8 ms·
This 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 u
by weinzierl 3y ago
This 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.
- s_dev 3y agoI can't read this comments as anything other than virtue signalling. You can call Mark Shuttleworth an asshole and still use Ubuntu without being a hypocrite.
- pydry 3y agoIve been feeling like Ubuntu has been failing technically for years and this thread is really helping explain why.
- cbozeman 3y agoYeah, I was thinking the exact same thing. This Shuttleworth guy sounds like a smarmy jackass, and after reading that article on the hiring process, I wouldn't even wanna bother, especially considering I could literally apply at a MAGNAM company and get double the compensation. They can have their "fanatical fan base employees" with my blessing.
- hluska 3y agoWould you mind explaining why you say Ubuntu has been failing technically? I’ve found it underwhelming but I’m curious to read more negative opinions.
- antod 3y agoBut these factors were also in place for their distro ascendency too, so you probably can't blame the factors. If anything, long term success itself is more likely to explain eventual hubris, complacency then decline. I still use Ubuntu at home, but it's probably just inertia at this point. I don't hate it, but I also don't really like it the way I used to.
- hluska 3y agoThat’s interesting because as soon as I read the phrase ‘virtue signaling’, I ignore the person who wrote it. It’s deeply rude because you’re implying that I have no virtue. You don’t know me and so that’s intellectually dishonest.
- 3y ago
- qaq 3y agoHonest question why?
- hluska 3y agoIt’s based upon a few things. Ubuntu has been underwhelming as of late. It’s fine, just underwhelming. Sometimes software becomes underwhelming as it matures but in this case, the hiring process seems designed to ship underwhelming software. Then there is the particular issue. That kind of thinking/communication style doesn’t make me feel comfortable with Ubuntu (or any project he would have a leadership role in). And finally, I’m really tired of how our industry seems to glorify jerks. So we have: 1.) Ubuntu is rather underwhelming. 2.) The hiring process is so fucked that underwhelming software is the most likely result. 3.) There is a lot of competition and I can find projects with vaguely professional/secure leaders. 4.) I run more than enough jerk driven software.
- qaq 3y agoWhy is filtering applicants for people who accomplished at least something in any area of life (not even specifically software) being a jerk ?
- ubermonkey 3y agoI mean, if Mark wrote that in 2004, he was dunking on an administration that was widely believed to be the worst ever. (Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)
- bdav2418 3y ago> (Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.) Yeah, those drone strikes from the Obama administration were pretty bad.
- delecti 3y agoObama certainly could have done a better job at stopping them (and done better at many other things as well), but those drone strikes started under Bush2, along with the rest of the mostly disastrous "war on terror". Given we experienced our first non-peaceful transition of power, it's absurd to pretend anything else in US history compares.
- marcusverus 3y ago[flagged]
- cdchn 3y agoMaybe the ones that all the indictments just happened for?
- fineIllregister 3y ago> our first non-peaceful transition of power I know what you mean, but the phrasing seems odd given that the US has gone through multiple transfers of power because POTUS was murdered.
- Timon3 3y agoI'm not sure why that is relevant. "Transition of power" describes the period of time when power transitions from one administration to the next. A non-peaceful end of presidency can be followed by a peaceful transition of power. If anything, this fact makes things much worse.
- JimDabell 3y agoThey also buy email lists from ZoomInfo to spam people then don’t take GDPR requests seriously after you chase them for answers. So yeah, good riddance.
- weinzierl 3y agoC'mon, it was a casual joke and no harm done. Also punching someone weaker is a simple act, but taking on someone stronger requires courage. Does it fit the somewhat quirky (but by far not unusual) interview process? Yes Is it a sign of a moral flaw? No
- rbanffy 3y agoUnless, of course, you work for that government. Kind of the same one that put people on the Moon, made the atomic bomb, invented the internet, and other things less extraordinary than repackaging Debian ;-) I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.
