12 ms·

Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

118 points by psanford 3y ago

ss1996 3y ago
On a side note - has anyone applied to Canonical for a software job? Their first step is a written interview which requires as much, if not more, effort as a graduate college application.
- snapcaster 3y ago
  I decided not to because of the essay and not really wanting to fill it out
- ilayn 3y ago
  Immediately withdrew after seeing the high school grade questions.
  - firmnoodle 3y ago
    What kind of student were you in high school. Tell us in 5,000 words or more. Now take this personality test. Now do this other crazy thing.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    Hah I stopped there too. Who thought that was a good idea. Why do they have a job while I don't lol
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    What on earth. That’s definitely the sort of thing that would make me close the tab immediately. What are they trying to select for here? Are they hiring all 18 year olds, or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management. On the other hand, a lot of people that did well when I was in HS are the same who would diligently perform this sort of busywork no questions asked.
    - diddlybopshubop 3y ago
      > or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management. That's exactly what they expect. Anecdote: MS was part of the tail-end of my interview process and after I brought up that it was a bit much asking me for justification of decisions I made decades ago, he stated - I'm paraphrasing here - that he believes that someone's decisions at that stage of their life are consistent with how they will react and respond later on, which is why they ask the questions to begin with. I nope'd on out afterward. Only advice I can give is beware companies that cultivate a cult-of-personality around one or multiple execs. You will be required to drink the Kool-Aid and - when you invariably don't - that's that.
      - pseudalopex 3y ago
        MS was Mark Shuttleworth?
  - anaisbetts 3y ago
    A friend of mine, a person with a Master's degree and multiple years of extremely relevant work experience, dropped out of their process after multiple interviews because they would not continue without having her high school report card. Absolute clown town.
    - ecshafer 3y ago
      who even has access to their high school report card? I suppose maybe I could contact my high school? But I didn't keep a copy of my own grades for more than a week maybe even in school.
      - grogenaut 3y ago
        I was signing up for EMT classes and they required proof of English comp and algebra. My highschool takes 3 weeks to approve a records request. The community college would not accept my passing grades in differential equations or tech writing and I had to pass tests instead. Turns out the emt class doesn't even require those competencies but the comm college did.
    - DropInIn 3y ago
      So they are actively discriminating against those who have suffered a life shattering event in which personal documents were lost? (Eg house fire) Sounds rather evil....
    - klyrs 3y ago
      Report card??? This utterly stinks of ageism. I wonder if my school district even has that, approaching 30 years later...
    - jlokier 3y ago
      What a strange requirement. I can't imagine how I'd get that card. I'm guessing the record doesn't exist anywhere. Another commenter talked of how this is not ok for people who lose their paper records in a disaster. But is "high school report card" even the sort of record people have and keep? I have nothing like it in my personal records. I don't think I have anything at all from my school days.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    Wait I thought you mean they ask questions of a high-school difficulty level. You mean they wanted to see your actual high school grades?!?
    - ilayn 3y ago
      Yes and I was applying for VP of IoT.
  - gaza3g 3y ago
    I saw an entry for one of the positions there on LinkedIn. The application page wasn’t too bad at first glance since it doesn’t involve registration like Workday or Taleo. But as I began to scroll down, I saw those high school questions and that was enough for me to nope tf out of there.
- TheDesolate0 3y ago
  [dead]
- Twirrim 3y ago
  I've been chatting with someone as they go through the process just recently. It seems completely and utterly insane. Completely off-putting, and seemingly filled with nonsense that isn't providing actual value. There were so many bonkers things that I gave up trying to follow the particulars and just decided I'd never apply there.
- arachnid92 3y ago
  I did. I passed all rounds and was extended an offer, but the pay was way below what I expected and so I declined. They also don’t sponsor visas or relocation, which was a dealbreaker for me as well.
  - basisword 3y ago
    Is it usual to go through all rounds of an interview process without getting a salary range and asking if they sponsor visas and pay for relocation? These are round one questions for me and I assumed everyone else.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      There seems to be a whole school of HR / recruiting which tries to make it taboo or uncomfortable to ask those questions early on in the process. From what I'm reading here, I suspect a place like Canonical would end discussions early if you even asked. It sounds like they're looking for cheap talent.
    - arachnid92 3y ago
