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Having 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
by TrackerFF 3y ago
Having 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 agoThis is so unusual it borders on unbelievable
- yard2010 3y agoIn my last job search I had like 1 case like this out of 30-40. Might be my numbers though
- ghaff 3y agoIs that a normal number of leads to have in play? I certainly spewed my fair share of resumes into the void out of school but I haven't done that since.
- yard2010 3y agoI don't think so because most of these leads came from frontend recruiters that could have made a lot of money landing me a job, and as a result most of them were great opportunities for the recruiters, not so great for me and the potential future employer. Don't get discouraged. Work on a personal project if you want, so you have something to show. In my experience it's only hard to land the first job. Once you do, it becomes easier. Don't read other people's experiences and think something is wrong. Good luck <3
- bgirard 3y agoI've had interviews with startups that will use a quick interview turn around time as a selling feature to close candidates. I've also interviewed at Two Sigma where I was flown in onsite and by the last interview they had already reviewed most of my feedback and told me that they were going to extend an offer. I got the sense that if I wasn't using a 3rd party recruiter with rules they might have handed me an offer before I left offsite. But it was great having the chance to talk to my would-be manager knowing I would likely have the offer to discuss my role while I was still onsite.
- 3y ago
- PedroBatista 3y ago> 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. Well.. have you met their CEO? The truth is once companies have a certain size and revenue, their software developers don't matter really that much. Yes it can be hell to work there, everyone is overworked, things are low quality, etc. As long as the checks keep coming in ( and they will ) there is really no critical problem to be addressed. Now the funny part: once the alarm bells go off and they try to change course... not happens, the "ship" is unresponsive and in most cases it will sink. But depending on the size of the company that will take years and maybe even decades. So the best skill everyone needs to have (I wish really technical introverted software developers had this more ) is: Develop "street smarts" and tell these people to go fuck themselves and shove their "hiring process" up their asses.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- prmoustache 3y agoThe only time it took me more than 2 months to get a job, that was also the time I wanted to move to another country. All in all it was nice for me to take the time to ponder on the pros and cons, triple check the kind of quality of life I would have in the expected range of salary, housing, schools, etc. I am not sure I would stay motivated in another context.
- ghaff 3y agoDepends on the position. Took me about 2.5 months for current role between sending the first email and getting a formal offer. (I even got accidentally stood up when I was going to meet someone over breakfast :-)) But I was having conversations/interviews with senior people and it was just hard to get people in the office. (This was well pre-COVID so everything was in-person.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thayne 3y agoIt certainly doesn't help that many companies never inform you if you don't get a position, so if a candidate doesn't get a response quickly, they are likely to assume they were rejected.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snoman 3y agoI used to work at a medium sized firm (~2B revenue) and we had a policy where the candidate had an offer or a rejection (with reason) before they left the office. It was hard turning folks down, and it pushed us to have very crisp reasons for saying no, but I think it made us better interviewers and more humane in the process.
- sph 3y agoThe word humane is rarely used, most times in the context of "humane slaughter of farm animals" and now in "humane interview process."
- potamic 3y agoThis could also backfire with non-confrontational personalities. "Welp, I guess you're hired"
- snoman 3y agoIt was never decided by a single person. We always did a 5-15m debrief, consisting of about 4 people (hiring manager, 2 interviewers, hr to facilitate and maybe a shadow 2), between interviews on the day.
- KineticLensman 3y agoA lot can happen in three months. My wife interviewed years ago for a UK govt research agency. They took three months to respond but did eventually set up an on-site interview. She went along anyway. HR met her at the gate and took her to the office of the person who owned the opportunity. When they arrived and there was no-one at his desk it turned out that he had died two months earlier and that the HR drone hadn't known. Needless to say the interview was cancelled.
- keyle 3y agoWowsa. That reads like a B movie noir comedy.
- triyambakam 3y agoI would watch it!
