[HN Gopher] Canonical's recruitment process is long and complex
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Canonical's recruitment process is long and complex
Author : opensourcecat
Score : 348 points
Date : 2023-08-09 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| wcunning wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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_.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Direct link to Mark Shuttleworth's response in that thread:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...
|
| [actually submitted in the usual manner, but marked as a dupe]
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| This 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
| itronitron wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what a "stats bleeder scam" is?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| The 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 =)
| baby wrote:
| Now 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.
| 3littlefish wrote:
| Second 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| Did 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?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| It's weird but I think there could be a significant benefit for
| a company that makes an operating system that users are
| installing themselves. This policy means their staff will use a
| diverse set of hardware, some brand new, some old, some home-
| built. That leads to natural dogfooding and might result in a
| better product.
|
| * autocorrect manualfixes
| tribaal wrote:
| The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical
| (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made _some_
| sense:
|
| They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country
| using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the
| laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you
| being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get
| the bugs fixed.
|
| In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in
| the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of
| thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds
| (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
|
| One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they
| relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu
| would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
| jandrese wrote:
| Having people source random laptops to help increase
| compatibility doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but the
| company definitely should reimburse you for the purchase. I
| certainly can't blame them for dogfooding their own OS
| either.
|
| Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the
| point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure
| cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
| tribaal wrote:
| Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy
| whatever laptop you want with.
|
| Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was
| already doing open source work with, no reason for me to
| change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as
| usual, and got paid for it).
|
| Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about,
| this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum
| at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased?
| Sure...
|
| They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you
| around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in
| my book.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Speechless tbh ...
| joncrane wrote:
| Do they at least pay really really well so the laptop is just
| a tiny percentage of your annual compensation?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| I don't think it's weird.
|
| At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had
| to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was
| restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on
| what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the
| best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor
| quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I
| needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the
| other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it
| safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the
| work-controlled laptop.
|
| I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just
| one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense.
| Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to
| work.
|
| I do understand why each job had their way of doing things
| though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary
| code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive
| patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the
| laptop any more.
|
| Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a
| matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools
| worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work
| and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.
|
| That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20
| years all work I've done has been using my own devices except
| for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-
| supplied laptop to be unusual.
| rwmj wrote:
| Isn't that a problem with the company policies? Any company
| with heavily locked down laptops probably won't be happy to
| let you BYOD. I have a work supplied laptop but I run my own
| OS on it.
|
| The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You
| shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think
| about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
| madrox wrote:
| When 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-
| unluc...
| linuxftw wrote:
| That was a really patronizing thing to read.
| madrox wrote:
| That'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.
| Lio wrote:
| An 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.
| sakex wrote:
| I'd never get the job given how much of a loser I was in high
| school.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I picture them running in circles
| toyg wrote:
| I 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.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| > 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?
| MockObject wrote:
| A generation has been successfully raised to believe that we
| are our most superficial traits, that we live as stereotypes
| and view the world that way.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please not take HN threads on generic tangents or into
| flamewar? The site guidelines contain several rules designed to
| prevent this kind of thing - for example:
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article
| or post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead._"
|
| You started a flamewar with here and perpetuated it downthread.
| We're trying to avoid these things on HN as they are tedious,
| repetitive, and predictably turn nasty. If you wouldn't mind
| reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| A bias just means looking at things in a skewed way because of
| experience or mental conditioning.
|
| The fact is that demographics have a lot to do with bias
| because people from the same demographics have similar life
| experiences. Having someone else with a different set of
| experiences can help to mitigate bias by giving their
| perspective in the group. It is a simplistic way to determine
| 'tendency towards bias' by focusing on demographics, but it is
| also a pretty good indicator that when you are in a group of
| all the same demographic then there is going to be some bias
| that will go unnoticed.
|
| To answer your question -- the race part is incidental. A 30
| year old college educated white male from an urban/suburban US
| upbringing is more than just 'white'. This is why it is not
| racist -- because race is one aspect of a demographic.
|
| Hope this helps.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| She didn't complain about the panel members being exclusively
| educated people (which does affect how you think). But she
| did complain that they are all white (which doesn't). So
| yeah, go ahead, dig in.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| She mentioned demographics and one aspect of that was skin
| color. You are the one focused on race.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| Please explain how skin color is relevant in the
| interview context and why it was specifically mentioned
| in the original post. Please explain how skin color is
| different from race for the purpose of this discussion.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| The specific term was 'demographic', your quote did not
| include the word race.
|
| EDIT: Upon re-reading... are you really asking me to
| explain why skin color is part of a demographic? I guess
| I glossed over that because it doesn't make sense unless
| youwant to imply that mentioning 'white' in the context
| of other demographic variables like age and location is
| racist...in which case, census forms are racist.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| > are you really asking me to explain why skin color is
| part of a demographic
|
| No, I didn't ask that.
| yuumei wrote:
| That irked me too. Expecting the company to not be roughly 82%
| white British.. in the UK. Pretty racist
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah. I was going to make the same point. It _seems_ like this
| person has some kind of issue with peoples skin colour or
| something.
|
| Hmmm, thinking back over it maybe she's internalised the US
| diversity thing and is judging everything through that lens?
| Tade0 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| She said demographics -- the person who you are responding to
| said 'race'.
| unpopular42 wrote:
| You 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
|
| Replace race with skin color in the GP comment, the point
| still stands
| Eisenstein wrote:
| You 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.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN or use the site
| for ideological battle. We've had to ask you this before.
| Also, please don't break the site guidelines regardless
| of what another commenter has been doing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| unpopular42 wrote:
| Now 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.
| dang wrote:
| You broke the site guidelines in several places in this
| thread, but here you crossed the line very badly. We ban
| accounts that attack others like this, so please don't do
| it again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| hacliff wrote:
| Matches 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 wrote:
| > I'm curious what candidates make it through.
|
| compliant ones I would expect, which seems to be the aim of the
| process.
| sho_hn wrote:
| They 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]
| throw16180339 wrote:
| This process isn't accidentally awful; it's deliberately targeted
| to exclude anyone who isn't a young true believer.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I got a whiff from the gaming industry off of it, so I second
| that sentiment.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| (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...