      Part of what I remember about the process is that you don't actually get to speak to anyone until quite late in the process. I think I only finally got to jump into a call with the hiring manager after passing both the written essay and the personality test. I also have to admit Canonical was the first company to get back to me during my latest job search, and I the time I had no other offers so I just kept moving forward with them. Their process is relatively lengthy, however, so when I reached the offer stage I was interviewing with other companies and even had some verbal offers, so declining wasn't too hard.
- lisasays 3y ago
  Yup, and a beauty that interview process is. They've even earned themselves a bit of fame for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/thsrcp/this_was_the_first_step_in_the_interview_process/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/thsrcp/this_was_the_... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Wow, that's hilarious. I guess they have a surplus of people... because that process looks more intense and picky than e.g. Google's, and Google is only able to do what it does because they pay very high and had great perks and a reputation. All this stuff about high school performance, and choice of university -- really? Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent. Because there's some serious arrogance there if they expect to put applicants through the ringer like this without a commensurate effort upfront. Any senior engineer is going to look at that and wonder why they should bother.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Ubuntu is cool and popular and that will drive a lot of applications. > Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent. Pay em less, make crazy demands, less chance of rebellion, no context to know if behaviors are crazy, etc. Same idea with the video games industry, really
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    That's absurd. I am not answering questions about high school or college, especially to that degree. I am a decade into my career at this point. I would turn this into a "creative writing" exercise.
- reactordev 3y ago
  I applied and got to the essay and turned back. Feels like college admissions all over again. I’m too old and too mature for that. Technical questions? Fine. Behavioral, sure. Firing squad of 5 engineers for 3 hours of co-programming, ouch but ok… 1,000 words on why I love Canonical? I have just 6 letters: Ubuntu. If you really want to shave the neck beard down to 5: Debian.
  - amelius 3y ago
    > 1,000 words on why I love Canonical ChatGPT to the rescue?
    - gabereiser 3y ago
      There’s only so many ways to say kubernetes. I don’t think LLM can write a pager on Canonical without sounding repetitive.
      - saghm 3y ago
        I don't think a lot of humans could either; I doubt I could!
    - jacobr1 3y ago
      [dead]
      - roarcher 3y ago
        486 words. If there's one thing I've noticed ChatGPT sucks at, it's writing things with a specific number of words.
  - bennettnate5 3y ago
    Debian is 6 letters as well, though I agree--Debian really brings most of what I love about Ubuntu.
    - gabereiser 3y ago
- manifoldgeo 3y ago
  I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages. One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and it seemed like a data breach waiting to happen. I expressed my concern to the HR team in charge of hiring, and said I wouldn't feel comfortable having that kind of deeply personal info shared. I further expressed surprise that an open-source software company was using this test at all, given the usual penchant for data privacy in the FLOSS community. They (cordially) said I could either take the test or drop out-- I chose the latter. For the other role, the interview process was going well, and I made it to final round. But, I ran when I saw their tech stack and tech debt. Lots of Jenkins and heavy reliance on Launchpad for almost everything. Launchpad might not technically be proprietary since it's GNU-licensed, but it's as good as proprietary if Canonical is one of the few companies using it commercially. And Jenkins is just Java / Groovy garbage all the way down. It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. Lastly, I read a lot of negative press about Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth while researching the company. In general, Canonical seems like a sketchy place to work.
  - lbhdc 3y ago
    > It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?
    - pixl97 3y ago
      Eh, because it sounds like the violation of labor laws in many places. My company gives me a stipend for use of my own phone every month.
- TheCondor 3y ago
  I don't know why, but I've sort of expected them to get bought up by MS or something like that for a while. Are they special because they can be ultra selective with who they bring in to the fold and have a loyal army of "true believers" working for them? Or something else? I get it, I watched a fabulous company get nearly ruined by a couple of bad hires. I'm a big believer in culture adds vs. culture fits and every time you bring someone in they're adding various traits to your culture, some are good and some are bad. We choose to be a little different, try to find the best fit, try to avoid wasting time, and then after 1 to 2 quarters ask some hard questions about if they're actually working our or not. I suspect that there is something in his message about it not being the company he was excited to work for 12 years ago.
- monocasa 3y ago
  Oxide was similar. Something like 12 pages written just to be ghosted.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    What was the Oxide process like? What did they have you write? What was the role? Thanks!
    - monocasa 3y ago