- paulddraper 3y ago> there was no-one at his desk Sounds like a vacancy
- christophilus 3y agoYeah. I thought the story would end with the HR person saying, “Oh. Turns out Bob died. I guess you’re hired. Have Bob’s office.”
- darth_avocado 3y agoI recently had the misfortune of trying to find a job in a rough hiring market. I was appalled by what I saw. Very few companies move fast. Here’s what I saw on average for a software engineering role: 1. Excruciatingly long application processes, especially when companies required you to use workday for applying (30mins - 2 hours) 2. 2 weeks to hear back from the recruiter 3. 1-2 weeks to schedule a recruiter call 4. 1-2 weeks for a phone screen 5. 1 week to confirm results 6. 1-2 weeks for another round if not moving to on-site directly 7. 2-3 weeks for scheduling an onsite 8. 1-2 weeks for results (more immediate if it’s an obvious reject) 9. Additional 1-2 weeks for finalizing an offer and signing it. The shortest end to end I could manage to get was around 2 and a half months, which is crazy.
- gen220 3y agoDid you interview at any startups? <= Series B? This sounds like a standard big-tech run around, but IME most companies that take hiring seriously (i.e. more than "churn management") are not this slow.
- depereo 3y agoWorking at a startup is not an aspiration for most. Long hours and low pay for a lotto ticket's chance at a windfall is attractive to a very niche crowd. The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process for entirely human, rather than technical, reasons (before anyone at a startup chimes in with 'our platform makes this better!')
- gen220 3y ago> The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process I don't think this claim holds outside of technical jobs at big tech and big-tech-aspirers. I think you're trying to say that jobs with godawful applications/hiring processes acquire this disease for human reasons? If so, we agree. I'd sum it up as decadence. SMBs, inclusive of the "earlier" stage startups that are a big source of employment for the people who frequent this site, can't afford the decadence. I was curious about what pond they were fishing in, because that representation of an average experience is totally alien to me. As for which pond "most" people on this site should aspire to fish in (on which I made no claim), ymmv. Just collecting data.
- rurp 3y ago> scientists going to antarctica I know someone who applied for a technical job based in antarctica and the interview process was much less arduous than the one described here.
- verzali 3y agoI applied to be an astronaut and that was only 5 or 6 rounds of interviews. Granted, you have a lot more invasive medical tests and being dunked upside down in swimming pools.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoThat doesn’t sound nearly as bad as implementing quicksort on a whiteboard :)
- Arch-TK 3y agoIt actually sounds like fun in comparison to implementing anything on a whiteboard.
- sph 3y agoI'd rather all interview processes were like one of those funny Japanese game shows, rather than the dehumanisingly dull whiteboard interviee. I could see a dystopian sci-fi short story or Black Mirror episode with the same theme.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoIt depends where you're going. Villas Las Estrellas requires an appendix removal.
- philovivero 3y agoI'm assuming this is a joke of some sort?
- mcguire 3y agoWell, you see, the potential cost of losing a good candidate is much less than the potential cost of hiring a bad candidate, so every effort should be made to prevent the latter. There's a Joel on Software or Stack Overflow thing on this....
- TrackerFF 3y agoThe fatal error here is to believe that the hiring process follows a linear curve, so that the outcome is directly proportional to the effort spent. When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.
- rwmj 3y agoYou may be assuming there is any kind of rational process here, when Mark Shuttleworth thinks it is important to find out what you did in high school.
- voakbasda 3y agoI think that emphasis makes it obvious that they only want high school or recent college grads. It's a clear signal that real experience is not valued.
- danenania 3y agoUnless you are paying at the very top of the market or are doing something so extremely prestigious/cool that it makes top people want to work for your org specifically (SpaceX, NASA, OpenAI, maybe a handful of others), a process like this seems guaranteed to only select for candidates that have no other options.
- pengaru 3y agoI don't think anyone disagrees with that. The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.