| tristor wrote:
| Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software
| companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons,
| because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than
| software.
|
| That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies
| / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making
| offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much
| less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me (I'm in
| Colorado, so they're legally obligated to provide a salary
| range) about a job that required a very specialized skillset at
| a senior level that I happen to have (although it's nothing to
| do with what I do /now/), and the top of the salary range was
| $20k/yr less than what I was making doing that same work in
| 2014, almost a decade ago and more than $100k/yr less than I
| make now. There's a HUGE disconnect between management at most
| companies, especially in HR roles, and the actual market for
| specialized technical labor. At least in the US, I attribute
| this to HR roles treating Department of Labor stats like the
| gospel, when job categories in DoL aren't modernized and
| therefore cover such a broad range of subjobs that they are
| diluted and meaningless, while at the same time average salary
| is heavily skewed by the fact that largest employer in the US
| across almost all job categories is the federal government,
| which has a notoriously low payscale for skilled labor (which
| attracts exactly the sort of toads on a log you'd expect).
|
| I am not currently in the market for a new job, but I switched
| roles at the beginning of 2022 and I made it a point of
| starting my conversations with recruiters by telling them
| rather directly "I have no concerns about my ability to do
| whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are
| you willing to pay me what I'm worth?" The company I eventually
| accepted a position at had to go through a lot of internal
| bureaucracy to make my offer, but only put me through one round
| of interviewing before they did the legwork to make sure they
| could make it worth my while before running me through their
| entire process. I think it's especially rich that HR people
| think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an
| insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially
| considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers
| and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > I don't fully understand the reasons
|
| It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more
| demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and
| supply & demand takes care of the rest.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| > I have found that there has been a rash of companies /
| recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making
| offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much
| less in 2023
|
| I think this has an angle of the artificially created
| "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is
| a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than
| any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick
| a few people into lower paid jobs.
|
| > I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is
| necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing
| to pay me what I'm worth?
|
| That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a
| new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any
| recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full
| details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront
| with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).
| IshKebab wrote:
| Hasn't been my experience. I switched from software (C++
| compiler & profiler development) to silicon verification and
| got a decent pay rise (in the UK).
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software
| companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons,
| because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than
| software.
|
| I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in
| the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60%
|
| In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was
| wildly unstable in the 90s.
| idkyall wrote:
| > Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software
| companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons,
| because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than
| software.
|
| My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs
| hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain
| sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs
| are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a
| piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With
| hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw
| material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $
| to go around.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| > I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're
| wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low
| offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering
| there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR
| folks (who are a dime a dozen).
|
| I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can
| be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say
| security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you
| will never see them, you will never interact with them
| outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them
| anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing
| nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex,
| competing organizational systems (office politics, board
| concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to
| manage them in such a way that none of the competing
| organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while
| having none of the power to actually change anything by
| themselves.
| tristor wrote:
| My comment wasn't saying that HR wasn't important or that
| their job was easy, it's saying that it doesn't require
| skills which are hard to acquire in the labor market. If we
| use credentials as a corollary for skills (which,
| ironically, is understating my case), then there are a
| vastly higher number of available persons in the labor
| market with the necessary credentials/skills to be in an HR
| role than to be in a technical knowledge worker role like
| software development, operations, or even product
| management.
|
| The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor
| of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative
| difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are
| "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in
| some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry
| from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be
| significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs.
|
| Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day
| in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't
| credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less
| than software developers because the only qualification
| barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically
| disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from
| the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel,
| you can dig a ditch.
|
| Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it
| only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared
| to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very
| dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically
| skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR
| person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're
| wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in
| these situations. The candidate's time is actually more
| valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time,
| especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier
| roles you can have in HR.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all
| day in an air-conditioned office
|
| Not it isn't. I haven't dug ditches, but I've done other
| physical labor. At the end of the day your body is
| exhausted, but your mind is still sharp and ready for
| more. By contrast when programming all day your mind is
| exhausted, but your body is ready for more. Different
| types of hard, but both are very hard in their own way.
|
| Actually most ditch digging these days is done with a
| machine. I don't know how hard that is, but I assume it
| moves more to the repetitive mental work side.
| tristor wrote:
| I have dug ditches, I've also written software. Digging
| ditches is harder. I also explicitly was referring to
| doing it manually, not with a machine. There's some
| philosophical conversation to be had here with the
| satisfaction of work with tangible outcomes vs intangible
| outcomes, but that wasn't the point of my comment, it was
| about supply/demand. You can get unskilled day laborers
| to dig ditches, you cannot get unskilled day laborers to
| write software.
| tetrep wrote:
| > Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software
| companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons,
| because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than
| software.
|
| This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few
| devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best
| guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to
| the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for
| the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too
| many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.
| vincentkriek wrote:
| This was my experience with canonical. I made it through the
| interview process to the offer stage and the offer was far from
| competitive for my country (the Netherlands).
|
| Was bit bummed about this, I would love to work for canonical
| as they do great stuff and their embedded Linux offering is a
| great product. Just doesn't really make sense sadly.
| nfriedly wrote:
| That sucks. Personally, I won't go beyond the first interview
| without at least a brief discussion of salary.
|
| I always ask what they're targeting first, but if they decide
| to be cagey, I'll throw out a range where the low end is
| comfortably above what I'm currently making, enough that I
| would actually consider the offer.
|
| I already get paid pretty well, so I think this has saved
| myself and others quite a lot of time.
|
| (I also tend to reply to recruiter emails with a polite "no,
| thanks, but can you share the pay range for this role?". Maybe
| half reply with numbers, which is enough to keep a good sense
| of where the market is at.)
| fluoridation wrote:
| Did you not try to negotiate up?
