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.