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Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
- kramerger 3y agoHere is the funny part: If you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.
- throwanem 3y agoI can't imagine how it would be otherwise! The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia.
- lapcat 3y ago> The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia. Tenure-track hiring is nothing like that. Is it rigorous? Yes. Do they take dumb formalized tests? No. Rather, they typically present their research to the faculty.
- throwanem 3y agoWell, I didn't call it an informed parody - my one brief brush with academia having sent me fleeing back to industry, very much for keeps. Granted it's not always a bed of roses, but it is much more rewarding, not to mention much less often so petty and so vile.
- znpy 3y agounderstandable, as each interviewing systems effectively selects people good at passing that system. if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests. if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology. if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management and upper management are somewhat disconnected from the actual work that has to be performed.
- spacebanana7 3y agoRandomness in interviews is underrated because it offsets these over-selection effects. I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.
- rightbyte 3y agoI believe most recruiting processes are worse than chance so skip the weights. Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for scammers, done.
- ghaff 3y agoI honestly don't think it's that bad. But if one or two (for a sanity check) qualified people look at resumes and have a 30 minute conversation/technical weeding out question with a candidate, you're probably getting into diminishing returns past that. (Though you probably also lean heavily on referrals and "pedigree" given that you're not really trying to get some non-obvious signal in the interview process.)
- rightbyte 3y agoSure I agree. I was abit hyberbolic, but not much, if you account for all the bad processes.
- mistrial9 3y agoAs an American in California, watching the extreme lengths people went to, to find specialists fitting some very exacting requirements and literally bringing people from around the world and then rejecting them in large numbers, I was told that in China in the dot-com boom time they formed companies with very skilled people but basically formed the teams with whoever showed up. It was a completely different method, and the difference is the virtue signalling and status cues for the founders and their inner circle. In Silicon Valley, it was anti-status to NOT search the world for particular resume contents, and that got weird sometimes. Secondly the "google style" interrogation of new candidates with "you just got out of computer science graduate school so you learn to present like this" whiteboard sessions, evolved in the hands of callous or worse managers, into a sort of repeated hazing of programmers, by non-programmers or the like.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 3y agoYeah, they're hiring process is biased towards people that love talking about themselves over and over again.
- convolvatron 3y agoand oddly, even though I'm probably the best at going on and on about things that I find interesting, no one seems to want to want to hire me. I don't think this is the full picture.
- itronitron 3y agoI think the interview process is tricky for people that like to dig into technical details as a lot of companies just want to hear adulation from the candidate towards the company, under the guise of excitement for the company mission. or whatever.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoHR might be somewhat interested in that. Most managers won't give a rat's ass.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoOK, here's a possibly better picture from having hired many engineers over the years. I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.
- icedistilled 3y ago"Going on an on about things" one finds interesting is not the same as marketing oneself. I don't know if this is what you're referring to by the phrase 'going on and on' but the phrase makes me think of my coworker who talks in circles about any topic, providing many words but little info. And the circles usually incorporate personal anecdotes. He hasn't realized people tune out immediately.
- paxys 3y agoDoes that also imply that you are not particularly good at your work but just an expert at gaming the system? Or are you somehow special and everyone else is an idiot?
- swaggyBoatswain 3y agoI worked at a company that sounds similarly to this company culture about 3 years ago. I got laid off, moved onto a better company. But just yesterday I ran into someone who works at my old company. We chatted for a little bit until I realized how drained I was getting just from talking to him And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread: Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc) They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about I have people on both sides of these spectrums. On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity. But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards. It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way
- Lio 3y agoAn interview process like that should make you wonder what the ongoing employee appraisal process is like. From outside it looks very much like HR is out of control.
- bettercallsalad 3y agoWhile this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side. Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.
- eschneider 3y agoAt least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.
- bettercallsalad 3y agoI am not against behavioral interview if it’s part of the loop, but these attempts to force candid to answer some standardized questions make no sense. Especially you can easily come up with many of the answers using GPT now a days anyways. I for one don’t even have access to these when I interview candidates and I am pretty sure HR doesn’t even look at them or even have a quantitative way to judge them or verify their authenticity.