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Sure, 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 wrote:
| If 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?
| RobertSponge wrote:
| Did you agree to 8 rounds of interview, without knowing if
| there is a match between your salary expectation and their
| salary range?
| hashtag-til wrote:
| That's a common mistake, I agree.
|
| In my case, they knew my current salary and expected salary
| from the first call.
|
| They didn't commit to anything beforehand, and maybe that's
| my mistake. OTOH it is quite a bet to spend a lot of someones
| (mine, in this case) betting they're going to accept a
| smaller salary just for the privilege of working for you.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| The hiring game is really varied across their teams fwiw. I get
| the impression the technical lead of some group has total
| discretion over how to arrive at the yes/no call.
| michaelteter wrote:
| This is exactly why companies need to list the salary range for
| a position.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is exactly why most do not, unless they legally have to.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Should have told them you were committed but they were
| obviously not serious about hiring you with that offer.
|
| I won't even interview without a salary range being provided
| and then acknowledging my minimum. Otherwise it's a waste of
| everyones time. Any company that has an issue with this is
| going to be difficult to work for and treat you like you are
| lucky to be there.
| pcrh wrote:
| To 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.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Isn'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.
| [deleted]
| TrackerFF wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The 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.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Depends 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.)
| thayne wrote:
| It 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| It's always fun getting rejection letters from companies,
| long forgotten, after months of silence. What were they even
| hiring for?
| rurp wrote:
| > 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It depends where you're going. Villas Las Estrellas requires
| an appendix removal.
| verzali wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That doesn't sound nearly as bad as implementing quicksort
| on a whiteboard :)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| Wowsa. That reads like a B movie noir comedy.
| triyambakam wrote:
| I would watch it!
| jzb wrote:
| That's probably a good sign you don't want that job.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > there was no-one at his desk
|
| Sounds like a vacancy
| christophilus wrote:
| Yeah. 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."
| smeagull wrote:
| Actually 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Finally a good use case for gpt: filling out 41 paragraphs of
| q&a sent to you by people who disrespect you
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| devil'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.
| realusername wrote:
| Having 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| This is so unusual it borders on unbelievable
| yard2010 wrote:
| In my last job search I had like 1 case like this out of
| 30-40. Might be my numbers though
| ghaff wrote:
| Is 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.
| rcbdev wrote:
| I was hired on the spot after a 15 minute interview at a
| huge international bank. If they really like your profile
| this can happen.
| bgirard wrote:
| I'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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I had a similar, but inverse experience - was brought in
| for an all-day interview, and after half a day both they
| and I realized that I wasn't going to be a good fit, so
| they let me go.
|
| No hard feelings on my end; I was out of my depth at the
| time, and knew it, and was glad I wasn't going to have to
| waste the rest of my day and theirs.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| heard of it, but never happened to me. The closest "turn
| around" was 2 weeks after getting a response from a
| recruiter (which took 3 weeks, so let's just ignore
| that). But that was because stage 3-6 of the interview
| was compressed into a full work day of revolving teams to
| talk to.
|
| Given how the other processes work, I sort of prefer to
| get it over with. But I understand that that's not viable
| for people searching while still working full time.
| xen0 wrote:
| Do you now have any 'work examplesin obscure language'?
|
| Or was the manager just interested in trivia?
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The job was part of rewrite from the obscure language to
| C#. So I guess some, but mostly I just need to be able to
| read it.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| > 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.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Lets 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
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Did 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 wrote:
| Working 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| depereo wrote:
| I've got a mate trying to apply to jobs in the
| construction sector and it's still a godawful HR mess. A
| cousin struggling with architecture firm jobs. Even
| emergency services roles are like this. This isn't a
| problem of the tech sector, I think it's a problem of
| risk aversion and ass-covering being more important than
| delivery.
|
| If you're understaffed and can't meet goals it's because
| you're understaffed and it's the business's fault. If you
| have enough people and can't meet goals it's because
| you're messing up and it's your fault. If you hire
| someone and don't get 'enough output' from them then you
| made a bad call and it's your fault. It's damn near
| incentivized to slow-roll hiring and agonize over the
| choices instead of getting people in the door and working
| on your tasks.
| mcguire wrote:
| Well, 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| bloaf wrote:
| Which is fine, but the point here is that as you increase the
| onerousness of your interview process you don't just get
| diminishing returns, your ability to attract good people _at
| all_ actually declines past some point. Qualified people have
| other options.
| pengaru wrote:
| I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
|
| The issue is more that this process can't possibly be
| selecting for the best hires.
| danenania wrote:
| Unless 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| There'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.
| isk517 wrote:
| By hiring their biggest fans they're guaranteed to produce a
| product that their biggest fans will love. Everyone maybe not
| so much but their biggest fans will love it.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Too bad that common vision isn't a Desktop that isn't
| absolutely garbage.
|
| Maybe they should spend more time hiring people that actually
| make competitive applications against Microsoft than die-hard
| nutjobs who think waiting a year to work for an open-source
| company is a good idea.
|
| Microsoft might not have 70% of the desktop market if they'd
| done that.
|
| Apple managed to claw back 15% of the desktop market to 20%
| with their BSD-clone OS, and it still has garbage software
| compared to what's available on Windows, but at least it's a
| start...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Who's a die-hard canonical fan?
| Alupis wrote:
| Who'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.
| kragen wrote:
| i 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-...
|
| 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
| Alupis wrote:
| If you were looking for a new job today, would you
| tolerate an 81 day process like the OP did? My guess is
| probably not, unless you were just in love with Canonical
| and their mission (ie. it was your dream job).
|
| Most available top-tier talent can land a job in much
| less than 81 days with much less effort at much more
| prestigious places... and they won't wait around for an
| average offer like what will come from Canonical.
|
| By dragging out their process, Canonical either
| intentionally or unintentionally limits themselves to
| people who really just love Canonical and it's mission
| (and/or people like Mark). Additionally, this lengthy
| process ensures the most desirable candidates self-
| eliminate from the pool due to accepting offers elsewhere
| in the meantime.
| kragen wrote:
| yeah, i would, unless i were desperate to get some income
| (as in fact i am right now, but almost never have been)
|
| like, yeah, if i had just been laid off and i was trying
| to get two or three offers on the table at the same time
| so i could choose between them, getting me an offer in a
| couple of weeks instead of three months would be crucial
|
| but usually when i've interviewed for a job, i've already
| had another job, or at least hourly contract work
| sufficient to pay the bills
| [deleted]
| tschwimmer wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| klntsky wrote:
| > $X is bad
|
| > $X bad on purpose
|
| > $X is made to appear bad for those who are not die-hard $X
| fans
|
| You just invented a consipracy theory that has surprisingly
| huge explanative power in modern world
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| They 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.
