3 ms·

1. The questions on both high school and college should be meaningless for anyone 5+ years into their career. I am a different person than I was in high school.

1. The questions on both high school and college should be meaningless for anyone 5+ years into their career. I am a different person than I was in high school. 2. It is unclear from the prompt how much detail to provide - many of these questions could have multi-page responses. Is that preferred, or penalized? 3. There are far too many questions (37!). "Choose 3 of the above, and write 10-20 sentences on them" would be a much better prompt if your goal was to evaluate writing skills and communication ability. Good writing takes time. 4. The asymmetric time spent between candidate and company. So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions. The company is wasting time of candidates that would not be a good fit for the role. 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.

Beltalowda 5y ago
I think you can (and should) use your own judgement in how much detail you want to provide. It's the same with a normal interview question: on any question you have the choice to give a short concise answer or go in to great detail. For some of these questions I would provide a fairly short answer, on others a much more expansive one. > So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions I don't know who gets this assignment: maybe they're very selective about it, or they shotgun it to loads of people. The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned, but hard to be sure. Most intro calls I've had were 100% a complete waste of time for both of the participants by the way, where they just read what's on the website and job posting ("I can read thank you"), and you just repeat what's on your CV ("surely you can read too?"), after which you're typically given some technical assignment or a second (actually useful) interview. > 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias. English is the language in which Canonical communicates, and selecting for English proficiency makes sense, just as selecting for proficiency in $technology makes sense. Does this advantage native English speakers? Sure, but that can't really be helped I'm afraid. I've worked with non-native coworkers (as a non-native speaker myself, I should add) that were a pain to work with because half the time they wrote some documentation there were so many odd grammar mistakes that it was hard to read, and in some cases very unclear. So the bias is skill-based.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned Given that they asked questions about high school, and also questions about being an 'industry thought leader', I disagree.

Beltalowda 5y ago

I think you can (and should) use your own judgement in how much detail you want to provide. It's the same with a normal interview question: on any question you have the choice to give a short concise answer or go in to great detail. For some of these questions I would provide a fairly short answer, on others a much more expansive one. > So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions I don't know who gets this assignment: maybe they're very selective about it, or they shotgun it to loads of people. The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned, but hard to be sure. Most intro calls I've had were 100% a complete waste of time for both of the participants by the way, where they just read what's on the website and job posting ("I can read thank you"), and you just repeat what's on your CV ("surely you can read too?"), after which you're typically given some technical assignment or a second (actually useful) interview. > 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias. English is the language in which Canonical communicates, and selecting for English proficiency makes sense, just as selecting for proficiency in $technology makes sense. Does this advantage native English speakers? Sure, but that can't really be helped I'm afraid. I've worked with non-native coworkers (as a non-native speaker myself, I should add) that were a pain to work with because half the time they wrote some documentation there were so many odd grammar mistakes that it was hard to read, and in some cases very unclear. So the bias is skill-based.

michaelt 5y ago
> The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned Given that they asked questions about high school, and also questions about being an 'industry thought leader', I disagree.