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The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
- the_only_law 4y agoIf an interviewer starts asking me about my general High School experience it’s over right there.
- version_five 4y agoDiscussed a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
- corrral 4y agoAn exchange from that thread: > > there is absolutely zero chance anyone on the other end is going to take the time to actually read and evaluate each of them > This is understandable to think, but is simply wrong -- I know because I'm a software engineer at Canonical who helps review these written submissions. They're sometimes read and reviewed by our CEO, though often he delegates that out to a pool of us reviewers. I always read mine thoroughly, whether they're 3 pages or 30. I don't have exact stats, but from where I sit maybe 80% of them are quality submissions. Shuttleworth is directly involved in, and approves of, this "write ten pages about your childhood, then take a battery of personality tests, and then maybe we'll proceed" shit? Is this a South African thing? I know some cultures have very different expectations about how job applications should work.
- markshuttle 4y agoThis is not a South African thing :) The written interview serves multiple purposes. First, it is a response to a massive flow of applications. We can more fully and fairly assess those who show they are willing to do some work to be part of our company. Second, it helps address bias. The written interview is not a resume, which a hiring manager would read through bias like "I recognise that university" and "I like that country". The written interview is anonymous work, which can be assessed more objectively. We get it assessed, twice, anonymously, in the common case. For my roles, more than 100 people at the company help me with this, and I'm grateful to them for the work they do. Third, it helps us focus our resources. We have very light resume screening requirements - be a plausible candidate from somewhere in the world - but we spend a LOT of time on the written interview, and interviews. So for those candidates who show they care, they have insights, and they are quick on the uptake, we can spend a lot more time on them. Fourth, it helps avoid repetition. We can share a written interview with interviewers later in the process, and they get a lot of context on the candidate very quickly. They don't always read it before meeting the candidate, but they can and they should.
- valdiorn 4y agoI'm sorry Mark, but you are also indirectly selecting for candidates that: * Have ample time to write multi-page essays about themselves. Quality candidates are in demand, with multiple offers or solicitations for interview all the time. * Feel comfortable sharing fairly intimate details about themselves and their lives - I personally would never, ever want to share some childhood trauma stories with my potential future colleagues, or complete strangers. * Are willing to put up with ridiculous, time-wasting tasks - maybe you want this, because these employees will be more easily managed and manipulated, but just understand you ARE selecting for it, whether you intend to or not. * Have a personality that you personally, or someone at your company, has decided is "an acceptable fit", thus missing out on a wide variety of potential candidates that might offer qualities you never even thought to test for. It all seems very misguided, and that's the reason why there have been numerous posts both here on Hacker News, Reddit and other forums on the internet, lambasting your process. It's broken, and most people outside your company seem to realise this, while you do not.
- morelisp 4y agoIf 80% are good submissions it’s a useless filter and should be dropped.
- ahahahahah 4y agoThat wouldn't necessarily be true even if 100% of submissions were good, as you've completely discounted the cases where no submission is made. You can argue about whether the whole thing has any point or use, but a low % bad on submissions isn't on its own a sign that such a filter isn't useful.
- morelisp 4y agoLooking at the funnel holistically, I doubt anyone who didn't write the essay would make it through the "standardized aptitude and personality tests". And even so - if the filter is submitted vs. didn't submit - there's no need to actually waste time reading them... (If that sounds absurd, it is and this funnel is broken as hell.)
- version_five 4y agoI'm of the same mind. Interviews are not like school assignments, there's not some reason why the average person should "pass" most questions. Every question or step should provide clear information that lets you decide who to hire. In practice it's not like this though, it's probably true that < 10% of what goes on in most interviews actually differentiates candidates. I think part of it is it's just hard to figure out which 10% is the useful part. Though certainly if 80% are passing an early step in the process, it should just be scrapped altogether.
- Strom 4y ago> If 80% are good submissions it’s a useless filter and should be dropped. How did you arrive at this conclusion? I can easily imagine that this process is so laborious that plenty of people don't even submit anything. Like the person who wrote about this on reddit. -- Now what reason would we have to think that the people who don't want to go through the process would also be 80% good? This may be a very valuable filter for Canonical!
- Havoc 4y agoSome employers approach this as more is better. I’ve had an employer do multiple days of on site psychometrics Doubt that improved the hiring but that’s how they rolled
- pengaru 4y agoWhat this tells me is Canonical gets far more applicants than they have positions. But the kinds of people this filter likely selects for doesn't seem like what I'd be interested in, just strange.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lmc 4y agoExactly. This does not seem like a cool place to work.