| webkike wrote:
| I 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
| joeuser0123 wrote:
| This 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.
| DanieleProcida wrote:
| https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews
| benhoyt wrote:
| In 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 - "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!
| caboteria wrote:
| Their 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 wrote:
| Ooh yes how clever
| diegoveralli wrote:
| I 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.
| markshuttle wrote:
| In my experience it's university access that's very heavily
| shaped by privilege, not high school.
|
| High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much
| everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost
| any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor,
| you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person
| now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear
| how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty
| of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with
| lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process,
| it's a useful reference point that is _less_ susceptible to
| circumstance than things like "which university did you go
| to".
|
| We now hire much from many more countries than we used to,
| and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to
| work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be
| cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for
| our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we
| want to work with people who are conscientious and care about
| getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use
| form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most
| profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make
| that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?
| pydry wrote:
| I 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.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Where 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.
| artyom wrote:
| This is just a creative take on the utterly broken interview
| process from software companies, that we all are probably too
| familiar with.
| rcarmo wrote:
| A 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).
| thiht wrote:
| > interviewed me while having dinner (on his end)
|
| Wtf? Couldn't he have done that at a more convenient time?
| re-thc wrote:
| [flagged]
| echelon wrote:
| I'd rather him have the respect to not be doing anything
| else at all while conducting an interview.
| hadlock wrote:
| I would imagine he is on the phone 8-12 hours a day when not
| at the office, and still 4-6 hours a day at the office.
| Someone at his level, especially as a founder/owner is
| talking to somebody pretty much at all waking hours, and
| meals happen during calls unless it's an exceptionally
| important meeting.
| liendolucas wrote:
| If you were _that_ busy you wouldn 't even care
| interviewing anyone, you're supposed to delegate
| responsibility to the HR team. What would be the point to
| get involved in a one-time interaction with someone that is
| (I assume) in another plane to his day to day management of
| the company? I kind see this like: "Our king has the very
| last word on the matter, so good luck with him" which is
| nonsense.
| markshuttle wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the candidate was interested in
| a product management role for our cloud offerings, which
| is something that I care a great deal about. Hi, Rui ;)
| And yes, I'm on calls through lunch and dinner, so I
| sometimes get to have lunch or dinner with candidates.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Hi Mark! Yep. I didn't think our chat was weird, mind.
| Just anecdotal, in the sense of something that stuck with
| me.
| ghaff wrote:
| Doesn't seem that odd? I imagine he has a pretty busy
| schedule.
| ugh123 wrote:
| I've learned over many years that someone who eats during
| an interview or meeting (while you're not the one eating),
| doesn't give a shit about you and perhaps has already made
| up their mind.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| This would be a deal breaker for me. 0 respect.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone at
| a company took someone out to a meal? The latter seems
| perfectly normal and I've been in that situation a number
| of times. Obviously you ought to have the opportunity to
| eat but having especially a more casual conversation over
| a meal just doesn't seem odd to me.
| deaddodo wrote:
| It doesn't sound like they had a shared meal, but that he
| ate his dinner during a pre-allocated meeting time via
| zoom/google meet/etc.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Shuttleworth is a _very_ hands-on manager, which is both
| a blessing, if you like his style, or a curse, if you don
| 't.
| pharrington wrote:
| That sounds like a euphemism for "micromanager".
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| > Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone
| at a company took someone out to a meal?
|
| It sounds more like situation where he was eating on zoom
| with mic on, while the second person just talked.
| ghaff wrote:
| In that case, it's entirely possible I misunderstood the
| situation.
| setgree wrote:
| In my dream world we would normalize things like eating
| on a zoom call. People gotta eat, it's no big deal. Maybe
| if they're audibly slurping soup that's a problem in
| terms of noise, but that would also be a problem during a
| boardroom meeting.
|
| (I once got in a _lot_ of trouble for having a bowl of
| cereal while I was a silent participant in a call with a
| client at a fintech company, so I understand that
| attitudes like yours are common.)
| ghaff wrote:
| It's one thing, on a team meeting, to somewhat
| embarrasingly say "I'm going to go off-video because I
| haven't had breakfast yet" and it's quite another thing
| to be eating when on a call with a client.
| setgree wrote:
| Yes, in retrospect I obviously should have waited as a
| matter of norms (that I didn't know). I'm saying that I
| would like for that norm to be relaxed.
| S201 wrote:
| People also gotta shit. Should I do a Zoom call while on
| the toilet?
|
| It's a matter of where is your attention. If you're
| eating you're not fully focused on the other participant
| you're interacting with and not being fully present for
| them is rude.
| hobr wrote:
| Isn't this a false equivalence?
|
| I'll often eat with other people, but I wouldn't take a
| sh*t with them.
| S201 wrote:
| If society agrees that eating during workplace meetings
| is acceptable, then so be it. My point was that "it's a
| biological need therefore it's acceptable" isn't an
| excuse to use for eating in a meeting (working lunches
| excluded as all participants understand the intention of
| those).
| 9dev wrote:
| It's okay, we're all grownups here. You can say shit
| without censoring yourself.
| toyg wrote:
| I don't disagree, but on the other hand: Lloyd's used to
| be a London pub where merchants would hang out all day,
| carrying out their business as they ate. Business deals
| at the highest level are still routinely done over
| breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
|
| I think the problem, as usual, is the power imbalance:
| they are eating and you are not, in addition to the fact
| that they have the money and you don't - so it becomes a
| bit too humiliating.
| windmark wrote:
| Apart from it being over Zoom, the main differentiator is
| that only one party eats. That's a clear show of power.
| What you are talking about is that that both meet over
| food, which is very different.