- eschneider 3y agoIn this case, the company seemed to be very hung up on irrelevant bullsh*t. Huge red flag.
- The_Colonel 3y agoIf I did that, I wouldn't land the job with ~2 the compensation of what I'd have otherwise and the best job overall. It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.
- rwmj 3y agoPart of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible. This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.
- bradley13 3y agoInsane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way. I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually counterproductive, because talented people are not going to put up with it.
- dcminter 3y agoOn paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience. I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such. Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not. But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time. Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then. Last time this came up here, Shuttleworth popped up to tell us it was just what they needed so there you go. No need to apply. :shrug:
- eschneider 3y agoYeah...I applied when I was job hunting at the beginning of the year and I hard stopped on the high school question. I've got over 30 years of relevant experience and if that's what they're asking, I'm obviously not the sort of person they're looking for. Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.
- mojo74 3y agoI just trod water through my high school (read secondary school in the UK) years. Like you I am not the boy I used to be so hiring 'him' would not be a good fit.
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- WWLink 3y agoHot damn this canonical dude is more full of shit than I ever possibly could have imagined lmao. I love Linux, I really do. I enjoy writing software for ig as a career choice. This has nothing to do with my love for Linux lol. But wow.
- hacliff 3y agoMatches my experience, for the first step I was given a lengthy questionare and told it would be about 12 pages of answers. Nope'd out immediately. It's a shame because the product and my Hiring Manager seemed great, I'm curious what candidates make it through.
- comice 3y ago> I'm curious what candidates make it through. compliant ones I would expect, which seems to be the aim of the process.
- tokai 3y agoJust seem like Canonical in a nut shell. Burning energy on nonsense going nowhere.
- nirui 3y agoActually, nonsense interview is another red flag to watch out for when applying a job. Some companies uses long and pointless interviews to discover and collect legally sound reasons to reject candidates without revealing the true reason of rejections (could be based on race, gender, age, disability, religion etc). But, you probably don't want to work for a bad company anyway, so I guess just be happy for the fact that now you don't have to.
- ChicagoBoy11 3y agoI'd argue this is essentially evidence that their hiring process worked in this case. I mean, a company that so vehemently believes that your HS story is so fundamental to how you'll perform as an employee manage to successfully put in enough of that in the hiring pipeline to prevent you (sane person) from going through with it and therefore not wasting either of your times!
- weinzierl 3y agoThis is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here, where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshuttleworth.com/work.html http://markshuttleworth.com/work.html Around 2004 it said: "Brilliant. Tell me about things you've done in which you have truly excelled. I don't mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you've setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven't done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you'll fit in just fine" The very last "here" was a link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/ http://www.whitehouse.gov/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.markshuttleworth.com/work.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.marksh... https://archive.is/o2rJa https://archive.is/o2rJa
- hluska 3y agoIt’s time for me to leave Ubuntu behind for good. I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole.
- devwastaken 3y ago[flagged]
- kennyChinzy 3y ago[dead]
- appplication 3y agoI feel like in 2004 not everyone who was an asshole on the internet was aware they were assholes, and there wasn’t the same culture of enthusiastically informing them. Not to excuse the behavior, but different times were different times.
- est23 3y agoIs not an hiring process, is squid game
- throwaway85858 3y agoThis is basically my experience too. For me it was demeaning, exhausting and a complete waste of time.
- ylyn 3y agoI interviewed at Canonical, doing all of the written stuff, and got an offer. But in the end I turned them down because their compensation wasn't competitive.
- arachnid92 3y agoSame here. And they’re a BYOD shop too, which I found strange.
- LandR 3y agoBYOD ?
- joncrane 3y agoThey don't provide a laptop, AND your work computer must run Ubuntu.
- not_the_fda 3y agoBring Your Own Device i.e. laptop / dev machine
- Aeolun 3y agoThey’re saving money on not buying equipment for their employees.