      > What was the Oxide process like? Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there. > What did they have you write? Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire > What was the role? Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there. Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        I'm surprised by the Psych Questionairre. Can you say more about it?
        monocasa 3y ago
        Questions like when have you been happiest in your career? Unhappiest? A bunch of stuff about their core values and examples of how you or previous organizations have reflected those, have not reflected those, when two came into tension, etc.
        3y ago
- marcinzm 3y ago
  From what I read they pay low rates but have a certain group of people really wanting to work for them. So an involved process seems good at very cheaply filtering out people unlikely to fall into the latter category. I also suspect going through such an involved process that includes praising the job would psychologically make it more likely that you'll take the low pay.
- wazoox 3y ago
  Not yet but I'm considering it. Though I may reconsider given the comments below :)
- elroyjetson 3y ago
  I applied a while back. Made it through months of tests, interviews, all the way to an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. I respect what he has built, but the interview only really focused on what I had done in high school. I graduated 36 years ago - I just don't see the relevance. I am glad he passed on me given all the news coming out since.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    As I recall, high school was a big focus of the essay questions when I applied, too. Like you, that was a lifetime ago, and my growth since then is much more important. If I was a lawyer, I might try to round up a few grayhairs that have had similar experiences for a class action suit.
- idlephysicist 3y ago
  I noped out right there. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. If they cannot make a decision after two interviews (three at the absolute most) then I probably won’t want to work there. Oh and they asked me if I would be willing to use my own laptop… Below is the list of interview/application stages: - Initial screening - Personal essay - Standardised aptitude and personality tests - Culture interview - General interviews - Recruitment screen - Technical assessment - Role-specific interviews - Hiring manager interview - Executive interview
  - synergy20 3y ago
    I stopped at the lengthy "personal essay", though I could let chatgpt to write one for me but even that it sucks.
  - glonq 3y ago
    [flagged]
- phone8675309 3y ago
  I did and they ghosted me.
- zshrdlu 3y ago
  It's horrible. Yet somehow they still manage to hire and have a thriving company ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Seems to work for them.
rvz 3y ago
[flagged]
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  He worked mostly on LXD[1]. This seems related to the recent move[2] of Canonical taking over the LXD project, discussed here[3]. [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/canonicals-loses-prominent-lxd-engineer https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/canonicals-loses-promine... [2]: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/ https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/ [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36592343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36592343
  - kramerger 3y ago
    According to TFA, [3] happened _because of_ him leaving: "Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project."
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  Former lead of the LXD project, the person TFA discusses (actually, author of TFA) ?
clvx 3y ago
Stephane is a great guy. I never met him but we had several discussions in the LXC mailing list before the LXD project became a thing. His knowledge helped me to enter to the linux container world and made a career of it.
- chomp 3y ago
  I've met Stéphane, he's great in person as well. I briefly considered applying to Canonical despite the stories of poor conditions, just to get the chance to work with him. I hope he does well.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
CLAs are a great reason not to contribute to corporate source. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know all the implications of what I'm signing, and I'm not gonna hire a lawyer just to send you a bug fix for your own product. Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs.
- niemeyer 3y ago
  > Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs The less simplistic view of the situation is that major maintainers (corporate or otherwise) pay the price of keeping the project up for the long run, under the defined license, in all senses including the legal one. So the CLA is the way to integrate contributions without strings that remain legally attached to the author of these contributions. So the CLA is, ironically, the way for these major maintainers to say "no strings attached or wait until we fix the bugs" back to you.
noaheverett 3y ago
Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works. So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys! Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :) [1] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org [2] https://ark.fm https://ark.fm
v3ss0n 3y ago
He is a great guy , i helped debugging ZFSMount problems with him - which causes LXD Container restarts to fail. It was just solved in previous release ( usual suspect , it is because of snap. ) . I would like to contribute on his new opensource projects.
- ornornor 3y ago