| ghaff wrote:
| I gather the situation here was that he was multi-tasking
| over Zoom. But, yes, in-person meetings/conversations
| over a meal are not necessarily ideal but they're very
| commonplace in a business context and range from the very
| casual to more formal. (If you're at an event for
| business partners/customers/media/etc. they're pretty
| much inevitable.)
| physicsguy wrote:
| I recently turned down a job where the CEO of a startup
| came into an interview unexpectedly, and started texting
| or checking his emails or something halfway through. It
| wasn't the only thing that put me off but it certainly
| was a big part.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but what's MBB?
| mertd wrote:
| Apparently it's the big three of management consulting.
| rendall wrote:
| I 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?
| rcarmo wrote:
| Borrowing a quote from a recent movie, I have a very
| particular set of skills :)
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > union ... and
|
| Unions are (by and large) 'inclusive or's, for an 'and'
| you're thinking of intersections.
| alephnerd wrote:
| For 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.
| Delk wrote:
| People might prefer not to single out the company even if
| they only interviewed at one.
|
| Just a guess, though.
| rcarmo wrote:
| More than one in each set. But no, singling out isn't a
| thing I do, unless there are memorable bits in the
| process---and you always learn something by it.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain& Company.
| morelish wrote:
| Bill Gates can sleep happy knowing Ubuntu will never be a
| challenge to windows
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I 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.
| weinzierl wrote:
| 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
|
| 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/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.marksh...
|
| https://archive.is/o2rJa
| hluska wrote:
| It's time for me to leave Ubuntu behind for good. I can't
| support anyone who is this much of an asshole.
| qaq wrote:
| Honest question why?
| weinzierl wrote:
| C'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 wrote:
| Unless, 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| They also interned Japanese-Americans, caused the Arab
| Spring/Syrian Civil War, made the atomic bomb (oh, you
| mentioned that one!), ran numerous undisclosed human
| experimentation projects, imposed multiple central
| banking systems on the United States, caused the mortgage
| crisis, and gave China most favoured nation status.
| [deleted]
| devwastaken wrote:
| [flagged]
| kennyChinzy wrote:
| [dead]
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I 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.)
| markshuttle wrote:
| Exactly :) It was still a brat comment though. I'd
| forgotten about that. Thank goodness we grow out of some
| things.
| bdav2418 wrote:
| > (Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)
|
| Yeah, those drone strikes from the Obama administration
| were pretty bad.
| delecti wrote:
| Obama 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 wrote:
| [flagged]
| cdchn wrote:
| Maybe the ones that all the indictments just happened
| for?
| appplication wrote:
| I 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.
| JimDabell wrote:
| They 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.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Every famous computer scientist is a complete asshole.
| s_dev wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Ive been feeling like Ubuntu has been failing technically
| for years and this thread is really helping explain why.
| hluska wrote:
| Would 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.
| cbozeman wrote:
| Yeah, 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 wrote:
| That'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.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| he's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary
| people and made fun of george bush?
| phist_mcgee wrote:
| Twisting the signal/noise knob this way may not attract all
| or even the right kind of extraordinary people you think
| you will.
| [deleted]
| zer8k wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| The irony of almost anyone on Earth, let alone some no-name
| person on HN, calling Musk a moron, is rich.
| hcks wrote:
| Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical
| accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year
| uni students?
| count wrote:
| Heh. Curious, how old are you? When did you start using
| linux?
|
| I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in
| 'brand' equity.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| With fear of creating another Putnam moment on HN what
| exactly did you do that is so much greater than Ubuntu?
| IshKebab wrote:
| He didn't say he did do something incredible. Mark
| Shuttleworth did.
| graton wrote:
| So they should compare their accomplishments to something
| that has had hundreds of full-time employees working on
| since 2004?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Well, apparently parent doesn't think that is an
| accomplishment, so yes.
| pohuing wrote:
| It's also not true and gp corrected themselves
| weinzierl wrote:
| You'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.
| re-thc wrote:
| > What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the
| way?
|
| Credited for creating the most painful interview process.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Ubuntu is now the "Windows" of the Linux world. It's pretty
| successful if you ask me.
| dagw wrote:
| _What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the
| way_
|
| I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked
| like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge
| deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp.
| media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro
| at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The
| desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured
| as well with most defaults working the way most people
| expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they
| would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in
| the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was
| an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge
| deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could
| take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just
| accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working
| Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge
| accomplishment.
|
| We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made
| over the years and what they have become, but let's not
| pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most
| significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
| aulin wrote:
| Please, desktop was plain GNOME.
|
| Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome
| based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a
| permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs.
| They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers
| (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages,
| drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and
| debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
|
| That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and
| Nvidia drivers.
|
| And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary
| themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based
| projects always failed to achieve.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same
| as the Ubuntu install process.
|
| As someone at the time who didn't know anything about
| Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to
| be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used
| to with other OSes
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same
| as the Ubuntu install process.
|
| That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME
| and that experience was the same as any other distro
| running plain GNOME.
|
| What set them apart was the installer and the rest of
| their post.
| vetinari wrote:
| But the desktop was not plain GNOME.
|
| It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the
| time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that
| plain GNOME didn't.
|
| That is valid even today; just the choice of default font
| is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in
| the same league.
| prmoustache wrote:
| There was zero polishing appart from different background
| color and theme accent in their early releases. It was
| just a debian with package versions similar to SID with
| debian's experimental installer.
|
| What they really did well and made them known very well
| is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other
| distros you either had to buy them from a store, download
| it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with
| cdrom install of a different distro every month.
|
| That was a big deal when very few people had access to
| fast internet connections.
| deaddodo wrote:
| In the early days it wasn't "polished" in any way _other_
| than the font or color choice. Which just about _every_
| distro was doing at the time (Fedora _also_ had a clean
| and liked theme).
|
| But sure, here's the comparison.
|
| Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&im
| age=ubuntu_histo...
|
| Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/com
| mons/2/28/Fedora_C...
