6 ms·

Interviewing at Canonical

128 points by jordigh 3y ago

serengetti 3y ago
I've been suckered into that tarpit myself. It's a gruelling and mostly pointless process that is designed to suck the soul out of you and crush any hope of ever getting a job there. It starts almost inviting, but gets progressively disparaging and obscure. After the 6th round of interviews I got zero feedback other than "other candidates were better suited for this position". It's an utter nightmare that any sane person should avoid.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It kinda does explain a lot of their decision making though. Like the way they keep soldiering on with snaps that nobody wants.
  - ein0p 3y ago
    “Nobody” is an overstatement. I find the software that is confined and that I can cleanly uninstall pretty valuable. There might be problems with Canonical, but if a gnarly package is available in both APT and Snap, there’s no question as to which one I’d prefer.
    - solid_fuel 3y ago
      Personally I would prefer the tool that allows me to choose when updates will be applied, regardless of the level of isolation. It does look like snapd now finally allows automatic updates to be disabled, as of version 2.58 (so Jan 2023), but it always left a really bad taste in my mouth that the ability to control what gets updated and when was kept out of user control for so long.
      - ein0p 3y ago
        Yeah that’s an issue for some users. But the vast majority of packages are available on apt as well, so you don’t have to use it for packages where this is critical.
        adhamsalama 3y ago
        The problem is that Ubuntu hijacks some "apt install" commands and converts them to "snap install".
        hedora 3y ago
        Another problem is that many packages have been sitting waiting for critical bug fixes for months. I'm not sure what their focus is, but they really aren't particularly suitable for use as a desktop or server OS. A third problem is that the quality of the .deb's they package is low and decreasing rapidly. For instance, they don't seem to understand how to properly configure update-alternatives anymore. I'm guessing all the above can be explained by establishing hiring bars that aren't good predictors of job performance, and then letting it play out for a decade or so.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        > Another problem is that many packages have been sitting waiting for critical bug fixes for months. I'm not sure what their focus is, but they really aren't particularly suitable for use as a desktop or server OS. This is something that bothers me with all the containerisation yes. If there is a big vulnerability in libssl found now, you just update your distro once and boom, everything that uses openssl is fixed. Now with all these snaps you have to wait for every maintainer to incorporate the update in their package when they feel like it. It's a mess.
        solarkraft 3y ago
        Like Chromium?
    - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
      Gnarly like this? “Steals your crypto wallet” but the snap is marked as “safe”. https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/ https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/
richbell 3y ago
See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_and_their_disrespectful_interviews/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_an...
caseyy 3y ago
Hehe, Canonical has a bit of a stink in the industry for this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894
mrd3v0 3y ago
The hiring process sounds like it is made to recruit unquestioning human drones. I guess that makes sense given how closed and hypocritical "the maker of the world's favourite Linux system" is. Employees having any actual interest or passion in what they are supposed to be doing would cause issues.
- shtShow 3y ago
  [dead]
- lozenge 3y ago
  Eh, if you fit Mark Shuttleworth's template you probably fly through with barely a care in the world. Meaning you had resourceful parents, went to a good school, tuned your high school life for college applications, and etc. Who wouldn't want a friendly chat with the CEO before an offer?
mdekkers 3y ago
Canonical and Gitlab are both on my “ignore until the end of time” list due to their dehumanising recruitment approaches. Some companies design their recruitment processes around the “let’s see how much nonsense they will put up with” approach to filtering people, and I don’t to work with, or use the products/services of these kind of companies. They are dead to me.
- spicyusername 3y ago
  I just got an offer from GitLab, though I didn't end up accepting, and it was a pretty standard interview process ~3 rounds with a little homework. No leet code. Regular interview questions. The interviewers were polite.
  - mdekkers 3y ago
    My issue is with their “we will pay you according to where you live” policy which I find an unacceptable overreach. Pay me for the value I deliver to the business, not “this is the standard of living we believe you should enjoy”
    - belter 3y ago
      Could be ok with the "pay you according to where you live” , as long as they would sell the product, priced "according to where you live” ...
      - serengetti 3y ago
        this is the only way to judge a company.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Add Google to it, twice were enough for me.
Macha 3y ago
> Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16." Ah, so those education questions are there for precisely the BS reasons it seems like they're there for.
- sharphall 3y ago
  What gets me is -- besides this reflecting poorly on Canonical for wasting the candidate's time -- isn't this also a huge waste of time for Canonical and its CEO? Why go through all that trouble of scheduling a meeting between the candidate and the CEO if they knew they weren't going to accept the candidate based on something they knew near the top of the hiring funnel? Surely the CEO has better things to do with his time? Or perhaps not?
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    The amount of time and resources wasted into converting Canonical into an HR machine capable of processing 10000 applicants per month is astronomical. People are spending 30-50% of their time in hiring tasks, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates, while the success rate is close to what you see in spam operations: 1 out of 10000 applicants get an offer. High-paid vicepresidents spend more than half their time pushing resumes and clicking around the recruitment page instead of having meetings with their teams. This is all as desired by Shuttleworth: he is convinced he has just reinvented or disrupted HR and is entirely devoted to this. It’s not a waste of time for him - it’s what he lives for.
pquki4 3y ago
When I saw the title I knew what the author was up for. No not really, I was wrong. The most lengthy interview process that I am aware of and have seen first hand is faculty member hiring at a university -- that was really challenging and demanding -- but worth it. Canonical? What kind of cult is it?
hasty_pudding 3y ago
Is it just me or is the mastodon mobile interface is not great.
adev_ 3y ago
Reddit and Forums are full of people with similar experience. Canonical currently uses this "psychometric test" as a decisive critera for candidates https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Example-Booklet-2018.pdf https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Exampl... And from their own words "they take it very seriously". The result is exactly what you would expect of this kind of test. It is unsurprisingly utter rubbish. It asks the candidate to solve "important cognitive tasks" and translate that to substract 2 number as fast as possible, identify letters as fast as possible or rotate an image as fast as possible. I would honestly be curious to know how anybody with a functional brain can believe 5 seconds that this can be an important selection criteria for a senior software engineer, a SRE or an engineering manager. Is the goal suppose to be identifying the best human-based GPUs ? I wonder how many top talents they lost in early selection process due to this kind of garbage.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  its obviously just an abstraction over an IQ test. Id argue its probably quite hard to find a 'top talent' that has an IQ thats substantially outside their desired range. Obviously theres variance and there's other factors that contribute to someones success in their career, but their raw intelligence is certainly a large input thats worth considering. Its nearly impossible to train someone with an IQ of 80 to be a senior software engineer. and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades.
  - timmytokyo 3y ago
    >and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades. I'm glad you settled the debate with a single sentence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
    - anthonypasq 3y ago
      if you could guarentee your child had an iq of 80 or an iq of 120 which would you pick? presumably if IQ is useless youd be fine flipping that coin?
arp242 3y ago
> Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16." What a silly take; generally brains aren't fully developed until the age of 25 or so and some people mature earlier than others. Whatever you were or weren't at 16 says very little about you if you're over 30, or even in your 20s. Never mind environmental factors which are often much harder to deal with at young ages, such as a less-than-ideal family situation, being bullied, and things like that. But according to Mark a ~5-year window defines who you are for the rest of your life... Seems like a classic case of someone thinking their own experiences (or their perception of them, which may not necessarily align with reality) is the only possible path to be a good person. I always assumed these questions about high school were mostly to writing capability more than anything else and that the content doesn't greatly matter. Well, guess it does :-/
- blub 3y ago
  We’re talking high-school, not university. In the EU not graduating high-school opens the window for job opportunities such as garbage disposal, cleaning floors and package delivery. Probably McDonalds too. Shuttleworth is asking a legitimate question. That person should be happy they even got an interview, most HR departments would instantly screen them out.
  - arp242 3y ago
    "Why didn't you finish high school?" is a fine question. Expecting someone to be "equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16" is not, and neither is banging on about it for someone with over a decade of experience. No one reasonable does that because, again, what you were at 16 says very little about who you are at 36. And no one has ever asked me my high school certificate in the EU, for any job, including software dev.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