- jakeinspace 3y agoI’m just annoyed at how much they spam LinkedIn by posting the same remote job listing in 500 different cities.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoJob searches take your location into account and sometimes won’t show remote-only positions if you do something like scoping your search to your area. Posting remote listings in specific locations allows those to show up in search results more frequently. And it works - it’s kind of gaming job search boards but it did result in Canonical getting an absolute deluge of applications for each position. Canonical also re posts every month or so to also benefit from higher placement for more recent listings.
- jakeinspace 3y agoI understand that, but if I’m looking for a remote job in particular, I’ll just search for the country I’m working in. If I look for remote firmware/kernel/driver jobs in Canada, I’ll see the same Canonical posting in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, Halifax, Calgary… I end up just filtering them out.
- rwmj 3y agoDid anyone think it's a bit weird that they don't give you a laptop? Are you supposed to buy your own hardware or something?
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoYou are supposed to bring your device. If you don’t have one you can get a loan to buy one and pay it off by paycheque deductions. Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years. Source: former Canonical employee.
- smetj 3y agoSpeechless tbh ...
- joncrane 3y agoDo they at least pay really really well so the laptop is just a tiny percentage of your annual compensation?
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoThe cost of a well-specced business laptop would be between 1% and 5% total pre-tax yearly compensation for engineers (variable depending on skills, location, seniority and the fact that I need to fudge the data a bit to avoid disclosing actual salaries which I obviously cannot do ;) ). It doesn’t feel tiny-tiny to me.
- ghaff 3y agoIt is a bit weird although honestly not really a big deal. I have a work laptop but I use my own computers 99% of the time.
- jlokier 3y ago
- 3littlefish 3y agoSecond this experience absolutely! A couple of years ago I had a similar experience. I was so annoyed having burnt a ton of time going through a number of rounds, submitted an essay, and then giving an extensive presentation only to get a cold, bland, automated rejection email. Terrible interview experience and enough for me to put peers off applying to the company if they asked me. Ironically they are still advertising to fill that same job two years later.
- caboteria 3y agoTheir focus on high-school looks like a thinly-veiled strategy for weeding out anyone who is old enough that they no longer remember the details of their high school education.
- smetj 3y agoOoh yes how clever
- TrackerFF 3y agoWhere I'm from the only companies that give a shit about HS grades are the elite finance and consulting firms - pretty unheard of otherwise. Why they care? I've heard a couple of explanations: - Like with the standardized test (cough IQ test cough) obsession, they kind of subscribe to the racehorse theory, namely that some individuals are just born smart and have excelled all their lives. They don't just want hard working individuals, they want hard working and smart individuals. - It shows a constant progression. They want people that have excelled all their lives, and not those with random spurs of excellence And of course, just another weeding function.
- diegoveralli 3y agoI don't know whether it's a deliberate strategy but this definitely happened to me during my interview with Canonical this year. From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions. But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.
- pydry 3y agoI ran into somebody recruiting for Canonical who mentioned, regretfully, that it would matter. It's sad because they were otherwise very convincing. It was too big of a red flag though.
- 3y ago
- bluGill 3y agoI hate these things. This is at least from an outsider perspective, but when what I really want to know is WHY they do each step and what makes them work better. Most companies have no reason to believe their process is better than taking a random resume (which selects for people who want to work for you enough to send a resume) and making an offer. Sure they have elaborate processes around interviews, tests, and the like. However are they helpful or just processes for the sake of process. I know there is research on how to interview people. However I don't know where to find it, and most processes seem to have been created without looking at it.
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoThis is not the worst process I’ve seen, but likely the funniest stats bleeder scam I've seen in years. “How would you change the company?” Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side. Also, Canonical is still not Evil enough for the tech industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGLveebwjo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGLveebwjo
- itronitron 3y agoCan you elaborate on what a "stats bleeder scam" is?