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.
|
| Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the
| game changer was the installer and the willingness to
| chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at
| the height of its influence and the terrible that was
| setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci
| students, let alone the general public.
|
| The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still
| had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros)
| was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to
| make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100%
| committed since before even starting, and it reached many
| countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain
| to download ISOs.
|
| All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a
| pretty big deal.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.
|
| That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity
| theme is _much_ closer to what standard GNOME looked like
| back then. Which goes against the original point that
| they were especially polished.
|
| > Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming,
| the game changer was the installer and the willingness to
| chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at
| the height of its influence and the terrible that was
| setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci
| students, let alone the general public.
|
| What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common
| these days? First of all, _many_ distros eschewed "Free
| Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc;
| and they definitely did it better than the early versions
| of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to
| install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was
| reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The
| Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same
| experience as the standard debian installer that early
| versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two
| minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge
| then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary
| drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that
| didn't offer it.
|
| But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.
|
| Here's the Ubuntu 4.10 install:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLX3vJgLdrw
|
| Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a
| year and a half _before_ the first version of Ubuntu
| (even with the fact that this person chose to manually
| partition their disks, it 's pretty streamlined):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6c3prrIhzI
|
| If you honestly believe the Ubuntu install is easier _or_
| more friendly than the Fedora one, you 're delusional.
|
| And for further comparison:
|
| Mandrake 10.1:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTnKhruF9kc
|
| Linspire 5.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lL4HE5a0o
|
| Yeah, you're right. They're _much_ more difficult than
| Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").
|
| In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too
| far when they started developing in their own bubble and
| refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time
| they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their
| overly opinionated stances and for holding back
| advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the
| Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to
| Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with
| Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty _now_ to
| show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they
| start [and always lose] to do things "their way":
| systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland,
| GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.
|
| Their reputation has _always_ been that they use the
| Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and
| give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved
| in the community.
|
| > The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they
| still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary
| distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was
| too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you
| weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it
| reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be
| a huge pain to download ISOs.
|
| There you go. _This_ is why they were popular. In a time
| when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-
| Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a
| millionaire cover the cost of sending it to you was a big
| deal. Ubuntu 4.10-6.10 didn 't get popular for being
| pretty, or easy to use, or having a great out-of-the-box
| experience; they did despite those things because it was
| super easy to get 5 discs and hand them out to your
| friends who knew nothing about Linux. They _then_ worked
| on making the out-of-box experience better for themselves
| (and only themselves) while leeching off the established
| distros who _did_ work with the community. Red Hat
| /Fedora is the big one, but Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, etc
| were also big contributors. Hell, it was common for
| _Microsoft_ to contribute more to the Linux upstream than
| Canonical did.
|
| > All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a
| pretty big deal.
|
| The one action. Making discs easy to get and distribute
| to people unaware.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Goes to show that one thing is creating technology, and
| another thing is creating a product people can use.
|
| That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was
| also the height of accomplishment for Canonical.
|
| They were weaker in the technology aspect and,
| ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so
| space for community participation was limited, which made
| them lose the mystique by year two or three.
|
| As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely
| packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go,
| they tried to get into vertical integration and more
| infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't
| their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably
| corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
| ftaghn wrote:
| > That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs
| and Nvidia drivers.
|
| Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi
| support was still extremely immature when the first
| ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-
| tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were
| on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in
| any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro
| like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time
| depended on one of those drivers, the original developer
| probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver
| and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to
| adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time
| on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running.
| Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff?
| ah, nonono.
|
| By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary
| driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that
| weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.
|
| It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD
| installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD
| distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the
| desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to
| what Ubuntu preselected.
|
| It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages
| without the breakages that happened routinely in sid
| (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major
| struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten
| a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and
| containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)
|
| As a long time linux user who started with slackware and
| the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems
| and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to
| appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked
| it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss
| with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was
| absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between
| distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu
| any more convenient than regular debian and even arch
| isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some
| package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss
| with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out,
| it was a revelation.
|
| And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt
| stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came
| out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they
| didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer.
| Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that
| users should generally suspend their computers instead of
| shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),
|
| while Unity introduced really innovative features that I
| still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed
| you to use functions from any GTK software by typing
| words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched.
| It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more
| than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to
| find the right submenu.
|
| Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding
| the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the
| era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a
| full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation
| fault dialogs.
|
| Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a
| really sad state of affair.
|
| I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity
| they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux
| desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much
| worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and
| apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a
| proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that
| does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it.
| Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the
| experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the
| OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more
| recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish
| is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't
| really improve enough there to justify their existence),
| I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration
| of the stable release, only when the time comes for the
| next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane
| desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware
| by default. It's the zen I need.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Mandrake/Mandriva distribution was easy to use/install, but
| since it was from a French company, it never had any
| traction, if I remember were, it was created in late 90s.
| deaddodo wrote:
| > So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback)
| worked out of the box than any other distro at the time
|
| SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box"
| just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions.
| Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't,
| but they were trying to make a point about free software
| and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on
| included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge
| to your repos to fix, however.
|
| The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they
| were easier, they were popular because they followed the
| AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They
| leaned into making the install process easier much later
| (around the 6-7 versions).
|
| > The desktop they provided was was really nice and well
| configured as well with most defaults working the way most
| people expecting them to.
|
| Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme.
| The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to
| Fedora, until they started forcing in their own
| customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style
| titlebars/menus, etc).
|
| > Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an
| install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back
| when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an
| impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge
| deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
|
| Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular
| and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
|
| Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any
| of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that
| rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple
| communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc)
| over their collective ego until their personal projects
| inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I think you shouldn't undersell the impact of Ubuntu
| shipping with binaries/installers for proprietary
| drivers, media codecs and things like adobe flash. These
| were easy enough to install on other distros, but for a
| noob user Ubuntu was more streamlined.
|
| Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just
| an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
| deaddodo wrote:
| No one's underselling this, you're _overselling_ this.
| Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn 't
| become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases.
| 2-2.5 years _after_ the first version.
|
| SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping
| proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish;
| four years before Ubuntu did.
|
| There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on
| Free Software turned people away. However, even if they
| did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is
| today. Because their popularity mostly came from the
| millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
|
| Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the
| most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same
| for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs,
| with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego
| wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge,
| despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux
| community overall.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| Canonical'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 wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take
| a less doctrinaire approach to including software that
| was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time)
| than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-
| box experience for casual users.