- tssva 4y agoThe Canonical founder was recently bemoaning the lack of available talent limiting the growth of the company. The issue really seems to be a ridiculous hiring process limiting the available talent pool and therefore limiting company growth.
- sosodev 4y agoDo you have a link to this? That's pretty funny if true
- tssva 4y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo-in-2023/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/canonical-now-hopes-to-ipo... "He noted that Canonical’s revenue last year was $175 million and that the company’s biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company’s ability to service it, in large part because there isn’t enough talent on the market for the company to hire."
- colejohnson66 4y agoI’ve seen quite a few suggest that the “labor shortage” of this past year isn’t actually a shortage, but just people believing they’re worth more. Especially in the tech community; people are just more selective about how much BS they put up with in hiring.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bhhaskin 4y agoSounds like their application process works. If someone is unwilling to fill out a basic questionnaire they are probably aren't a good candidate. The questions seem reasonable and they aren't asking for you to write a book for each one.
- pc86 4y ago25 questions, some of which would require a paragraph or more to adequately answer, is not "a basic questionnaire," is completely inappropriate to ask someone to do before even an initial phone screen, and is artisanal small batch bullshit of the highest (lowest?) quality. Whoever put this together should be fired, and the people defending it should be ashamed of themselves.
- nieksand 4y agoThe questionnaire looks pretty reasonable, but I'd be concerned about the sketchy looking "Psychometric assessments" that's next in the list. Also, at what point will the candidate be able to vet whether Canonical is a suitable match? Is that only after this questionnaire, psych test, and take-home assignment?
- throwanem 4y agoYeah, I'm sure their application process works great, for keeping their pipeline nice and empty of potentially worthwhile candidates. These questions are anything but "reasonable", either in their quantity or in the depth of demanded response. I'm sure that the team at Canonical feels this process works for them, and maybe it does, but I'd love to see what metrics they have to show that it does. (Or maybe they for some reason have to practice "hire slow, fire never"...)
- cogman10 4y agoHonestly looks like an attempt to get H1Bs. "We can't find any qualified candidates! Please give us cheap slave labor!"
- corrral 4y agoI ain't writing a fairly-long essay that includes a ton about what I did in high school(?!), for a chance at a job, unless the comp is insane.
- ntoskrnl 4y agoPsychometric assesssments, eh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics > such measurements are often misused by laymen, such as with personality tests used in employment procedures.
- cedilla 4y agoI think that quote says the opposite of what you seem to imply it does. It says that bullshit like Myers Briggs is misused by laymen. That implies that actual psychometric tests done by experts can be correctly used. The real headscratcher though is that either Canonical thinks psychometrics work, but still bother with all the other nonsense; or they don't think they work but still leave it in in such a long hiring process...
- markshuttle 4y agoPsychometrics work, but they are only one dimension. Interviews and competence assessments give us other perspectives on a candidate. For a single role we will have 500-3,000 applications, each step of the process helps select the best.
- JadeNB 4y ago> > such measurements are often misused by laymen, such as with personality tests used in employment procedures. > I think that quote says the opposite of what you seem to imply it does. It says that the use of personality tests in employment procedures is a misuse.
- cedilla 4y agoLaymen are mentioned for a reason. In any case, "personality tests" is not the same as psychometrics. Just like astrology being fraudulent doesn't imply astronomy being unscientific, Myers Briggs being bullshit says nothing about the validity of psychometrics. It's astonishing. If this line of reasoning was used against other fields of science, many people here would call it out immediately, but psychology is apparently always fair game. (NB: I don't believe psychometrics are very good indicators in the hiring process.)
- andrewstuart 4y agoThey're likely lamenting how hard it is to find great people.
- sosodev 4y agoRight? There's no way they're hiring good engineers with this BS. I ghosted them after they asked me to do the essay round because I was already nearing the offer stage with multiple companies. Reading the comments on this thread and others it seems I'm not alone in that decision.
- bin_bash 4y agoPersonally I'd prefer to fill this out than have someone try to interview me and scribble some notes down that I later get evaluated on. I'm a good writer but I'm not the best extemporaneous orator. Of course if it's this and then 14 hours of interviews (looking at you, Plaid), then it's a different story. EDIT: for these kind of numbers? no way: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Canonical/salaries/Software-Engineer/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Canonical/salaries/Software-E...
