6 ms·

I don't see a huge issue - the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. These absolutely exist, and in interviews, where we talking about first i

I don't see a huge issue - the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. These absolutely exist, and in interviews, where we talking about first impressions of many people, I would say they are endemic even given the best intentioned interviewer. Taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable.

tptacek 5y ago
This is a 35+ question essay exam that simultaneously asks whether candidates are industry thought leaders and "strong architects" and includes not one but four questions about high school achievements. It's among the top 5 worst hiring processes I've ever seen.
- johnfn 5y ago
  Not sure what the big deal about asking for high school achievements is. To me that seems to be done to be inclusive of people who didn't graduate college, which seems entirely reasonable to me.
  - simonw 5y ago
    "What sort of high school student were you? Outside of required work, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for, if we asked them?" Given how many people I know in the tech industry who had a horrible time at high school (nerds got bullied in the 80s and 90s, is that still true today?), this question carries a whole lot of baggage.
    - toyg 5y ago
      I reckon these questions started as "in college", then someone in meeting #8533 rightly said "but what about people who did not go to college?" and so it was turned into high-school. I suspect what this tells us about Canonical is that they have too many HR folks running riot.
      - heartofadog 5y ago
        Or too many folks still hung up about how they ranked and what they were able to "accomplish" in those years. A competent HR department exists, in fact, precisely for the purpose of preventing the adoption of inane practices like these.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        I strongly suspect HR has nothing to do with any of this, because some of these questions come close to the line of inappropriate and problematic.
    - twic 5y ago
      "Mostly they'd remember me getting wasted on super-strength cider, but people who knew me a bit better might also remember me playing Warhammer 40,000." I'd withdraw my application too.
  - nr2x 5y ago
    People in high school are children. I don’t expect an employer to ask me my favorite flavor of ice cream either, because I’m an adult. This is an absurd waste of time for any serious professional.
  - stormbrew 5y ago
    I don't have an engineering degree and let me tell you, if you asked me to answer these questions about my high school experience at this point in my now 23 year long career, I would not take you seriously. Never mind people who didn't graduate high school or got a GED, at which point you've just excluded a different class of people for an even more irrelevant-to-their-work set of questions.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I've seen the application, and there are questions about maths and grades. I know a lot of people with great grades and this doesn't translate into programming or innate understanding of CS in general. Similarly I've seen people with mediocre grades and great academic careers. Also, writing down all the questions will generate a sizeable document. That should be done orally, and even if it's done orally, there is some strong emphasis on the wrong points.
  - heartofadog 5y ago
    And exclusive of people who dropped out of (or barely made it through) high school -- which as a category includes some of the most responsible and accomplished people I know.
  - ozim 5y ago
    If they ask about "industry leadership experience" and "high school achievements" in the same form there is a lot wrong. This is not a form for a junior hire as I understand. Industry leadership experience should not be in the form aimed at junior staff and high school achievements should not be on the form for hiring "industry leaders". Unless you really are hiring whizz kids it is total waste of time to ask both questions on the same form. If someone has industry leadership experience you compare candidates based on that and if one of them had some high school achievements it might be a plus, but it would not have much weight on comparison. Because if two candidates would have industry leadership experience if one is better than the other it would show there.
  - wmf 5y ago
    Maybe it would be even more inclusive if they just asked about school, not high school or college specifically.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    It is absolutely not inclusive of people who didn't graduate college: those questions are followed with --- I swear I'm not making this up --- a question about which college you chose to attend and why you chose it. You can just go read it it see what a nightmare it is; it's not that long (unlike the response it demands).
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I applied for a Canonical job and was turned off by this. I was smart in high school but I wasn't an overachiever. In fact, I was into computers above and beyond what my high school was able to offer, and I was bored of the place as a result! But more importantly, that happened a lifetime ago; I'm an adult with 20 years of professional experience, focus on my high school is completely inappropriate and I don't think it's a stretch to call it ageist. But the hiring manager told me that they actually hire people from the community -- in other words, folks who have done a free internship. So in truth, I'm not sure why I even jumped through their hoops (including the personality and intelligence tests). What a lark.
- jackblemming 5y ago
  Notice the number of commentors defending it, even praising it. This is why no one really treats software engineers with respect or has sane hiring practices. They love to be subservient and jump through hoops for any sort of praise.
- LandR 5y ago
  How do you even know where you ranked in your classes in high school? I can't even remember what grades I got. Fuck, even university was long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot of academic details of what exact courses I did. What would my peers have said about me? In high school, no idea. I expect most are dead, in prison or full time alcoholics or drug addicts. I only keep in touch with two people from university too. I've had a whole professional life in twenty plus years since then, who gives a fuck what I did extra curricular twenty plus years ago!
mtrpcic 5y ago
The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end. Additionally, while I'm a huge advocate for removing biases in hiring and recruiting, this approach hoists all of the actual work for doing it onto the candidate, having them submit what is ostensibly an essay explaining why they deserve this job. If you want to remove biases in your hiring, it should be done internally via training and understanding, not by relying on anonymization. Without that training, the "human" piece of bias being understood, your anonymous reviewers are still going to implicitly bias against ESL candidates, and those biases are going to appear anyway at the in-person stage of the process. Funnily enough, half of the questions are biased towards a specific type of candidate, one who was passionate about maths, science, and technology by the time they were 16. Why are there so many questions about high school? The version of me in high school is so far removed from the adult version who would apply for this job that it might as well be an entirely different person.
- simonw 5y ago
  "The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end" ... which is then completely invalidated by this question: "Do you have a public platform were you communicate about the industry? Medium, Twitter, YouTube, a personal blog? Please provide links."
version_five 5y ago
Even if it eliminates in-person bias during the step in which it's used, (a) it's effectively still part of the prescreening, so the bias, if present, will still get introduced during the actual interview process and (b) it creates the potential for a whole new set of biases based on how the person writes and how they choose to interpret the questions (if you give short terse answers, is that seen as efficient or not taking it seriously, if you give long, detailed answers, do they even get read? What if someone doesn't like how you structure your thoughts, your writing style, diction, etc, especially when it's not clear whether these actually relate to the job. The more I think about it, the more confused I am about how they use this instrument internally to advance the hiring process. It it a writing test, are there right or wrong answers, are they really trying to get to know the candidate (in which case they've chosen an extremely inefficient way). It's their choice, but I wouldn't expect them to find highly qualified candidates lining up to do this for them.
kodah 5y ago
That's definitely not the purpose here. They start out by assuming you've finished college as a baseline. That is a bias.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  The job listing lists "Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical field." as a requirement.
  - kodah 5y ago
    Right, but likely not needed.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Some of these questions are reasonable (if asked in a more targeted way),but IMO there's some red flags. Asking grown adults about their high school classes seems like it would actually be a really effective way to introduce new biases without explicitly taking into account an applicant's race/national origin/socioeconomic status.
jmull 5y ago
Many of us have wasted a few years working on what could/should have been a good project but was hobbled by poor leadership, and aren’t eager to do more of that. To me, this lead doesn’t know how and/or care enough to identify and focus on key issues and definitely doesn’t mind wasting people’s time with a flood of busywork in lieu of paring this down to some thoughtful incisive questions. I would expect this to weed out a significant fraction of the good candidates.
objclxt 5y ago
> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. Except it doesn't eliminate bias at all! In fact, it has the potential to further increase bias. For example, the question "what university did you choose and why" assumes the candidate even had a choice (or went to university at all), and you can't consider a question about extra-curricular activities without also considering the candidate's situation (because candidates from under-privileged backgrounds are afforded fewer extra-curricular opportunities).
bedobi 5y ago
> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases how on earth does any of this do that > taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable wow, just wow