| vetinari wrote:
| Canonical, being incorporated on Isle of Man, could make
| moves, that distributions rooted in US could not. MP3 is
| the prime example.
| gopher_space wrote:
| At this point you might have been rolling your own video
| drivers and hoping your CRT didn't explode, so it was a
| bit of a step up.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Huge red flag
|
| What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
| glistenemployed wrote:
| I've also willingly subjected myself to this draconian
| interview process once and what I gathered from one of the
| engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on
| and still very much antagonizing.
|
| Take that as you will, but there's probably not been much
| change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wouldn't call that joke antagonizing particularly,
| though? Or do you mean something separate?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| It's certainly antagonizing to me, but maybe that's just
| because I work for the government and like to think that
| I do extraordinary work.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Did you work for the Bush administration? If you did, you
| should probably accept the criticism. If not, well, how
| is 20 year old criticism of the government any skin off
| your back?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Depends on how you take it. I worked for the government
| during the Bush administration, but not in the
| administrative staff itself. It's just a shitty and
| unnecessary jab that rubs me entirely the wrong way.
| markshuttle wrote:
| Well, yes, it was a shitty and unnecessary jab. Sorry for
| that. But really, it was a jab at the GW Bush White House
| administration, not the civil service. I grew up a great
| fan of the US and Bush-Iraq felt like something important
| in the world had died. It felt like stupidity on a
| generational scale, that would have terrible consequences
| for the US. And that was before the torture.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Hey, don't worry. Everyone who pays taxes works for the
| government :-)
| version_five wrote:
| Yeah I don't see working Canonical as an obvious target for
| the most ambitious, but there's nothing wrong with him
| having aspired to that at some point. The dig agaisnt the
| government is completely reasonable. Also somehow ironic
| because nobody has more hoops to jump through as an
| employer than the government.
| kennyChinzy wrote:
| Eh, a year ago I interviewed at a startup that has since
| died. I was on round 8 when I bailed. SaaS has imported
| the bureaucratic mindset of the universities that cranked
| out all these founders.
| ghaff wrote:
| Over much of the 2000s, it's fair to say that
| Shuttleworth/Canonical had pretty grand ambitions.
| They're still around--which is a not inconsiderable
| achievement in its own right--but in an era where the
| cloud providers have their own Linux flavors and other
| distros have generally leveled the usability playing
| field, Ubuntu just never really broke out.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I always hated the kid at school who took easy classes and
| got a 4.0 vs doing worse in hard classes.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| [dead]
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [dead]
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| Yes, 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.
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah this is not such a great signal once you're past a certain
| maturity level
|
| But hopefully it stayed in the past
| kramerger wrote:
| Mark 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.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| I'm just annoyed at how much they spam LinkedIn by posting the
| same remote job listing in 500 different cities.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Job 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| jsight wrote:
| Just wait until AI bots are the things doing the interview
| process to insure the company doesn't get sued for unfairness.
| est23 wrote:
| Is not an hiring process, is squid game
| renewiltord wrote:
| Making 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.
| sohrob wrote:
| I can't help but wonder how many highly talented people Canonical
| lost out on through this ridiculously long and inconsiderate
| vetting process.
| itomato wrote:
| To 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.
| ilc wrote:
| I 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/
|
| 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.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I 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?
| bettercallsalad wrote:
| While 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| Part 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.
| gwright wrote:
| > Part 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)
|
| I once received an application for someone looking for a
| position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing
| was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)
| tbrownaw wrote:
| ... Now I'm trying to imagine a train made out of Al2O3:Cr
| .
| jherskovic wrote:
| Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field,
| you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate
| people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and
| many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor
| a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-
| level analyst position. We're a hospital.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. It goes both ways. Interview processes may often be
| terrible. But it's also the case that, in a world where you
| don't even need to put a stamp on an envelope, a lot of
| people looking for a job/any job (or hoping to get a story
| written about their client, etc.) will just blast out
| email/applications to any valid or even invalid endpoint.
|
| ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or
| past history that really jumps off the page, it _is_ a
| numbers game to a large degree.
| ghaff wrote:
| When I applied for a government job many years ago, I had to
| take a number of standardized tests of various kinds.
| eschneider wrote:
| At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the
| process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| If 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.
| bettercallsalad wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| In this case, the company seemed to be very hung up on
| irrelevant bullsh*t. Huge red flag.
| n6h6 wrote:
| Jesus fucking Christ
| Balgair wrote:
| What 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.
| tokai wrote:
| Just seem like Canonical in a nut shell. Burning energy on
| nonsense going nowhere.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| I'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!
| nirui wrote:
| Actually, 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.
| crabbone wrote:
| I 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.
| kramerger wrote:
| Here 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| paxys wrote:
| Does 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?
| [deleted]
| Kagerjay wrote:
| I 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
| znpy wrote:
| understandable, 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.
| kennyChinzy wrote:
| [dead]
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Randomness 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 wrote:
| I believe most recruiting processes are worse than chance
| so skip the weights.
|
| Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for
| scammers, done.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| A lot of the back of the envelope math points to new hire
| failure rates of around 50%, where failure is if the
| candidate is still there in 18 months.
|
| Only about 19% would be considered "successful" hires.
|
| Also only about 11% were not successful due to purely
| lacking technical skills. like I'm sure we all have
| stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do
| something basic like ssh with a key or something, but in
| many cases that's not the issue.
|
| https://sowelo.eu/unsuccessful-recruitment/
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't
| know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or
| something_
|
| Not knowing how to do that, or not knowing how to google
| how to do that?
|
| I also joined some jobs as a noob when switching domains,
| where I was lacking skills that the more seasoned people
| would consider as being "basic", but I could also google
| what I was lacking most of the time and learn on the fly.
| ghaff wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Sure I agree. I was abit hyberbolic, but not much, if you
| account for all the bad processes.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| As 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| Yeah, they're hiring process is biased towards people that love
| talking about themselves over and over again.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| If that was true I'd be CEO at this point. I can ramble for
| hours about my cat, my hobbies, and my side projects.
