5 ms·

When 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 f

When 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 ago
  Honestly, 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 ago
    But 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...)
    - markshuttle 4y ago
      Yes, that's one significant benefit of the written interview. We had 110,000 applications to Canonical last year, which is a lot to process for a company of 800. We offer a very high-quality remote-first employment experience, with international travel twice a year for up to two weeks so teams can plan, bond and play. That's attractive to a lot of people. Candidates these days apply for between 5 and 75 roles in a batch, and I'm pretty focused on selecting for people who genuinely care about open source and the role we can play in making it a level playing field with high quality developer and production experiences. About 30% of the people who are moved to written interview submit them, so it does serve to separate out those who understand our mission and are excited about it, from those who just clicked on our link along with 50 others. The written interview also helps reduce culture and gender bias in our hiring. Given that we hire globally we know that the people reading the candidate resume may not have context on the resume norms and expectations in the culture and place that the candidate comes from. We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume.
      - gravypod 4y ago
        Food for thought: I care about open source and I'd say I'm the kind of engineer canonical would benefit from hiring (not to flatter myself too much) but at this point in my career I no longer look for work. People try to poach me and usually offer to skip interview requirements. Good engineers are never "looking" for work since the work finds them. Increasing the bar of application just means filtering out top candidates. I'm not even the best SWE in the world, just in a very special niche (which Ubuntu IoT serves poorly). Engineers who are better than me have it way easier than I do. It's exponentially easier to job hop at every skill percentile. > We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume. The SATs essay portion is known for giving horribly biased signals. My assumption is this selects for essay writers, not technical design excellence. There's a lot of great stuff I've seen come out of canonical (MaaS, etc) and a lot of horribly designed legacy tech that no one enjoys using (juju). It seems like getting someone in the pipeline that can sort out a clear modern infrastructure vision would really help canonical and the broader ecosystem at large but I think it won't be happening largely due to hiring practices.
manfre 4y ago
I applied for positions there late last year. I appreciated that they were upfront about the steps of their process. It made it a relatively quick decision to not continue.
hedora 4y ago
Meh. I switched away from Ubuntu years ago, but it still makes me sad to see they're this broken of a company. I guess it explains the plummeting quality of the technical decisions they make.
- nix23 4y ago
  Bring opensource to the people, but if we create something it has to be closed-source, and of questionable quality :)

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 ago
Honestly, 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 ago
  But 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...)
  - markshuttle 4y ago
    Yes, that's one significant benefit of the written interview. We had 110,000 applications to Canonical last year, which is a lot to process for a company of 800. We offer a very high-quality remote-first employment experience, with international travel twice a year for up to two weeks so teams can plan, bond and play. That's attractive to a lot of people. Candidates these days apply for between 5 and 75 roles in a batch, and I'm pretty focused on selecting for people who genuinely care about open source and the role we can play in making it a level playing field with high quality developer and production experiences. About 30% of the people who are moved to written interview submit them, so it does serve to separate out those who understand our mission and are excited about it, from those who just clicked on our link along with 50 others. The written interview also helps reduce culture and gender bias in our hiring. Given that we hire globally we know that the people reading the candidate resume may not have context on the resume norms and expectations in the culture and place that the candidate comes from. We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume.
    - gravypod 4y ago
      Food for thought: I care about open source and I'd say I'm the kind of engineer canonical would benefit from hiring (not to flatter myself too much) but at this point in my career I no longer look for work. People try to poach me and usually offer to skip interview requirements. Good engineers are never "looking" for work since the work finds them. Increasing the bar of application just means filtering out top candidates. I'm not even the best SWE in the world, just in a very special niche (which Ubuntu IoT serves poorly). Engineers who are better than me have it way easier than I do. It's exponentially easier to job hop at every skill percentile. > We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume. The SATs essay portion is known for giving horribly biased signals. My assumption is this selects for essay writers, not technical design excellence. There's a lot of great stuff I've seen come out of canonical (MaaS, etc) and a lot of horribly designed legacy tech that no one enjoys using (juju). It seems like getting someone in the pipeline that can sort out a clear modern infrastructure vision would really help canonical and the broader ecosystem at large but I think it won't be happening largely due to hiring practices.

manfre 4y ago

I applied for positions there late last year. I appreciated that they were upfront about the steps of their process. It made it a relatively quick decision to not continue.

hedora 4y ago

Meh. I switched away from Ubuntu years ago, but it still makes me sad to see they're this broken of a company. I guess it explains the plummeting quality of the technical decisions they make.

nix23 4y ago
Bring opensource to the people, but if we create something it has to be closed-source, and of questionable quality :)