  Can I ask about the unusual punctuation? I’ve never seen a country where you put a space before the comma or where you space around parens like that. I’m only aware of the French adding a space before ! and ?
  - qsdf38100 3y ago
    You're right about ! and ? but as far as I know parenthesis spacing is the same in French and in English.
  - v3ss0n 3y ago
    Mainly beca auto formatters. It becomes a habit.
trufas 3y ago
LXD is great tech and a pleasure to work with. This blows. Hopefully an actually open alternative pops up. Canonical's general bad attitude towards FOSS is just appalling.
- dcgudeman 3y ago
  Can I ask what you use LXD for?
  - v3ss0n 3y ago
    - if you have a good hardware , you can easily build digital ocean / aws lightsail like environment with a single install in 5 mins of configuration - A VPS Like experience for both Containers and QEMU - Quick and easy multi-tenancy - Very easy to build development enviorment isloated from the system. - Isolation host for docker containers. - Automatic networking support with DHCP , OVN or MacVLAN if you have multiple physical IPs. - Home Made Cluster of containers. It is literally best way to host multiple docker containers. Isolated from each other. You wont need K8s in many case , infact if you don't have 10k+ users , do not need to worry about 99.999 uptime and redundancy - LXD is all you need. Or if you have only one Physical Machine and want to test K8s cluters , you can use LXD Containers for that instead of resource intensive VMs.
    - HumanOstrich 3y ago
      I'm curious as to why you put spaces before commas. It's incorrect and slightly obnoxious to read.
      - v3ss0n 3y ago
        Thanks, hard to format, I was on car while typing on phone.
      - v3ss0n 3y ago
        Another problem is use of auto formatters. When I am on phone I expect it to auto format text.
kundaru 3y ago
Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company. Sample report https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2022-pdf https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2...
- synergy20 3y ago
  is this the same laundry list I got twice from its HR? so lengthy that I gave up right way, it asks from high school courses all the way to your adulthood, the stupidest questionnaire I have ever seen for any jobs. By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.
  - kundaru 3y ago
    24 questions, each question describes a situation, you select which adjective describes you most and least. you end up picking random words because non fit.
- klyrs 3y ago
  When I interviewed with them, they were doing an intelligence test that involved quickly identifying rotated shapes. But later in the interview they acknowledged that they only hire people from the community who have already been contributing. The intelligence and personality tests are a misdirection: they want you to do an unpaid internship.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  > Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company. They also have a really weird focus on your education history when applying, to the point that when I was considering applying there, their application form made me realise I don’t want to work there.
MR4D 3y ago
“As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today” Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams. Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  Yeah, tbh I was a little shocked he put that out there. Speaking for myself, I know I wouldn't publicly burn a bridge like that for what seems to be no good reason, and I'd advise anyone leaving a job to try to do so on reasonable terms if possible. If Canonical is really that bad, people already know (and judging by the comments... yeah... not great).
  - frozenport 3y ago
    OSS companies have strong community interaction. He needs to explain why he tried to get tons of people to work on Canonical adjacent tech, but is now leaving. He'd be burning bridges with all his contacts if he didn't off them an explanation as to why Canonical tech is no longer something they should contribute to.
    - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
      I don't agree. He could simply say "After reflection and thinking about what I want to do next in my career, I've realized it's time to part ways with Canonical.". Frankly, that'd be about as detailed as what he posted, but without the parting shot (it's not like he elaborated on his management complaints). He owes no one a detailed explanation for his decision and it's perfectly normal to keep things like this close to the vest.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
kramerger 3y ago
This is a huge loss for Canonical and Linux container development.
pxc 3y ago
> Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project. That’s the news which we announced last week. So is this like retaliation? Or an effort to reduce Stephane's influence over LXD? Or was it just that he'd been the one who pushed for developing LXD in the open, and with him gone they figured 'why bother'?
- niemeyer 3y ago
  It was always pretty clear that something would have to get adjusted the day Stephane left the company, because it's a major project for Canonical and Stephane preferred to run some of the infrastructure himself. From his own comments in the forum: "In theory Ubuntu Discourse should be more reliable in that it’s run by Canonical IS who has a 24/7 team of people looking after services unlike this forum where I’m the one running the infrastructure and dealing with outages." Nothing is changing about how in the open LXD is developed.
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]

