Shopify Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected the Morning After a Rover Pair-Programming Round

After a quick first call with the recruiter, they immediately scheduled a pair programming round plus an assessment.

The assessment was done online first, and included 40 IQ questions plus 120 behavioral questions.

All 40 questions were pretty simple. The recruiter's email said to find a quiet place and have paper and pen ready, but it turned out to just be simple stuff like spot-the-difference pictures, or "what's the price after a 20% discount on a $20 item" type questions — probably just testing basic IQ.

The behavioral section was also basic multiple choice, testing personality and how you handle a work environment, I guess.

The pair programming round was the rover problem that's already been mentioned repeatedly on this forum. I thought I did pretty well, but the next morning at 6am I got a rejection email. There were actually several follow-ups:

First, write the simplest version — one rover on a 2D map.
How would you improve the code if there are multiple rovers?
How would you improve the code if it's a 3D map?
[the code was all written by AI] What parts of the code could be improved?

I used Python plus Claude Code — since AI use was allowed, there was no version of this I couldn't solve. I'm not sure exactly why I got rejected. I can only say I didn't do everything perfectly — partway through I discussed some things with the interviewer, thinking communication was a good sign, but maybe what they actually wanted was for me to spot every edge case myself immediately, without needing to be prompted or to discuss it.