I wasn't too surprised by the result, because that second pair programming round really did feel bad — the other side's negative energy was just overwhelming. That said, I don't take this kind of thing personally, and I quickly moved on to prep for the next company.
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