118 points by psanford 3y ago

ss1996 3y ago

On a side note - has anyone applied to Canonical for a software job? Their first step is a written interview which requires as much, if not more, effort as a graduate college application.

snapcaster 3y ago
I decided not to because of the essay and not really wanting to fill it out
ilayn 3y ago
Immediately withdrew after seeing the high school grade questions.
- firmnoodle 3y ago
  What kind of student were you in high school. Tell us in 5,000 words or more. Now take this personality test. Now do this other crazy thing.
- tayo42 3y ago
  Hah I stopped there too. Who thought that was a good idea. Why do they have a job while I don't lol
- the_only_law 3y ago
  What on earth. That’s definitely the sort of thing that would make me close the tab immediately. What are they trying to select for here? Are they hiring all 18 year olds, or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management. On the other hand, a lot of people that did well when I was in HS are the same who would diligently perform this sort of busywork no questions asked.
  - diddlybopshubop 3y ago
    > or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management. That's exactly what they expect. Anecdote: MS was part of the tail-end of my interview process and after I brought up that it was a bit much asking me for justification of decisions I made decades ago, he stated - I'm paraphrasing here - that he believes that someone's decisions at that stage of their life are consistent with how they will react and respond later on, which is why they ask the questions to begin with. I nope'd on out afterward. Only advice I can give is beware companies that cultivate a cult-of-personality around one or multiple execs. You will be required to drink the Kool-Aid and - when you invariably don't - that's that.
    - pseudalopex 3y ago
      MS was Mark Shuttleworth?
- anaisbetts 3y ago
  A friend of mine, a person with a Master's degree and multiple years of extremely relevant work experience, dropped out of their process after multiple interviews because they would not continue without having her high school report card. Absolute clown town.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    who even has access to their high school report card? I suppose maybe I could contact my high school? But I didn't keep a copy of my own grades for more than a week maybe even in school.
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      I was signing up for EMT classes and they required proof of English comp and algebra. My highschool takes 3 weeks to approve a records request. The community college would not accept my passing grades in differential equations or tech writing and I had to pass tests instead. Turns out the emt class doesn't even require those competencies but the comm college did.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    So they are actively discriminating against those who have suffered a life shattering event in which personal documents were lost? (Eg house fire) Sounds rather evil....
  - klyrs 3y ago
    Report card??? This utterly stinks of ageism. I wonder if my school district even has that, approaching 30 years later...
  - jlokier 3y ago
    What a strange requirement. I can't imagine how I'd get that card. I'm guessing the record doesn't exist anywhere. Another commenter talked of how this is not ok for people who lose their paper records in a disaster. But is "high school report card" even the sort of record people have and keep? I have nothing like it in my personal records. I don't think I have anything at all from my school days.
- amatecha 3y ago
  Wait I thought you mean they ask questions of a high-school difficulty level. You mean they wanted to see your actual high school grades?!?
  - ilayn 3y ago
    Yes and I was applying for VP of IoT.
- gaza3g 3y ago
  I saw an entry for one of the positions there on LinkedIn. The application page wasn’t too bad at first glance since it doesn’t involve registration like Workday or Taleo. But as I began to scroll down, I saw those high school questions and that was enough for me to nope tf out of there.
TheDesolate0 3y ago
[dead]
Twirrim 3y ago
I've been chatting with someone as they go through the process just recently. It seems completely and utterly insane. Completely off-putting, and seemingly filled with nonsense that isn't providing actual value. There were so many bonkers things that I gave up trying to follow the particulars and just decided I'd never apply there.
arachnid92 3y ago
I did. I passed all rounds and was extended an offer, but the pay was way below what I expected and so I declined. They also don’t sponsor visas or relocation, which was a dealbreaker for me as well.
- basisword 3y ago
  Is it usual to go through all rounds of an interview process without getting a salary range and asking if they sponsor visas and pay for relocation? These are round one questions for me and I assumed everyone else.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    There seems to be a whole school of HR / recruiting which tries to make it taboo or uncomfortable to ask those questions early on in the process. From what I'm reading here, I suspect a place like Canonical would end discussions early if you even asked. It sounds like they're looking for cheap talent.
  - arachnid92 3y ago
    Part of what I remember about the process is that you don't actually get to speak to anyone until quite late in the process. I think I only finally got to jump into a call with the hiring manager after passing both the written essay and the personality test. I also have to admit Canonical was the first company to get back to me during my latest job search, and I the time I had no other offers so I just kept moving forward with them. Their process is relatively lengthy, however, so when I reached the offer stage I was interviewing with other companies and even had some verbal offers, so declining wasn't too hard.
lisasays 3y ago
Yup, and a beauty that interview process is. They've even earned themselves a bit of fame for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/thsrcp/this_was_the_first_step_in_the_interview_process/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/thsrcp/this_was_the_... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Wow, that's hilarious. I guess they have a surplus of people... because that process looks more intense and picky than e.g. Google's, and Google is only able to do what it does because they pay very high and had great perks and a reputation. All this stuff about high school performance, and choice of university -- really? Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent. Because there's some serious arrogance there if they expect to put applicants through the ringer like this without a commensurate effort upfront. Any senior engineer is going to look at that and wonder why they should bother.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Ubuntu is cool and popular and that will drive a lot of applications. > Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent. Pay em less, make crazy demands, less chance of rebellion, no context to know if behaviors are crazy, etc. Same idea with the video games industry, really