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoThe antithesis of moral intellectualism, and an amalgamation of several cognitive biases. Perhaps you wanted a more pleasing answer... but Deconstructionism is rarely productive. Best regards =)
- _ea1k 3y agoJust wait until AI bots are the things doing the interview process to insure the company doesn't get sued for unfairness.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoAnd AI bots doing the application process for you
- Balgair 3y agoWhat a winnowing process! The only people that make it through really aren't the people you'd want to make it through. No one with a lick of other opportunities would take a job there. If hiring is a market-like process, then these guys have priced themselves right out of it.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> Day 81: Automated rejection says it all really. just about done with this silly industry.
- artyom 3y agoThis is just a creative take on the utterly broken interview process from software companies, that we all are probably too familiar with.
- DanieleProcida 3y agohttps://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews
- sdfghswe 3y ago> How do you remain calm in a high-stress, fast-paced environment? Canonical, isn't the Ubuntu company? I don't know much about it, but I can't imagine it's high-stress and fast-paced.
- forgetfulness 3y agoI picture them running in circles
- unpopular42 3y ago> exactly how unbiased is it when every person I interviewed with was exactly my demographic? (White, female, American/western European) Please could someone explain how is this, claiming that someone's race and ethnicity defines their bias, not in itself racist?
- Tade0 3y agoI have a follow-up question: what kind of race is "western European"? Is skin tone not enough? I don't have a gene test on hand to confirm, but I'm pretty sure my heritage is all over the place.
- Eisenstein 3y agoShe said demographics -- the person who you are responding to said 'race'.
- unpopular42 3y agoYou don't know that. "White" can mean either, but it didn't matter because both interpretations are equally bad. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people Replace race with skin color in the GP comment, the point still stands
- Eisenstein 3y agoYou are bringing up race specifically and you are making the value judgements and then attributing it to the author. Everything you have been doing has been to prove a (bad) point in bad faith in order to fuel some culture war issue.
- unpopular42 3y agoNow you are just lying and calling names. I'll try one more time before I give up. The original author wrote the word "white", not me. There are many ways to segment a population - that's demographics. Having "white" as the segmentation criteria and claiming that it affects whether the demographic is biased for an interview sounds very racist to me. Your opinion that this argument is in bad faith or in order to fuel something is not supported by any facts and is therefore irrelevant.
- webkike 3y agoI applied for a job there, got to the personality test thing, said to myself "this is really stupid" and stopped replying to their emails. Just not worth it
- coffeebeqn 3y agoSame. Would’ve loved to work for a Linux company but the level of bureaucratic absurdity was way too high
- rcarmo 3y agoA few years back, I actually made it all the way through to Mark, who interviewed me while having dinner (on his end). My essay focused on Ubuntu on ARM and how critical it would be for hyperscalers, which at the time wasn't really a thing at all (that should date me). I ended up declining their offer mostly because nowhere during any step of the process but the very end they pointed out they could only contract, not take me on as a full-time employee. I don't regret giving it a go, but it was one of the weirdest hiring processes I've ever gone through (including FAANG, MBB and think tanks).
- FlyingSnake 3y agoPardon my ignorance, but what’s MBB?
- mertd 3y agoApparently it's the big three of management consulting.
- rendall 3y agoI suppose it should not surprise me as much as it does that there are people out there who are in the union set of people who have interviewed at FAANG (i.e. all of them or enough not to refer to them individually) and also interviewed at MBB (ditto). No Jane Street, though? No PEGS? No GSIBs?
- alephnerd 3y agoFor those of us who started in the last 10 years, Jane Street falls within that union set as well. MBBs, FAANG, and top HFTs tend to recruit at the same handful of top public and private schools. The GSIBs (by which I assume you mean large banks) pay shit outside of their IB practices. That said, if you were good enough to get a FAANG APM interview and an MBB Analyst interview at a program like Cal or Mich or Harvard you'd probably get an IB Associate interview at UBS or JPMC as well.
- 3y ago
- hashtag-til 3y ago(A bit off-topic, but to give another example of where convoluted hiring processes get you to...) Last year, I did 8 interviews (including 4 technical assessments and quizzes) to get an offer from AMD (in Germany) as a software engineer. For completeness, they reached out to me. I wasn't really looking at the time. When I got the offer, salary+bonus was less than what I had at the time (a lot less now) living in a similar cost place, so I rejected the offer, obviously. In the final call, the HR person implied more than once that I was a time-waster for going through the whole process just to get the offer and then say "no" to it, that I wasn't "committed" as I said...