tptacek 5y ago

This is a 35+ question essay exam that simultaneously asks whether candidates are industry thought leaders and "strong architects" and includes not one but four questions about high school achievements. It's among the top 5 worst hiring processes I've ever seen.

johnfn 5y ago
Not sure what the big deal about asking for high school achievements is. To me that seems to be done to be inclusive of people who didn't graduate college, which seems entirely reasonable to me.
- simonw 5y ago
  "What sort of high school student were you? Outside of required work, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for, if we asked them?" Given how many people I know in the tech industry who had a horrible time at high school (nerds got bullied in the 80s and 90s, is that still true today?), this question carries a whole lot of baggage.
  - toyg 5y ago
    I reckon these questions started as "in college", then someone in meeting #8533 rightly said "but what about people who did not go to college?" and so it was turned into high-school. I suspect what this tells us about Canonical is that they have too many HR folks running riot.
    - heartofadog 5y ago
      Or too many folks still hung up about how they ranked and what they were able to "accomplish" in those years. A competent HR department exists, in fact, precisely for the purpose of preventing the adoption of inane practices like these.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      I strongly suspect HR has nothing to do with any of this, because some of these questions come close to the line of inappropriate and problematic.
  - twic 5y ago
    "Mostly they'd remember me getting wasted on super-strength cider, but people who knew me a bit better might also remember me playing Warhammer 40,000." I'd withdraw my application too.
- nr2x 5y ago
  People in high school are children. I don’t expect an employer to ask me my favorite flavor of ice cream either, because I’m an adult. This is an absurd waste of time for any serious professional.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  I don't have an engineering degree and let me tell you, if you asked me to answer these questions about my high school experience at this point in my now 23 year long career, I would not take you seriously. Never mind people who didn't graduate high school or got a GED, at which point you've just excluded a different class of people for an even more irrelevant-to-their-work set of questions.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  I've seen the application, and there are questions about maths and grades. I know a lot of people with great grades and this doesn't translate into programming or innate understanding of CS in general. Similarly I've seen people with mediocre grades and great academic careers. Also, writing down all the questions will generate a sizeable document. That should be done orally, and even if it's done orally, there is some strong emphasis on the wrong points.
- heartofadog 5y ago
  And exclusive of people who dropped out of (or barely made it through) high school -- which as a category includes some of the most responsible and accomplished people I know.
- ozim 5y ago
  If they ask about "industry leadership experience" and "high school achievements" in the same form there is a lot wrong. This is not a form for a junior hire as I understand. Industry leadership experience should not be in the form aimed at junior staff and high school achievements should not be on the form for hiring "industry leaders". Unless you really are hiring whizz kids it is total waste of time to ask both questions on the same form. If someone has industry leadership experience you compare candidates based on that and if one of them had some high school achievements it might be a plus, but it would not have much weight on comparison. Because if two candidates would have industry leadership experience if one is better than the other it would show there.
- wmf 5y ago
  Maybe it would be even more inclusive if they just asked about school, not high school or college specifically.
- tptacek 5y ago
  It is absolutely not inclusive of people who didn't graduate college: those questions are followed with --- I swear I'm not making this up --- a question about which college you chose to attend and why you chose it. You can just go read it it see what a nightmare it is; it's not that long (unlike the response it demands).
- klyrs 5y ago
  I applied for a Canonical job and was turned off by this. I was smart in high school but I wasn't an overachiever. In fact, I was into computers above and beyond what my high school was able to offer, and I was bored of the place as a result! But more importantly, that happened a lifetime ago; I'm an adult with 20 years of professional experience, focus on my high school is completely inappropriate and I don't think it's a stretch to call it ageist. But the hiring manager told me that they actually hire people from the community -- in other words, folks who have done a free internship. So in truth, I'm not sure why I even jumped through their hoops (including the personality and intelligence tests). What a lark.
jackblemming 5y ago
Notice the number of commentors defending it, even praising it. This is why no one really treats software engineers with respect or has sane hiring practices. They love to be subservient and jump through hoops for any sort of praise.
LandR 5y ago
How do you even know where you ranked in your classes in high school? I can't even remember what grades I got. Fuck, even university was long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot of academic details of what exact courses I did. What would my peers have said about me? In high school, no idea. I expect most are dead, in prison or full time alcoholics or drug addicts. I only keep in touch with two people from university too. I've had a whole professional life in twenty plus years since then, who gives a fuck what I did extra curricular twenty plus years ago!