- cuddlybacon 4y ago> The bulls*t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give Can the title be updated with the other half of the sentence?
- AdmiralAsshat 4y agoI assume they ran out of space in the title. Maybe it should be renamed to something more succinct, e.g. "Canonical's bulls*t Hiring Process"
- markdown 4y agoOr "HN's bullshit title rules"
- metadat 4y agoOP- Thank you for linking to the less user-hostile "old" reddit portal.
- juice_bus 4y agoThe day old is fully removed or stops working is the day I stop using reddit entirely. I'm trying to get away from it more and more just to make the transition less painful.
- baal80spam 4y ago> The day old is fully removed or stops working is the day I stop using reddit entirely. I know it's not the same but there's always https://teddit.net https://teddit.net
- avgcorrection 4y agoI know, right? What even is New good for? I’ll never find out. :)
- aeturnum 4y agoThough I think they should offer salary ranges (it's a legal requirement several places and is also just good practice), asking people to fill out essay questions seems...totally fine? If you want to build an engineering culture which has writing as a core skill, this seems like a really good filter.
- klyrs 4y agoEssay questions are fine. Their psychometric assessment is a personality test and a fast-twitch "intelligence" test. Unless the job involves quickly rotating shapes in your head, I fail to see the point.
- sosodev 4y agoAsking me how I did in high school when I graduated over a decade ago is just completely pointless. It is in no way representative of who I am now.
- markshuttle 4y agoWho you are, and what you have done, are of course two very different things.
- ww520 4y agoHigh school is relevant for people don't do much after high school. It shows the level of expectation they have for their candidates.
- the_only_law 4y ago> High school is relevant for people don't do much after high school. Odd that Canonical would want such people.
- markshuttle 4y agoWe don't.
- 4y ago
- klyrs 4y agoI jumped through their hoops once, only to be told that they prefer to hire active contributors from the community. No unpaid internship, no job.
- markshuttle 4y agoEither that was a mistaken position by the hiring lead, or they were just shy to tell you that you were not the best candidate. Either way, my apologies.
- latchkey 4y agoTo be honest, that seems fair given that they are pretty community focused. You might view it as an unpaid internship, but my own contributions to open source and the community have always gotten me jobs. I view it as extracurricular activity... similar to what they pushed us to do in high school for getting into college.
- klyrs 4y agoSure. But I have a full-time job and a family. Combined with the essay's focus on the candidate's high school career, it's a pretty strong signal I'm too old to work there. I'm sure as hell not going to spend a year of my precious spare time on the gamble it'll get me a job where they expect me to continue working off-hours.
- t_sawyer 4y agoI posted this on the Reddit thread too but: Yeah I was through 4 or 5 “steps” before salary was discussed. And I ultimately think that’s why they didn’t move forward. Lesson learned. I wasted quite a bit of applying, doing an initial interview, a second interview with a teammate, doing weird aptitude tests that had me comparing images, a personality test, a coding test while a manager watched, and finally talking to an hr person about salary requirements.
- markshuttle 4y agoWe generally discuss salary after we've got through early-stage interviews. By then we have a sense of whether someone might be great at Canonical, and we're trying to figure out where they might fit best. If a candidate has higher salary expectations, then that narrows the list of roles we could consider them for. If you had interviews after the HR interview, then I guarantee you that comp was not the reason not to proceed.
- latchkey 4y agoI feel like it is hard enough to hire people, especially good devops, why turn people off this badly?
- markshuttle 4y agoLots of people won't do this work, it's true. But the ones who will, are much more likely to make phenomenal colleagues. They care, they are focused, they are diligent. Things work better when you are in a team with more of that. Try it someday.
- latchkey 4y agoTry what someday? Making people jump through silly hoops and run a business that gets ripped on for odd hiring practices? No thanks. I'll stick with my current hiring practices. Thanks for Ubuntu by the way. I've got well over 15k servers running it right now and wouldn't even consider anything else.
- markshuttle 4y agoYou're welcome :)
- valdiorn 4y agoHow would you know, if you reject everyone who doesn't fit your predetermined box? Have you ever actually tried a different strategy for hiring, or building a team? Also, for people standing outside the company looking in, things do not look happy and healthy at Canonical, which makes it even more likely you are being fooled by some of your own staff, or the figures they present to your, into thinking things are better than they are. I've failed to find a single positive review of working for Canonical, yet we have a smorgasbord of bad reviews all over the internet. You may want to evaluate that as "evidence" that something isn't right.