- fluoridation 3y agoDid you not try to negotiate up?
- hashtag-til 3y agoSure, they bumped it a bit to try convincing me, but still less. I guess they wanted me some proof I wasn't moving _because_ of the money, or some other BS companies try to tell themselves...
- bluGill 3y agoIf I didn't want to work for money there are plenty of charitable causes I believe in that need help, why would I work for you?
- michaelteter 3y agoThis is exactly why companies need to list the salary range for a position.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThis is exactly why most do not, unless they legally have to.
- 3y ago
- renewiltord 3y agoMaking harder interviewing processes is frequently an attempt to select exactly the kind of people you want. In the end, you only get those who are desperate enough to do the thing. I like to keep things short and punchy.
- idontwantthis 3y agoI got a couple of interviews to be a traveling support and I was super excited. I was upfront about having little experience and I passed the first interview, and the interviewer said they were looking for inexperienced juniors. Second interviewer asked me all kinds of technical questions I had no idea how to answer and was confused why I was so inexperienced. Never heard from them again. Really unpleasant.
- throw16180339 3y agoThis process isn't accidentally awful; it's deliberately targeted to exclude anyone who isn't a young true believer.
- Tade0 3y agoI got a whiff from the gaming industry off of it, so I second that sentiment.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoGaming engineering interviews are generally much better than general tech? Shorter, more applicable to day-to-day work, etc. My main problem is the uncompetitive pay
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- joeuser0123 3y agoThis was me this week: Thank you for applying for a position as a Cloud Field Engineer - Americas (Remote) at Canonical! I am the hiring lead for it and will steer you through the process. I have reviewed your resume and moved you forward. The hiring process has several stages: initial resume screening (done) written submission (this stage) standardised aptitude and personality tests Face-to-face Meet & Greet interview Online 15min Linux/Networking quiz Online 2hr Python Coding test Live 1hr Linux Troubleshooting interview Talent Interview (HR team) Hiring Manager interview, Hiring Lead interview If we think you are a fantastic fit for Canonical then we will find you the best role for you at the company. We are committed to run a smooth and fast hiring process, ideally reaching an offer in 2 weeks time. The current stage is your written submission. Consider this to be a written interview, and a prepared statement for interviewers to read in advance of your meeting to cover your interests, priorities, experience and ambition. Please answer the following in a PDF document: Education How would you describe your high school interests in mathematics, physical sciences and computing? In these subjects, which were your strengths and what were your most enjoyable activities? How did you rank, competitively, in these subjects? What did you do after high school? Why did you choose that? Which course and university did you choose, and why? Which university courses did you enjoy the most, and which ones did you perform best at? How did you rank in your degree? Outside of degree requirements, what were your interests and where did you spend most of your time? During your time at high school and university, what did you achieve that you consider to be exceptional? Experience What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which development environments, languages, databases? How extensive is your experience of Python software engineering? How do you test Python applications? Outline the applications that you have led in Python, and your takeaways from that experience. How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of Linux is, from the kernel up? How have you gained this knowledge? How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of networking is? How have you gained this knowledge? Describe your experience with private and/or public cloud technologies (Openstack, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). What is the next technology you want to learn about, and why ? How do you plan on learning it ? Do you have experience with customer-facing roles ? Outline your software documentation experience. Context Outline your thoughts on the mission of Canonical. What is it about the company's purpose and goals which is most appealing to you? What is it that you think is risky or unappealing? Who do you see as competitors to Canonical, and in what ways do you think Canonical needs to change in order to be a more effective competitor to them? What do you see as the current dynamics in the cloud software industry that are favourable to Canonical? Which are unfavourable? Why do you most want