- ecshafer 3y ago
  That's absurd. I am not answering questions about high school or college, especially to that degree. I am a decade into my career at this point. I would turn this into a "creative writing" exercise.
reactordev 3y ago
I applied and got to the essay and turned back. Feels like college admissions all over again. I’m too old and too mature for that. Technical questions? Fine. Behavioral, sure. Firing squad of 5 engineers for 3 hours of co-programming, ouch but ok… 1,000 words on why I love Canonical? I have just 6 letters: Ubuntu. If you really want to shave the neck beard down to 5: Debian.
- amelius 3y ago
  > 1,000 words on why I love Canonical ChatGPT to the rescue?
  - gabereiser 3y ago
    There’s only so many ways to say kubernetes. I don’t think LLM can write a pager on Canonical without sounding repetitive.
    - saghm 3y ago
      I don't think a lot of humans could either; I doubt I could!
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    [dead]
    - roarcher 3y ago
      486 words. If there's one thing I've noticed ChatGPT sucks at, it's writing things with a specific number of words.
- bennettnate5 3y ago
  Debian is 6 letters as well, though I agree--Debian really brings most of what I love about Ubuntu.
  - gabereiser 3y ago
manifoldgeo 3y ago
I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages. One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and it seemed like a data breach waiting to happen. I expressed my concern to the HR team in charge of hiring, and said I wouldn't feel comfortable having that kind of deeply personal info shared. I further expressed surprise that an open-source software company was using this test at all, given the usual penchant for data privacy in the FLOSS community. They (cordially) said I could either take the test or drop out-- I chose the latter. For the other role, the interview process was going well, and I made it to final round. But, I ran when I saw their tech stack and tech debt. Lots of Jenkins and heavy reliance on Launchpad for almost everything. Launchpad might not technically be proprietary since it's GNU-licensed, but it's as good as proprietary if Canonical is one of the few companies using it commercially. And Jenkins is just Java / Groovy garbage all the way down. It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. Lastly, I read a lot of negative press about Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth while researching the company. In general, Canonical seems like a sketchy place to work.
- lbhdc 3y ago
  > It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Eh, because it sounds like the violation of labor laws in many places. My company gives me a stipend for use of my own phone every month.
TheCondor 3y ago
I don't know why, but I've sort of expected them to get bought up by MS or something like that for a while. Are they special because they can be ultra selective with who they bring in to the fold and have a loyal army of "true believers" working for them? Or something else? I get it, I watched a fabulous company get nearly ruined by a couple of bad hires. I'm a big believer in culture adds vs. culture fits and every time you bring someone in they're adding various traits to your culture, some are good and some are bad. We choose to be a little different, try to find the best fit, try to avoid wasting time, and then after 1 to 2 quarters ask some hard questions about if they're actually working our or not. I suspect that there is something in his message about it not being the company he was excited to work for 12 years ago.
monocasa 3y ago
Oxide was similar. Something like 12 pages written just to be ghosted.
- tptacek 3y ago
  What was the Oxide process like? What did they have you write? What was the role? Thanks!
  - monocasa 3y ago
    > What was the Oxide process like? Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there. > What did they have you write? Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire > What was the role? Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there. Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      I'm surprised by the Psych Questionairre. Can you say more about it?
      - monocasa 3y ago
        Questions like when have you been happiest in your career? Unhappiest? A bunch of stuff about their core values and examples of how you or previous organizations have reflected those, have not reflected those, when two came into tension, etc.
        3y ago
marcinzm 3y ago
From what I read they pay low rates but have a certain group of people really wanting to work for them. So an involved process seems good at very cheaply filtering out people unlikely to fall into the latter category. I also suspect going through such an involved process that includes praising the job would psychologically make it more likely that you'll take the low pay.
wazoox 3y ago
Not yet but I'm considering it. Though I may reconsider given the comments below :)
elroyjetson 3y ago
I applied a while back. Made it through months of tests, interviews, all the way to an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. I respect what he has built, but the interview only really focused on what I had done in high school. I graduated 36 years ago - I just don't see the relevance. I am glad he passed on me given all the news coming out since.
- klyrs 3y ago
  As I recall, high school was a big focus of the essay questions when I applied, too. Like you, that was a lifetime ago, and my growth since then is much more important. If I was a lawyer, I might try to round up a few grayhairs that have had similar experiences for a class action suit.
idlephysicist 3y ago
I noped out right there. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. If they cannot make a decision after two interviews (three at the absolute most) then I probably won’t want to work there. Oh and they asked me if I would be willing to use my own laptop… Below is the list of interview/application stages: - Initial screening - Personal essay - Standardised aptitude and personality tests - Culture interview - General interviews - Recruitment screen - Technical assessment - Role-specific interviews - Hiring manager interview - Executive interview
- synergy20 3y ago
  I stopped at the lengthy "personal essay", though I could let chatgpt to write one for me but even that it sucks.
- glonq 3y ago
  [flagged]
phone8675309 3y ago
I did and they ghosted me.
zshrdlu 3y ago
It's horrible. Yet somehow they still manage to hire and have a thriving company ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Seems to work for them.