128 points by jordigh 3y ago

I've been suckered into that tarpit myself. It's a gruelling and mostly pointless process that is designed to suck the soul out of you and crush any hope of ever getting a job there. It starts almost inviting, but gets progressively disparaging and obscure. After the 6th round of interviews I got zero feedback other than "other candidates were better suited for this position". It's an utter nightmare that any sane person should avoid.

wkat4242 3y ago
It kinda does explain a lot of their decision making though. Like the way they keep soldiering on with snaps that nobody wants.
- ein0p 3y ago
  “Nobody” is an overstatement. I find the software that is confined and that I can cleanly uninstall pretty valuable. There might be problems with Canonical, but if a gnarly package is available in both APT and Snap, there’s no question as to which one I’d prefer.
  - solid_fuel 3y ago
    Personally I would prefer the tool that allows me to choose when updates will be applied, regardless of the level of isolation. It does look like snapd now finally allows automatic updates to be disabled, as of version 2.58 (so Jan 2023), but it always left a really bad taste in my mouth that the ability to control what gets updated and when was kept out of user control for so long.
    - ein0p 3y ago
      Yeah that’s an issue for some users. But the vast majority of packages are available on apt as well, so you don’t have to use it for packages where this is critical.
      - adhamsalama 3y ago
        The problem is that Ubuntu hijacks some "apt install" commands and converts them to "snap install".
        hedora 3y ago
        Another problem is that many packages have been sitting waiting for critical bug fixes for months. I'm not sure what their focus is, but they really aren't particularly suitable for use as a desktop or server OS. A third problem is that the quality of the .deb's they package is low and decreasing rapidly. For instance, they don't seem to understand how to properly configure update-alternatives anymore. I'm guessing all the above can be explained by establishing hiring bars that aren't good predictors of job performance, and then letting it play out for a decade or so.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        > Another problem is that many packages have been sitting waiting for critical bug fixes for months. I'm not sure what their focus is, but they really aren't particularly suitable for use as a desktop or server OS. This is something that bothers me with all the containerisation yes. If there is a big vulnerability in libssl found now, you just update your distro once and boom, everything that uses openssl is fixed. Now with all these snaps you have to wait for every maintainer to incorporate the update in their package when they feel like it. It's a mess.
      - solarkraft 3y ago
        Like Chromium?
  - loloquwowndueo 3y ago
    Gnarly like this? “Steals your crypto wallet” but the snap is marked as “safe”. https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/ https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/

richbell 3y ago

See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_and_their_disrespectful_interviews/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_an...

caseyy 3y ago

Hehe, Canonical has a bit of a stink in the industry for this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894

mrd3v0 3y ago

The hiring process sounds like it is made to recruit unquestioning human drones. I guess that makes sense given how closed and hypocritical "the maker of the world's favourite Linux system" is. Employees having any actual interest or passion in what they are supposed to be doing would cause issues.

shtShow 3y ago
[dead]
lozenge 3y ago
Eh, if you fit Mark Shuttleworth's template you probably fly through with barely a care in the world. Meaning you had resourceful parents, went to a good school, tuned your high school life for college applications, and etc. Who wouldn't want a friendly chat with the CEO before an offer?

mdekkers 3y ago

Canonical and Gitlab are both on my “ignore until the end of time” list due to their dehumanising recruitment approaches. Some companies design their recruitment processes around the “let’s see how much nonsense they will put up with” approach to filtering people, and I don’t to work with, or use the products/services of these kind of companies. They are dead to me.

spicyusername 3y ago
I just got an offer from GitLab, though I didn't end up accepting, and it was a pretty standard interview process ~3 rounds with a little homework. No leet code. Regular interview questions. The interviewers were polite.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  My issue is with their “we will pay you according to where you live” policy which I find an unacceptable overreach. Pay me for the value I deliver to the business, not “this is the standard of living we believe you should enjoy”
  - belter 3y ago
    Could be ok with the "pay you according to where you live” , as long as they would sell the product, priced "according to where you live” ...
    - serengetti 3y ago
      this is the only way to judge a company.
pjmlp 3y ago
Add Google to it, twice were enough for me.

