4 ms·

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 80

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.

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.