rvz 3y ago

[flagged]

magicalhippo 3y ago
He worked mostly on LXD[1]. This seems related to the recent move[2] of Canonical taking over the LXD project, discussed here[3]. [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/canonicals-loses-prominent-lxd-engineer https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/07/canonicals-loses-promine... [2]: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/ https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd/ [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36592343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36592343
- kramerger 3y ago
  According to TFA, [3] happened _because of_ him leaving: "Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project."
loloquwowndueo 3y ago
Former lead of the LXD project, the person TFA discusses (actually, author of TFA) ?

clvx 3y ago

Stephane is a great guy. I never met him but we had several discussions in the LXC mailing list before the LXD project became a thing. His knowledge helped me to enter to the linux container world and made a career of it.

chomp 3y ago
I've met Stéphane, he's great in person as well. I briefly considered applying to Canonical despite the stories of poor conditions, just to get the chance to work with him. I hope he does well.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

CLAs are a great reason not to contribute to corporate source. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know all the implications of what I'm signing, and I'm not gonna hire a lawyer just to send you a bug fix for your own product. Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs.

niemeyer 3y ago
> Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs The less simplistic view of the situation is that major maintainers (corporate or otherwise) pay the price of keeping the project up for the long run, under the defined license, in all senses including the legal one. So the CLA is the way to integrate contributions without strings that remain legally attached to the author of these contributions. So the CLA is, ironically, the way for these major maintainers to say "no strings attached or wait until we fix the bugs" back to you.

noaheverett 3y ago

Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works. So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys! Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :) [1] https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org [2] https://ark.fm https://ark.fm

v3ss0n 3y ago

He is a great guy , i helped debugging ZFSMount problems with him - which causes LXD Container restarts to fail. It was just solved in previous release ( usual suspect , it is because of snap. ) . I would like to contribute on his new opensource projects.