Macha 3y ago

sharphall 3y ago
What gets me is -- besides this reflecting poorly on Canonical for wasting the candidate's time -- isn't this also a huge waste of time for Canonical and its CEO? Why go through all that trouble of scheduling a meeting between the candidate and the CEO if they knew they weren't going to accept the candidate based on something they knew near the top of the hiring funnel? Surely the CEO has better things to do with his time? Or perhaps not?
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  The amount of time and resources wasted into converting Canonical into an HR machine capable of processing 10000 applicants per month is astronomical. People are spending 30-50% of their time in hiring tasks, reviewing resumes, interviewing candidates, while the success rate is close to what you see in spam operations: 1 out of 10000 applicants get an offer. High-paid vicepresidents spend more than half their time pushing resumes and clicking around the recruitment page instead of having meetings with their teams. This is all as desired by Shuttleworth: he is convinced he has just reinvented or disrupted HR and is entirely devoted to this. It’s not a waste of time for him - it’s what he lives for.

pquki4 3y ago

When I saw the title I knew what the author was up for. No not really, I was wrong. The most lengthy interview process that I am aware of and have seen first hand is faculty member hiring at a university -- that was really challenging and demanding -- but worth it. Canonical? What kind of cult is it?

hasty_pudding 3y ago

Is it just me or is the mastodon mobile interface is not great.

adev_ 3y ago

Reddit and Forums are full of people with similar experience. Canonical currently uses this "psychometric test" as a decisive critera for candidates https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Example-Booklet-2018.pdf https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Exampl... And from their own words "they take it very seriously". The result is exactly what you would expect of this kind of test. It is unsurprisingly utter rubbish. It asks the candidate to solve "important cognitive tasks" and translate that to substract 2 number as fast as possible, identify letters as fast as possible or rotate an image as fast as possible. I would honestly be curious to know how anybody with a functional brain can believe 5 seconds that this can be an important selection criteria for a senior software engineer, a SRE or an engineering manager. Is the goal suppose to be identifying the best human-based GPUs ? I wonder how many top talents they lost in early selection process due to this kind of garbage.

anthonypasq 3y ago
its obviously just an abstraction over an IQ test. Id argue its probably quite hard to find a 'top talent' that has an IQ thats substantially outside their desired range. Obviously theres variance and there's other factors that contribute to someones success in their career, but their raw intelligence is certainly a large input thats worth considering. Its nearly impossible to train someone with an IQ of 80 to be a senior software engineer. and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades.
- timmytokyo 3y ago
  >and please dont respond to this comment claiming IQ is a useless metric. its not, and thats been very clear for decades. I'm glad you settled the debate with a single sentence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
  - anthonypasq 3y ago
    if you could guarentee your child had an iq of 80 or an iq of 120 which would you pick? presumably if IQ is useless youd be fine flipping that coin?

arp242 3y ago

> Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16." What a silly take; generally brains aren't fully developed until the age of 25 or so and some people mature earlier than others. Whatever you were or weren't at 16 says very little about you if you're over 30, or even in your 20s. Never mind environmental factors which are often much harder to deal with at young ages, such as a less-than-ideal family situation, being bullied, and things like that. But according to Mark a ~5-year window defines who you are for the rest of your life... Seems like a classic case of someone thinking their own experiences (or their perception of them, which may not necessarily align with reality) is the only possible path to be a good person. I always assumed these questions about high school were mostly to writing capability more than anything else and that the content doesn't greatly matter. Well, guess it does :-/

blub 3y ago
We’re talking high-school, not university. In the EU not graduating high-school opens the window for job opportunities such as garbage disposal, cleaning floors and package delivery. Probably McDonalds too. Shuttleworth is asking a legitimate question. That person should be happy they even got an interview, most HR departments would instantly screen them out.
- arp242 3y ago
  "Why didn't you finish high school?" is a fine question. Expecting someone to be "equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16" is not, and neither is banging on about it for someone with over a decade of experience. No one reasonable does that because, again, what you were at 16 says very little about who you are at 36. And no one has ever asked me my high school certificate in the EU, for any job, including software dev.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]