- robonerd 4y agoThese are such inane questions. > What was your first Linux distribution, and why did you start there? "Red Hat Linux, and I started there because I found a CD to install it in the cover of Red Hat Linux For Dummies at my local library." What does that say about my qualifications for the job? I can scarcely imagine. Clearly the questions are prompting for answers that will be evaluated in some vague bullshit way, so why not evaluate the questions themselves in the same manner? I see a lot of questions about what I was doing in highschool. I therefore conclude these questions were written up by an airhead do-nothing who's life peaked in highschool and they've been dwelling on the past ever since. Am I doing this right?
- corrral 4y agoConsidering another step is psychometric testing, and given the nature of these questions, I assume there's some woo-heavy tea-leaf-reading process to evaluate the submissions. "This person used 'I' too few times while writing about themselves, so they're clearly not confident enough" or whatever.
- robonerd 4y agoAnd if they think this is a good idea for hiring, they probably don't stop there. Imagine all your work emails being run through such evaluations every year during performance review.
- pessimizer 4y ago> psychometric testing I love these, they always fool employers that I'm a lot better than I actually am. For some strange reason, these tests always determine that the kind of people who write tests are ideal employees. "System builders."
- version_five 4y agoIn fairness (not that I think it's a good hiring process), your story about linux obviously shows that you were interested enough to get a linux book with CD from the library. That's more interesting (and in a real interview might lead to a more interesting follow on discussion) than someone who first encountered it in university because it was part of a course.
- Ekaros 4y agoI don't see too much issue with this type of questionnaire. Even though the education part smells lot like bullshit from my European perspective. Those questions can end up in interview too, so written answers and chance to properly articulate those isn't bad. Still, way too many steps and hoops otherwise in the process.
- manofmanysmiles 4y agoI’d love to take a questionnaire like this. It gives me then impression they are trying to get to know the people applying as people. I know bias sneaks in. I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately we are people, and will be working together as people. You can’t make everything unbiased and precise without treating people like replaceable robot cogs. Maybe some people like this or feel it is fair. I don’t.
- nix23 4y agoIt's a job NOT my family. >>Describe your familiarity with Linux performance debugging and tuning Don't use snap and add more cpu's and ram.
- corrral 4y agoIt's a lot of work, to still be very early in the hiring funnel and not to know what the comp is likely to be. Plus, I personally hate writing about myself, and writing something a bit boastful about myself is probably my single least-favorite thing to write. It feels really uncomfortable and gross. It's the kind of thing I hate enough that it might prompt me to go do something else I hate, like re-painting a room, to put off doing it. Résumés and cover letters are bad enough without "please write 500 words about your accomplishments in high school". But that's just me. The large time commitment for only a sliver of a chance at a job granting unspecified compensation, is why it's bullshit for everyone.
- _t4za 4y agoI noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is: - Initial screening (done) - Personal essay (this stage) - Standardized aptitude and personality tests - Meet and greet with an engineer - General interview(s) - Recruitment screen - Technical assessment - Role-specific interview(s) - Hiring manager interview - Senior leadership interview I highly doubt the initial screening is done by a human. So they want the essays and personality tests done before you speak to a human at the company, and they are probably not even on the team you're applying for. If you're unlucky, every human involved in the process will be on a different team until you get to the hiring manager interview, which is at the very end. Not only this but on Glassdoor I found dozens of people saying that they ghost you before the hiring manager interview so you could spend tens of hours interviewing and never speak to anyone on the team.
- markshuttle 4y agoTo be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two. I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.
- Q3Jhenkh 4y agoDo you think it's normal for the CEO of a 800+ employees company to be reviewing resumes? It sounds like you don't trust the people you hired to do that job, and decided to do the job yourself... Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this? And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.
- hshshjjj 4y agoThat’s why I show them middle finger and went and worked for MSFT. I am not going to talk about why I installed Arch linux 12 years ago, when I am applying to work on kernel.
- Beltalowda 4y ago2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
- 8bitsrule 4y agoThe trend in screening toward length and complexity, IMO, is not healthy. To me it suggests little confidence on the employer's part (either in HR and in working staff-members) -- and an attempt to remedy that squirminess by methods supposedly 'scientific'. A truly more 'scientific' approach might compare the 'results' of such a gauntlet with the predictions of a tea-leaf reading and an I Ching toss. I'd rather work for them free for a week, then let them decide, and have something to show for this goofy Wechslering.