ornornor 3y ago
Can I ask about the unusual punctuation? I’ve never seen a country where you put a space before the comma or where you space around parens like that. I’m only aware of the French adding a space before ! and ?
- qsdf38100 3y ago
  You're right about ! and ? but as far as I know parenthesis spacing is the same in French and in English.
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  Mainly beca auto formatters. It becomes a habit.

trufas 3y ago

LXD is great tech and a pleasure to work with. This blows. Hopefully an actually open alternative pops up. Canonical's general bad attitude towards FOSS is just appalling.

dcgudeman 3y ago
Can I ask what you use LXD for?
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  - if you have a good hardware , you can easily build digital ocean / aws lightsail like environment with a single install in 5 mins of configuration - A VPS Like experience for both Containers and QEMU - Quick and easy multi-tenancy - Very easy to build development enviorment isloated from the system. - Isolation host for docker containers. - Automatic networking support with DHCP , OVN or MacVLAN if you have multiple physical IPs. - Home Made Cluster of containers. It is literally best way to host multiple docker containers. Isolated from each other. You wont need K8s in many case , infact if you don't have 10k+ users , do not need to worry about 99.999 uptime and redundancy - LXD is all you need. Or if you have only one Physical Machine and want to test K8s cluters , you can use LXD Containers for that instead of resource intensive VMs.
  - HumanOstrich 3y ago
    I'm curious as to why you put spaces before commas. It's incorrect and slightly obnoxious to read.
    - v3ss0n 3y ago
      Thanks, hard to format, I was on car while typing on phone.
    - v3ss0n 3y ago
      Another problem is use of auto formatters. When I am on phone I expect it to auto format text.

kundaru 3y ago

Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company. Sample report https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2022-pdf https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2...

synergy20 3y ago
is this the same laundry list I got twice from its HR? so lengthy that I gave up right way, it asks from high school courses all the way to your adulthood, the stupidest questionnaire I have ever seen for any jobs. By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.
- kundaru 3y ago
  24 questions, each question describes a situation, you select which adjective describes you most and least. you end up picking random words because non fit.
klyrs 3y ago
When I interviewed with them, they were doing an intelligence test that involved quickly identifying rotated shapes. But later in the interview they acknowledged that they only hire people from the community who have already been contributing. The intelligence and personality tests are a misdirection: they want you to do an unpaid internship.
mdekkers 3y ago
> Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company. They also have a really weird focus on your education history when applying, to the point that when I was considering applying there, their application form made me realise I don’t want to work there.

MR4D 3y ago

“As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today” Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams. Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?

BaseballPhysics 3y ago
Yeah, tbh I was a little shocked he put that out there. Speaking for myself, I know I wouldn't publicly burn a bridge like that for what seems to be no good reason, and I'd advise anyone leaving a job to try to do so on reasonable terms if possible. If Canonical is really that bad, people already know (and judging by the comments... yeah... not great).
- frozenport 3y ago
  OSS companies have strong community interaction. He needs to explain why he tried to get tons of people to work on Canonical adjacent tech, but is now leaving. He'd be burning bridges with all his contacts if he didn't off them an explanation as to why Canonical tech is no longer something they should contribute to.
  - BaseballPhysics 3y ago
    I don't agree. He could simply say "After reflection and thinking about what I want to do next in my career, I've realized it's time to part ways with Canonical.". Frankly, that'd be about as detailed as what he posted, but without the parting shot (it's not like he elaborated on his management complaints). He owes no one a detailed explanation for his decision and it's perfectly normal to keep things like this close to the vest.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

kramerger 3y ago

This is a huge loss for Canonical and Linux container development.

pxc 3y ago

> Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project. That’s the news which we announced last week. So is this like retaliation? Or an effort to reduce Stephane's influence over LXD? Or was it just that he'd been the one who pushed for developing LXD in the open, and with him gone they figured 'why bother'?

niemeyer 3y ago
It was always pretty clear that something would have to get adjusted the day Stephane left the company, because it's a major project for Canonical and Stephane preferred to run some of the infrastructure himself. From his own comments in the forum: "In theory Ubuntu Discourse should be more reliable in that it’s run by Canonical IS who has a 24/7 team of people looking after services unlike this forum where I’m the one running the infrastructure and dealing with outages." Nothing is changing about how in the open LXD is developed.

Nellyz 3y ago

[dead]