to work for Canonical? Which sorts of Canonical products and services would you most like to work on? Please take the opportunity to re-read your submission and make sure you have put your best case of exceptional ability forward. Please make your submission as a PDF at the URL given below. I have set the system to hide your name and details from me, please do not put identifying details in the submission itself. Thank you! I look forward to reading your answers, and perhaps meeting later in the process. Camille -- My reply: I got a rejection letter from greenhouse within about an hour. This is ridiculous. Why do I care who your competitors are? Hint: it’s not my job to care. What dynamics in the cloud computing industry are favorable to Canonical and unfavorable? Don’t you pay your marketing department for these answers? I was laid off, I am looking for a fulfilling career. I need a job and I bring to the table a skillset spanning my entire adult life. One that fits the criteria of what you posted about. I want to pay my bills and enjoy what I do for work. A simple transaction. I bring to the table something to help push the company’s agenda forward that you need (and are posting about for a job). You, in turn, help me keep my family fed and my bills paid. My past is my past outside of the relevant work experience and credentials necessary to do the job you are posting about. The rest is simply put, none of your business. I’m sure my 11th grade chemistry teacher would agree. I don’t need to write a college admission application essay on why I want to work here. High school was 25 years ago and irrelevant. Do you actually think you’re going to pick me on whether or not I participated in the science bowl or what my score was in an AP Biology class? I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, supporting Software as a service on linux-based servers for almost that long. I’ve worked at ISPs hosting e-mail and web servers, to supporting a geographically low-latent software application supporting Fortune 500 companies so they can figure out how many of their website visitors are actually buying things and in turn adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. I’ve moved data centers and been on teams where I was directly responsible for portions of the effort to migrate them to the cloud. All of this is demonstrable and verifiable. If you are interested in the relevant experience and credentials I posses that qualifies me for the job, OK. But I won’t be answering any of the rest of below that is irrelevant to the application process.
- n6h6 3y agoJesus fucking Christ
- Tade0 3y agoI don't understand this at all. The only type of person who would have the time to go through all this would be someone with considerable amounts of fuck you money. But such people just say fuck you and move on when the process becomes tedious. Who are they trying to hire here? I've been to a few companies which had way too more applicants than they knew what to do with, but most of the time it was because the majority were under qualified spam applicants, who assumed that eventually someone will give them the time of day.
- parl_match 3y ago>Who are they trying to hire here? Self-described "Linux users".
- indrora 3y agoThe vast majority of Linux kernel engineers I know wouldn’t have the time, endurance, or care to complete this bullshit. I’ve known people who’ve maintained Arch packages, kept Brew up to date, and maintained kernels for Android devices. Some of whom have attempted to get hired by Canonical. Some of whom had Canonical engineers begging to hire them. Their process can’t hire Americans, is highly biased towards a British attitude towards long, laborious interview processes, and was described by one of my colleagues in diversity and inclusion as “the most trans and neurodivergent hostile environment I’ve ever seen in an interview loop, incapable of hiring the demographic that will make the most impact in their product.”
- morelish 3y agoBill Gates can sleep happy knowing Ubuntu will never be a challenge to windows
- TrackerFF 3y agoHaving previously worked at a place where it took minimum 3 months to hire someone (but often 6-12), I'd be amazed if Canonical actually ever gets to hire their first choices. What happened was this: By the time the first pick hires had been cleared, they had gotten another job. Same with second pick. Maybe even third, too. Most people don't have the luxury or will to just sit and twiddle their thumbs for months and months, and those that do will just say fuck it and look elsewhere. In our case, the place was a revolving door. ALWAYS hiring, never knowing who they'd hire - and those working there would carry the perpetually understaffed workload. I can understand a hiring process like this if we're talking about fighter pilots, astronauts, special forces operators, scientists going to antarctica, or whatever. But software engineering? C'mon. Delusions of grandeur.