- JustARandomGuy 4y agoI once interviewed at Northern Trust for a programmer role. Interview was 2 hours long divided into 4 - 30 minute segments each with different interviewers. None of the interviewers asked anything about tech. Absolutely nothing. All of the questions were in the style of “if you were a (blank), what type of (blank) would you be?”. And each interviewer asked the same questions in the same order working off the same interview sheet. By the third 30min interview I was concerned that I was stuck in some sort of time paradox. By the fourth 30min interview I just wanted to get out of there. They ended up offering me the position but I declined. Don’t know what happened but they felt very disorganized to me.
- hermitdev 4y agoI worked with Northern Trust tangentially for a few years (I left my role in early 2010s) in a quasi consulting role (it was actually a joint venture where we did the software, they ran it sort of thing). NT was hands down the most painfully bureaucratic company I've had the displeasure of working with. Something simple like a DNS change for a server was a 6-8 week turnaround. On top of that, they weren't exactly the best at following instructions, either, so it was often multiples of these multi month cycles to get even the smallest thing done. Very frustrating. You likely dodged a huge bullet by declining the offer.
- autarch 4y agoI'm surprised no one else has brought up Oxide's process, which has a similar writing-heavy stage as part of the application. See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgDQCRHx-GMSmPcxdEea4A/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgD... for what they ask for. It's not quite as much as Canonical, but it's still a _lot_ of writing to go through just to apply for a position. I considered applying there during my last job search but I just wasn't enthused about it enough to spend all that time writing before I even knew if they had any interest in me.
- lmc 4y agoIt's still a bunch of work but I think i like that one a lot more. It's more open ended and less 'worship us, btw what is your favourite distro?'.
- autarch 4y agoYeah, it's not as ridiculous, for sure. But I think it'd be better to allow people to apply first for an initial screening and then ask for this stuff in pieces over the course of the process. It's really not right to front load so much work into an application, IMO.
- justin_oaks 4y agoThere's merit to the idea of having a writing sample from a candidate. If you want to know that a candidate can communicate effectively, you'll want to both hear them talk and read their writing. That said, I'm not sure whether or not these interview processes were set up with that in mind. If they were, they should also consider that writing can take a long time to produce and so the writing sample should be adjusted to not be too long.
- ww520 4y agoIn return, I would ask them couple questions before going through the process. * What is the salary range? * Who was the person coming up with the interview questions? * What is that person's psychological profile? * What is that person's biggest achievement since high school? * Who are the people working in the team? * What are those people's psychological profile? * What're their education levels? * What're their work experience? * What're their biggest achievement since high school?
- markshuttle 4y ago* What is the salary range? That of course will vary based on role, experience and location. We have hired people from 50+ countries which is remarkable for a company of 800. We tend not to hire in the most expensive locations because we get fantastic talent who live in less polluted, congested and occasionally self-important environments. We do pay competitively; we have hired people out of FAANGs, and we constantly benchmark pay against our market data around the world. True remote work is worth an extra 20%, and quality of colleagues and focus is priceless. We also rigorously assess pay raises for gender equity. * Who was the person coming up with the interview questions? That would be me, mostly. I generally would have reviewed them, though occasionally some slip by. Some of the role-specific questions would be from the hiring lead on the role, who is usually a senior person in that part of the business who has been through an onboarding process run by our global head of HR and me, and who handles applications for multiple jobs. These hiring leads are less susceptible to bias, and more experienced, than first-level managers, and it frees the first-level managers to focus on their teams and get good at being managers. * What is that person's psychological profile? If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use. If you really mean psychological profile, I don't know. I've been called all sorts of things over the years, but not by professionals ;) * What is that person's biggest achievement since high school? That would depend on what one values. As a student I helped a small newspaper in Cape Town be one of the first in the world to be online. Started a company, Thawte, that helped lots of businesses outside the US get certificates for secure trading. Sold that well, and then trained to join a flight crew on Soyuz to the ISS. Ran several experiments in space, including the first stem cell experiments, which helped shape stem cell therapy research here on earth. Started a foundation which has funded tens of social change leaders working in health, digital, civil society and environmental areas. Started Ubuntu to democratise access to open source, made some mistakes but stuck with it to help Canonical survive and now thrive. Learned not to yell at people, learned to hire, hired hundreds of people. I also have helped start some botanical gardens because I like them, and am active in helping a small country chart a course for themselves that has made a measurable difference to the lives of that population. What, I wonder, do you value? * Who are the people working in the team? They are generally outstanding technically and socially, from all over the world, with a strong sense of shared mission to help open source be easier and cheaper to consume, personally and professionally, for companies and individuals. * What are those people's psychological profile? They vary greatly, it's useful to shape teams that complement one another. * What're their education levels? Generally but not exclusively they have undergraduate and graduate degrees. * What're their work experience? That varies widely, we hire both new graduates and people who could happily retire but like what we do and how we do it. * What're their biggest achievement since high school? If you can get a place in the company, you could ask them yourself.