- chc 3y agoThe Bush Administration did not do any of those things. Reading his comments as a dismissal of those things, rather than the guy running the White House when he wrote it, seems uncharitable.
- hluska 3y agoWords like “Bush” or “current administration” do not occur in the article. Rather, it was just a link. You don’t have any particular reason to be this charitable.
- chc 3y agoHe linked to the White House website. The occupant of the White House at the time was George W. Bush. I am not even trying to be charitable, that's just the most likely reading to me. Basically every talk show host made similar jokes all the time because Bush was widely considered to be an incompetent nepo baby, so I'd need a reason to read it any other way, and I don't really see one here.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
- YeBanKo 3y agoWhat is a good alternative to migrate from Ubuntu to?
- chinchilla2020 3y agoEvery famous computer scientist is a complete asshole.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agohe's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary people and made fun of george bush?
- phist_mcgee 3y agoTwisting the signal/noise knob this way may not attract all or even the right kind of extraordinary people you think you will.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoThe classic Madeleine Albright-Aaron Swartz dichotomy. Gee, that's a tough call LOL
- hluska 3y agoMore word salad.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoHow is it noise to imply that people who work in government are overwhelmingly blood-sucking bureaucrats who could never hack it in the software world? Who does that drive away that would be useful? Tech lobbyists?
- hluska 3y agoRead his words.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago"I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole." And so I ask again: He's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary people and made fun of george W bush? see, I added the W. now answer.
- 3y ago
- lannisterstark 3y agoWait till you hear how much of an asshole RMS and Linus (to degree) are. What's next on your trip, go full time on Microsoft?
- dandellion 3y agoThere's multiple different ways people can be assholes, some are fine and others not.
- hluska 3y agoWhy are you this obsessed with defending this particular dude??
- lannisterstark 3y agoWhere precisely was I 'defending' anyone, nonetheless 'obsessing' over it? hm? care to provide some citations? This isn't reddit. I wrote one line of facetious comment. Definition of "obsessed" and "defending" are clear cut. Words have meaning.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah this is not such a great signal once you're past a certain maturity level But hopefully it stayed in the past
- kramerger 3y agoMark ran into some issues with clueless US officials and was not allowed in the country for a while. Maybe that's what it said what it said.
- hcks 3y agoHuge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
- weinzierl 3y agoYou're reading too much into this. It is just a casual joke from a long time ago and I find the rest of the copy is quite good.
- rhaway84773 3y agoCanonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand. This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available. Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth. I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
- rlpb 3y ago> I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind. But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users. Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant. > NIH If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative. Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
- Knee_Pain 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- the_only_law 3y ago> It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. I guess it’s valuable to be a mildly smart kid in a really bad school.
- sneeze-slayer 3y agoI always hated the kid at school who took easy classes and got a 4.0 vs doing worse in hard classes.
- entropicdrifter 3y agoI did that my senior year. I was focused on my extra-curricular studies of music and philosophy, so I only took 2 AP courses instead of the 4 or 5 the school wanted me to take so that I'd have more free time.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- zer8k 3y agoFor a man who asks so much of someone, as is typical of this kind of person, he himself is unremarkable. Founding Thawte isn't a particularly impressive technical feat. Then he became a VC which is even less impressive. There is no respected engineering leader who would look at this moron as inspiration for anything other than jumping out of a building. I can't believe someone who has no actual technical chops, no listed formal education, etc can be such a chode. Especially one infamous for the Ubuntu Unity scandal. He's like a less important Elon Musk. Musk is a moron, but this guy takes the entire cake.
- lampshades 3y agoThe irony of almost anyone on Earth, let alone some no-name person on HN, calling Musk a moron, is rich.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chinchilla2020 3y agoYes, nobody at the White House has ever accomplished something notable. Not a single inhabitant of that building has any form of fame or notoriety. It's really a niche, little-known building on the outskirts of a relatively quiet city.