- realusername 3y agoHaving done a lot of interviews for my company, I also agree. If your whole process takes more than 3 weeks, you are losing people to competitors. Candidates aren't going to wait 3 months and delaying all the other offers they are receiving, that's not going to work unless you are working in a FAANG maybe and the prestige of your company can make this work.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoMy current job was less than a week between my application and signing the final offer. Day 1: I send in an application. Day 2: My future manager writes back "Hey, do you have any work examples in obscure language I used for 10 minutes in my EE classes?". I respond "No, nobody has work examples in obscure language." Later that day, same manager emails me again, asking the same question, in slightly different words. I say no again. They respond asking to set a time for an interview. I reply I'm free tomorrow. Day 4, interview. Takes an hour and half. I receive a job offer about an hour later. I reply we need to have a conversation about salary. Weekend rolls through, negotiations are successful and I'm hired on Monday.
- Invictus0 3y ago
- wcunning 3y agoI recently went through this for a job posting that changed after I started the process and then had the weirdest, least coherent interviews I'd ever sat through. They didn't have any idea who they wanted or a scope for the role (building out a new business line in safety critical software) and despite multiple interviewers telling me that I passed their round, I wasn't selected. In the end, I think that was better for my long term mental health, given how unprepared they were for that position, but it was a clear sign of an organization without a super clear direction. Combining that whole thing with the recent decisions around Snaps vs Flatpak, their interaction with LXD, and their general user hostility, I'm glad that I am not tied to their products in a meaningful way, and I've gone back to Fedora for my home systems. Really sad that they can't capitalize on the IBM murder of open source stable distros, but I've really never had major complaints with Fedora and I can always go back to OpenSUSE if I need to, given their recent renaissance.
- brobinson 3y agoI left Ubuntu for Fedora because of how slow/awful Snaps are. I can't imagine going through the described interview process and then having to work on _Snaps_.
- expertentipp 3y agoThat one time when Canonical answered to my CV, I passed after had received this list of few dozens of questions. I really wanted to tell them what they want to hear but honestly I had no idea what that would be...
- pfdietz 3y agoI knew a great guy who worked at Canonical, Adam Conrad. He died two years ago from cancer, way too young. I'm still upset about it. (Not implying this says anything negative about Canonical.) If he was representative of the kind of person who works at Canonical I'd say it's a place worth looking at.
- baby 3y agoNow that I’m on the other side I’ll say this: hiring is hard, you get super busy so it’s even harder. This kind of story is definitely a lose-lose situation and candidates should obviously not go through with difficult companies. Companies should be naturally incentivized by the market to improve their hiring process to both remove friction and measure for the right metrics.
- pcrh 3y agoTo be honest, that interview process is not unusual in either it's length or details. In the UK (where this appears to be), recruitment for most public sector, academic, and even entry-level graduate corporate jobs, takes at least as long as described, and often longer.
- ilc 3y agoI got a similar mail when I applied to Canonical. My mail contained 43 separate questions. 43. I am not joking, I just went and counted them. Each of which probably wanted a sentence to paragraph answer. Some could be more. As Blaise Pascal said: If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ Write a shorter letter Canonical. You told me so much about you in one step. You can't write a short letter, or you don't care.
- sakex 3y agoI'd never get the job given how much of a loser I was in high school.
- liendolucas 3y agoIsn't this also very costly for them? I wouldn't even imagine what would be the process for a technical role, maybe half a year? I haven't read all the post but it seems that this was taken well beyond insanity.
- physicsguy 3y agoI looked at applying recently and with the overwhelmingly negative Glassdoor reviews and convoluted interview process… I decided not to even bother applying. I just got a referral from someone I used to know for a company, and my technical interview was mostly chatting through what I’d built in the past. Then they asked me to go over in about 5 minutes how I’d build a link shortener. That was it. Why would I bother going through multiple rounds of interviews including quizzing my life story?
- sohrob 3y agoI can't help but wonder how many highly talented people Canonical lost out on through this ridiculously long and inconsiderate vetting process.
- toyg 3y agoI wonder if it's a reaction to some horror story they experienced. When they first started, they didn't have all that stuff. In fact, I remember them running around and hiring basically anyone with any role in the Linux/Debian space. For a period, I had quite a few conversations at LUGs where I was told "Oh, that guy you met last week? He's the <insert Debian package here>, Canonical just hired him...". I wonder if that original hiring spree (which was fishing heavily from academia, and seemed very informal) burned them so badly that they sat down and devised a process that is the exact opposite.