- pictur 4y agoMost of the questions are very funny. It's like when someone comes to you and says, define yourself as a human being. I would like to meet the very smart engineering managers who prepared these questions.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoWhen an almost identical interview questionnaire was posted a few months ago, I was hoping it was some sort of anomaly, or that Canonical would learn from the feedback and alter it. To see something so similar (for a different role) two months later makes it seem far more likely that they have one of the worst hiring pipeline processes I have ever seen. I’m good at these sorts of written/verbal assessments, and even my eyes start to glaze over just reading the list of questions, let alone thinking about how to answer them. A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour and that’s before you even get into the actual interview process or hear a salary range. And as dumb as questions about high school and college are for professional job interviews (unless you are hiring straight from undergrad, I just don’t see how this is relevant. And even for college recruits, I have a lot of problems with this approach.), it would be one thing if I thought the recruiter or hiring manager was actually going to read each response from each candidate. But I cannot imagine they will. For a company that has openly expressed its struggle to hire, it’s stunning to see them double-down on such a terrible recruitment process. The people who you want for this job probably have better things to do than waste an hour or more answering an overly-long questionnaire before they even find out the salary range.
- notRobot 4y ago> A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour Maybe I'm an outlier, but it would take me way longer than that. At least a couple hours.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoHonestly, it would take me a few hours too. I just wanted to undercount the projected time, in the event there were “I could do this in X minutes” responses. But yes, it would take me a few hours to do this too.
- FabHK 4y agoBut then, how many job applications do you do? Maybe Canonical wants to filter out people that apply to hundreds of firms, and only consider those for whom Canonical is on the short list - and a list short enough that a few hours spent on those questions is not a big deal. (Side note: it's kind of a Proof of Work...)
- dekadetera 4y agoWould not recommend working at Canonical. The CTO is incompetent, and bullies people out of the company if they disagree with him. Suggesting that the hiring process might be discriminatory may get you told that you "must live on fairy island" from where you should "send a postcard" on a company-wide email chain.
- markshuttle 4y agoThat was a regrettable exchange, and contrition was expressed.
- moosenuts 4y agoIt’s always the same story Mark. Sorry not sorry and the cycle continues. Happens when you surround yourself with sycophants and can’t see it.
- markshuttle 4y agoPeople have different views of what matters, or how to do things. Whatever your views, there are going to be some people that agree with you, and some people that disagree. Broadly speaking, when you lead something, the people who will step up to lead alongside you will be people who mostly agree with the position you take. Obviously. Why would they align and invest precious years in something they totally disagree with? It would be dysfunctional to have a leadership team in any organisation made up of people who have hugely different opinions about everything at a fundamental level. Of course, that group has disagreements on stuff. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we disagree on, but we live with people we broadly agree with. So from the outside it may look like the leadership team of any company are highly aligned. If you have been at Canonical, you know that in the leadership team we have lots of hard debates and discussions, all the time, in search of the best. You also know we are all working to the same goal, which is to help people consume open source cheaply and safely, at scale, across all kinds of compute. So, here's how I interpret your comment. You saw a group of people that were broadly supportive of a position I hold, and which you disagree with. Sure, you disagree, and that's fine. Calling them sycophants is just finding a nasty word for people who happen to be aligned on something you disagree with.
- psychometric123 4y agoI applied a few weeks ago for a different (more junior) role, got hit with a very similar email: https://pastebin.com/bJsLijXV https://pastebin.com/bJsLijXV Decided it was not a place I wanted to work.
- phendrenad2 4y agoWhenever I see an unusually obnoxious hiring process, I assume they're hoping that only desperate H1-B's apply, so they can be as abusive as they want to their workforce.
- markshuttle 4y agoIn our case, we are remote first across 50+ countries, so not really in the business of trying to import colleagues to one country or another.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]