|
| (I don't think it's true)
| convolvatron wrote:
| and 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| HR might be somewhat interested in that. Most managers
| won't give a rat's ass.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| OK, 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 wrote:
| "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.
| mouzogu wrote:
| > Day 81: Automated rejection
|
| says it all really. just about done with this silly industry.
| throwaway85858 wrote:
| This is basically my experience too. For me it was demeaning,
| exhausting and a complete waste of time.
| ylyn wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Same here. And they're a BYOD shop too, which I found strange.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Considering the underpowered equipment that often gets issued
| as standard hardware by IT departments, I wouldn't be that
| unhappy about BYOD.
| dv_dt wrote:
| Whatever other faults the Canonical process has, BYOD sort of
| makes sense to me from a dogfooding perspective with a
| company carrying a major desktop Linux offering.
|
| Would look for a budget or have it reflected in their offer
| analysis though.
| antisthenes wrote:
| They should give people devices just for wasting enough of
| their time with a lengthy interview process.
|
| Like, sorry you didn't make it past the final stage, but
| here's a nice Framework laptop with Ubuntu.
| LandR wrote:
| BYOD ?
| not_the_fda wrote:
| Bring Your Own Device i.e. laptop / dev machine
| Aeolun wrote:
| They're saving money on not buying equipment for their
| employees.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I'm surprised Amazon didn't come up with that idea a long
| time ago.
| joncrane wrote:
| They don't provide a laptop, AND your work computer must
| run Ubuntu.
| mattl wrote:
| Is it also a fully-remote company or do they have
| offices? My experience with Canonical has been pretty
| good from a customer perspective but I did have one sales
| guy call me with the most ridiculous levels of background
| noise.
| ghaff wrote:
| It is unusual although I use my own devices (running whatever
| I want to) even though I could get a standard-issue laptop.
| squidsoup wrote:
| They do pay for a laptop upgrade every three (iirc) years
| however.
| bluGill wrote:
| I 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.
| WWLink wrote:
| Hot 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.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| >Who are they trying to hire here?
|
| Self-described "Linux users".
| indrora wrote:
| The 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."
| pfdietz wrote:
| I 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.
| expertentipp wrote:
| That 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...
| bradley13 wrote:
| Insane. 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.
| [deleted]
| dcminter wrote:
| On 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:
| MockObject wrote:
| Asking about high school is ridiculous, but how is it age-
| ist? They had high schools back in the old days, too.
| dcminter wrote:
| Because it strongly implies that they are looking for
| people for whom high school experience was recent enough to
| be relevant to who they are now. For a 20-something this is
| (debatably) plausible. For a fifty or sixty year old it is
| at best a tenuous indicator.
| eschneider wrote:
| Yeah...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 wrote:
| I 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.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Same exact thing happened to me. I'm not writing an essay
| about my high school life, that's ridiculous.
|
| I don't do asymmetrical interviews. I'll consider a take in
| coding test in lieu of something else (or a very trivial
| one), but a written essay means I'm spending time and they
| are not. A phone or face to face interview requires an
| actual investment in their time, and doesn't treat my time
| as completely disposable.
| ghaff wrote:
| If your job involves communication in some form, it's
| reasonable to want to see an example--though I'd
| generally be pretty open to seeing previously written or
| recorded examples rather than something created
| specifically for the interview process.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the
| personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages.
|
| As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in
| undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in
| physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for
| experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a
| student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded
| and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions
| in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with
| my business partner to try to raise money to build
| accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that
| they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No
| investor would bite.
|
| But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since
| high school.
|
| Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a
| fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed,
| as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my
| interview is now up as well)
|
| That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process,
| signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep
| doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company.
| The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the
| same story. Its like their employees have written a
| collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious,
| blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional,
| their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that
| if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do
| not believe this to be the case.
|
| So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You
| don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a
| clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a
| materiel leadership change at the top.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| You bootstrapped a company without external investment?
|
| You're the one I want to get advice from on hackernews...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me
| the same story. Its like their employees have written a
| collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious,
| blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional,
| their processes are
|
| They know, and it's been discussed often.
|
| They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par
| wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans
| would rock the boat and demand too much money, and dip when
| it's clear the middle mgmt are clowns.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Ugh ... that's depressing.
| znpy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| i wonder what is preventing you from just lying. like, how
| are they going to confirm or deny what you're saying ?
|
| Frankly it seems like a way to have something they can use to
| reject you with something that's hard to debate against.
| ghaff wrote:
| That seems like a really terrible way to start off with a
| new company. But then I feel like that way about most of
| the scuzzy things some percentage of people have no qualms
| about doing if they can get off with them (e.g. working two
| full-time jobs at the same time).
| jsight wrote:
| I had the same thought. People have rightly pointed out the
| age bias, but there's also an implicit bias toward
| embellishment. People who are comfortable doing that can
| post lots of positive and mostly unverifiable things there.
|
| Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe
| overly positive unverifiable statements are actually
| negatives for them.
| dcminter wrote:
| > i wonder what is preventing you from just lying...
|
| Integrity? Also the self-interest of not wanting to work
| with liars and yes-men.
|
| Basically the same reason I don't lie during the rest of an
| interview process.
| itronitron wrote:
| The best tidbit of insight to hiring processes I've heard is
| that once your initial application/resume has cleared the first
| hurdle the company is basically looking for reasons to _not_
| hire you.
| bluGill wrote:
| Generally getting qualified candidates is the hard part. Once
| you can program basic things like fizzbuzz the only question
| is are you so bad we don't want to work with you even though
| you can do the job.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think that's true for more junior engineering roles, but
| I don't think that's as true for hiring senior engineers.
|
| Why would you pay a senior engineer salary for someone who
| is just barely competent enough to bang out CRUD apps, when
| you could spend a little more time searching and find
| someone who's a force multiplier and can lead projects?
| ghaff wrote:
| The very few jobs I've had in the decades since the first one
| post-grad school have been through some level of personal
| connection so I've never really gone through a standard
| interview process. The one person I know fairly well who worked
| for Canonical was there for about 6 months so there was
| obviously some disconnect.
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