- madrox 3y agoWhen I became an engineering leader, it was my turn to design a hiring process. Most other companies similar to mine copied what Google did. That led me to this essay [1] and I realized copying what other big tech companies do probably wasn't right. I didn't have a "I need to pick from several good engineers" problem. I had a "I need to find a good engineer quickly" problem. I really don't know which problem Canonical has. What I learned is that large tech companies invented modern technical recruiting as a way of choosing between good engineers. Many other companies that don't have this problem then started a recruiting cargo cult of similar practices thinking this is how you found the best people. I don't think a lot of companies have thought critically about their recruiting experience. 1: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people.html http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unluc...
- linuxftw 3y agoThat was a really patronizing thing to read.
- madrox 3y agoThat's fair. I had two competing thoughts in my head and neither were communicated clearly. My thesis is that I think recruiting pipelines are either optimized for something that is anti-candidate or not optimized at all and simply copying what others do without critical thought.
- itomato 3y agoTo have the honor and privilege of using Launchpad to Change the World. Unless something has changed, but when I worked there, the big customer problems they were trying to solve were being solved by talented people in a NIH culture with all the friction that introduces. MAAS, Juju; good ideas hindered by the execution pipe, but that’s just my opinion.
- crabbone 3y agoI once applied to Canonical... and forgot. Then half a year after I started another job, I received an email from them about how I'm a bad match. Then half a year later they've sent me an email asking how my experience with their hiring process was. I'm still holding off the reply.
- sho_hn 3y agoThey didn't even reply to my application over a waiting period of several months, for a position I was too good a fit for not to at least do a screening. Still slightly miffed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jjgreen 3y agoDirect link to Mark Shuttleworth's response in that thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/canonical_the_recruitment_process_really_is_that/jvhubst/ https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can... [actually submitted in the usual manner, but marked as a dupe]
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> I did enjoy your post. It has just the right amount of snark, but plenty of substance too, so well played, it's a good read. > And yes, we make mistakes occasionally, none of us are perfect. > To be successful and get an offer, you will need to be both outstanding, and a little bit lucky. That's life. haha. it comes across kind of salty to me. never going to use ubuntu again.
- benhoyt 3y agoIn case it helps anyone, here's a recent blog article written by Daniele Procida (a director of engineering at Canonical, responsible for documentation) that helps explain the motivation for our written interview: https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews - "Not just an annoying list of questions" Disclaimer: I work for Canonical and help with recruiting. I'd love it if our hiring process was shorter or tighter, but the written interview part (the part people seem to protest the most) I actually think is helpful. We're a fully remote company, and written communication is very important, so I think it's important that we evaluate how well someone can relate their experience and get technical ideas across. I personally review several written submissions per day, I read them in full, write notes of my thoughts, and evaluate them carefully. So your effort isn't wasted!
- tourist2d 3y agoFrom your page: > Imagine if – as a job applicant – you could put yourself right in front of the hiring lead, and tell them, in your own words, in your own time, without interruption or distraction or pressure, why you think you’d be an excellent person for the role. What kind of applicant would benefit the most? A liar
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheRealPomax 3y agoIf your recruitment process takes long, you're a bad company and you should feel bad. If someone's between jobs, and they are a good fit for what you need, hire them instead of going "we'll get back to you in half a year".
- Biganon 3y agoDon't forget to read Mark Shuttleworth's answers in the comments. That's the first time he's used his reddit account in 7 years.
- ninja-ninja 3y agoyeah, they do get a ton of applications for their size too. a friend went through the process and they shared that they get 60k applications on average and they have around 2k people. i guess its because people are passionate about the product
- yung_steezy 3y agoReally appreciate posts like these. I think this post specificaly might have saved me from embarking on a colossal time-sink application process.
- jarreed0 3y agoInteresting to see this. I'm going through this process ATM. Some of the written interview questions were different for me