mtrpcic 5y ago

The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end. Additionally, while I'm a huge advocate for removing biases in hiring and recruiting, this approach hoists all of the actual work for doing it onto the candidate, having them submit what is ostensibly an essay explaining why they deserve this job. If you want to remove biases in your hiring, it should be done internally via training and understanding, not by relying on anonymization. Without that training, the "human" piece of bias being understood, your anonymous reviewers are still going to implicitly bias against ESL candidates, and those biases are going to appear anyway at the in-person stage of the process. Funnily enough, half of the questions are biased towards a specific type of candidate, one who was passionate about maths, science, and technology by the time they were 16. Why are there so many questions about high school? The version of me in high school is so far removed from the adult version who would apply for this job that it might as well be an entirely different person.

simonw 5y ago
"The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end" ... which is then completely invalidated by this question: "Do you have a public platform were you communicate about the industry? Medium, Twitter, YouTube, a personal blog? Please provide links."

version_five 5y ago

Even if it eliminates in-person bias during the step in which it's used, (a) it's effectively still part of the prescreening, so the bias, if present, will still get introduced during the actual interview process and (b) it creates the potential for a whole new set of biases based on how the person writes and how they choose to interpret the questions (if you give short terse answers, is that seen as efficient or not taking it seriously, if you give long, detailed answers, do they even get read? What if someone doesn't like how you structure your thoughts, your writing style, diction, etc, especially when it's not clear whether these actually relate to the job. The more I think about it, the more confused I am about how they use this instrument internally to advance the hiring process. It it a writing test, are there right or wrong answers, are they really trying to get to know the candidate (in which case they've chosen an extremely inefficient way). It's their choice, but I wouldn't expect them to find highly qualified candidates lining up to do this for them.

kodah 5y ago

That's definitely not the purpose here. They start out by assuming you've finished college as a baseline. That is a bias.

charcircuit 5y ago
The job listing lists "Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical field." as a requirement.
- kodah 5y ago
  Right, but likely not needed.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

Some of these questions are reasonable (if asked in a more targeted way),but IMO there's some red flags. Asking grown adults about their high school classes seems like it would actually be a really effective way to introduce new biases without explicitly taking into account an applicant's race/national origin/socioeconomic status.

jmull 5y ago

Many of us have wasted a few years working on what could/should have been a good project but was hobbled by poor leadership, and aren’t eager to do more of that. To me, this lead doesn’t know how and/or care enough to identify and focus on key issues and definitely doesn’t mind wasting people’s time with a flood of busywork in lieu of paring this down to some thoughtful incisive questions. I would expect this to weed out a significant fraction of the good candidates.

objclxt 5y ago

> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. Except it doesn't eliminate bias at all! In fact, it has the potential to further increase bias. For example, the question "what university did you choose and why" assumes the candidate even had a choice (or went to university at all), and you can't consider a question about extra-curricular activities without also considering the candidate's situation (because candidates from under-privileged backgrounds are afforded fewer extra-curricular opportunities).

bedobi 5y ago

> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases how on earth does any of this do that > taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable wow, just wow