- 3y ago
- Alupis 3y agoThere's a point you may be missing - they're seeking fanatical Canonical fans that share in a common vision. Their lengthy process might mean they don't get your typical fast-flying FAANG engineer, but it does mean they get someone who's a die-hard Canonical fan.
- whatshisface 3y agoWho's a die-hard canonical fan?
- Alupis 3y agoWho's a die-hard Mozilla fan? People who love Ubuntu, tend to love Ubuntu. A very long hiring process pretty much ensures the only ones still waiting around are the ones who really want to work at Canonical.
- tschwimmer 3y agoThis is not exclusively true. You will get people who are willing to jump through a lot of hoops to get hired. Some of them may have strong affinity for Canonical, some may just really really need a job and have no other options.
- Alupis 3y agoThe folks who really really need a job are probably not the people Canonical is looking to hire. They are being extremely deliberate with their length hiring process. However it is true, it's not a universal thing of course.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kragen 3y agoi installed ubuntu or kubuntu on most of my new machines since it came out, but for my newest install i picked debian instead, especially since the softening of the debian social contract eliminated most of the install hassles because i usually use xpdf for pdf files and ubuntu dropped it https://askubuntu.com/questions/1245518/how-to-install-xpdf-on-ubuntu-20-04 https://askubuntu.com/questions/1245518/how-to-install-xpdf-... i was skeptical about ubuntu's business prospects when mark pitched me on it at the ceo conference in 02004 (he was attending, i wasn't) but i've always thought the distribution was pretty decent, and the company's behavior has also been excellent. a couple of my friends have worked there and had no complaints. i would have no hesitation about working there unless i had a better offer on the table but i'm definitely not a die-hard ubuntu fan
- barbariangrunge 3y agoLets not forget the 48 hour or less exploding offers they all received while you were waiting for them to reserve themselves for you for 3+ months with no promises on your part
- matheusmoreira 3y agoSo why do these companies insist on these incredibly long hiring processes? Clearly it must not be working if candidates are moving on before they're hired.
- JohnFen 3y agoMy assumption is that they do it to select for the types of employees that will put up with nonsense. I know that sounds like I'm being flip, but I'm not. There are tons of companies that don't do this (at least in the US), though, so there's no real reason to put up with it.
- imiric 3y agoThey don't insist on it. It's just the way they operate. Everything takes ages in the corporate world. Every hiring decision needs to be signed off by interviewers, managers, HR, and sometimes even executives. Someone in this chain is usually on vacation, but there's no clear replacement, so someone else needs to be brought up to speed. Meetings need to take place for everyone to touch base, and discuss the candidates. Coordinating this around everyone's availability is difficult, since they have other meetings to attend. It really takes some outside-the-box thinking to make it happen. :) Also, depending on the size and popularity of the company, they might be evaluating dozens of candidates at the same time. This also clogs the pipeline considerably.
- Arrath 3y agoThis applies to more than just hiring, too. As a lowly engineer trying to get subcontractor invoices paid I've had some very Kafkaesque struggles.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Everything takes ages in the corporate world But not everywhere. I've been hired by a couple of major tech companies and didn't have to go through such an insane, lengthy process as this. I think a lot of it depends on the corporate culture.
- smeagull 3y agoActually if you're slow enough, you can get them the next time around. I've had it before where I got an offer when I was in a job search from a place I approached from the last time I was in a job search.
- jjgreen 3y agoRecruitment aliasing!
- barbariangrunge 3y agoFinally a good use case for gpt: filling out 41 paragraphs of q&a sent to you by people who disrespect you
- johnnyanmac 3y agodevil's advocate: a bad software engineer is not only unproductive but drags down good software engineer's productivity. It doesn't make SWE's important, but it does sometimes mean that no hire isn't the worst choice. In addition, Canonical is HQ'd in the UK, so it's not quite as easy to let someone go if red flags come up.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoIt's incredibly easy to fire people in the first six months or so. It's only after that it's hard.