The best job refusal I ever had
How the Owl answered a newbie
Last year I was on Ruby Conf BR watching Arthur Neves talk and at the end he was asking people to apply for Shopify’s open positions because they had already hired every single Ruby developer from Ottawa. To me, it sounded like a charm, even knowing that I had no such experience to be hired.
Time has passed and this year, when I was browsing, I've found a job description that fit my needs and something that I know how works. It was the first time I feel a real chance to work for such a great company, in a country that I really like and doing what I like to do, build API's for developers.
I've read all job description, I've skipped the online test — which I'm not proud — and I fill the form. I was surprised because I've never seen a job form where you have to put a link to the funniest thing you saw on web last days and I felt strange to be treated as a human when applying for something, further when you're trying to get a job on a big company. After all, I've sent my profile.
A feel days later, the Owl answered me. In the beginning I was frustrated, I knew that I had experience to help the API team and I didn't get why I was not accepted. Reading the email, I realized that Shopify don't care if you are the most experienced guy, where you work and so on. They care about how you contribute to the community, in what open-source code you are working on and if you are helping software development made easier.
They've sent me a lot of information to improve not only my résumé but my contribution over the community. How they appreciate when you do something on your free time to help developers, how your opinion is important and so on. They also sent me the example of Gaurav Chande (http://gauravchande.com/the-story-of-how-i-got-hired).
I don’t really care if the answer is a kind of refusal email template. The entire point of all this post is that this answer inspired me to do good things. I'm working on my own SDK which will help people integrate with Moip Assinaturas APIs using Java. I've drafted some blog post that I am about to send and now I am more than excited to apply again for Shopify.
