I have answered this many times since announcing my departure. The reactions have ranged from shock to immediate understanding. Through this experience, I’ve discovered two things: this phenomenon is interesting to people (they ask about it a lot), and I’m not great at giving an explanation for my decisions verbally (prefer to write). I hope I can address the question more fully through this post.
Enter the Green Bag
I decided to start interviewing for Senior Frontend Engineer positions in the Summer of 2021. The reasons for which aren’t important here. During the process, I had interviews with a FANG-ish company, an early-stage startup, and Shopify all for Senior Frontend Engineer roles.
There were a few things that could have been done better during the Shopify interview process. The recruiters seemed frazzled and disorganized. Shopify scaled their engineering department pretty aggressively in 2021 and I wonder if the recruiting department was understaffed to meet this need. It wasn’t uncommon to ask a question and to wait two weeks for a response. It’s my understanding from reading about others’ experiences with the process that this phenomenon was not exceptional.
Most of the interview questions were frontend (React) focused – a surprising departure from the hardcore leetcode-focus of companies at this tier. The ~5 interviews were each conducted by different engineers. Mostly everyone was nice but I did have one extremely rude interviewer. One bad interviewer definitely isn’t indicative of the company at large, and certainly polite people can have a bad day, however, this can serve as a glimpse into how the company selects interviewers. I would later learn that this is on a volunteer basis. Engineers can become interviewers inside of their first six months at the company. This practice suggests that perhaps the company is scaling faster than resources safely allow. It is something that wouldn’t raise my eyebrow if happening at a smaller outfit, but Shopify is large enough that they should be able to responsibly partition resources for this need.
The interview process was uniquely positive in some ways. Shopify has a Life Story round. Due to developers’ insistence on rebranding everything, this is just a cutesy title for a work history interview. This is unique for a c
