My interview experience with Canonical | Hacker News Reader

My interview experience with Canonical

redbluemagenta.com

46 pointsmarvinpinto46 comments

I think the guy was just priced out.

Companies ought to be more upfront about their salary bands. It's pretty unreasonable to have candidates jump through a phone screen, complete a homework assignment, then travel to come meet in person for the whiteboard pain session before they know if a company can even afford them. I see more companies getting this right lately but we have a way to go.

Otherwise, it can be a huge waste of everyone's time. In this case it sounds like whoever negotiated didn't even have authority to make a deal, which is a pretty big flub on Canonical's part.

The other possibility is that one of the interviewers didn't get feedback in before the negotiation. That would still be a process fail.

A good developer/SRE should basically be able to justify her expense and essentially write her own check, splitting the value capture with the host company. Things are way off and asymmetric in the current hiring practice.

Thanks for posting. It's understandable to be upset here. More companies with bad interview processes should be outed so that they can improve and the rest of us don't have to discover them on our own.

Thanks BTW for understanding - that's my intention here, which is to call out bad companies for doing egregious sorts of things (along with me being pretty frustrated in general, which could've been in poor form but whatever)

They should have mentioned this earlier though. It seems pretty unprofessionally handled, and return he's being about as professional.

It's better to rise above things, but sometimes it's more evening to give what you get.

>"I think the guy was just priced out."

Indeed and I think this happens all the time. Recruiters play lots of games. They will reach out to candidates and get them into the interview pipeline in order to demonstrate to the company that are actually doing something meaningful.

I think that often times the recruiters are not forthcoming with others about the candidates salary expectations. I believe this results in lots of late stage rejections after many rounds of successful interviews. This costs recruiters nothing but candidates lots of time.

The article mentions salary negotiations and immediate interview feedback. It sounds like the executives decided not to hire for whatever reason (maybe salary).

>"A good developer/SRE should basically be able to justify her expense and essentially write her own check, splitting the value capture with the host company. Things are way off and asymmetric in the current hiring practice."

I was curious what you meant by "splitting the value capture with the host company." Similarly I would be interested in where you see asymmetry in the hiring process.

Not OP, but they likely meant that a developer or SRE can be a force multiplier that delivers value far in excess of salary and costs.

For example, if I produce value to the company of 400k/year, whther that's in new development, or optimising/supporting existing systems, and they incur costs of 50k/year in hiring me, then the 350k is up for discussion in terms of the distribution between salary/bonus and remaining with the company to reflect risk and capital etc.

That said, this calculation applies to most value-generating employees in most industries - techies, and HN in particular, are just more explicit in discussing it.

Probably a bad professional move for him to write this post and burn those bridges. It's suspicious that he didn't describe the execs interview. Normally when I've had a good technical interview the execs interview feels like just a formality, or it turns into them selling me on the company. The one time I saw a higher up override the technical manager was when the exec had a bias against consultants. Canonical being an open source company I imagine that more wishy-washy "values" criteria are given more weight.

Bridge burning is never a good professional move, and the author goes out of his way to be rude about it. I'm not sure what positive effect they thought this would have.

Based on this post I can't say I'd want to work with the author either.

I think it is a good thing he wrote this piece. It is better to go into an interview knowing about possible negative outcomes. I wouldn't mind working with people who speak their mind. Actually I prefer it.

There was never an interview where you meet with Canonical execs. There was an interview panel where I met with higher ups and whatnot, but not at the executive level. That was a completely, 100% hidden step in the process depending on where they think you lay in the hierarchy (probably decided after the interview - the job I was interviewing for wasn't originally written for a senior level hire.)

> It's suspicious that he didn't describe the execs interview.

Where does it say he had to do an interview with the execs after getting the provisional offer? All I read was that "Canonical requires a panel of executives to approve each senior level hire."

Forgot to mention: I don't expect anything positive to come out of it. I just want it to be a fair warning to anyone who would think about interviewing with them.

Do not ever take an action (such as rejecting other offers) based on a verbal/provisional/anything. Only a letter in hand is any good, and even then you should probably respond quickly if you plan to accept.

I've never heard of a "provisional offer" in the UK market - this would be highly unusual.

I don't know if Canonical is culturally UK, but maybe there was a misunderstanding about the stage of the process they had reached?

Im not sure about elsewhere, but in the US, at least in my experience, a "provisional offer" is an offer that's contingent on one or more specific condition, usually something like "pass your background check" or "pass your drug test," or "references check out," or "you prove you are legally entitled to work." These are things you won't usually put a potential hire through unless you've both agreed upon employment and salary.

A provisional offer usually comes from the person who would be your direct supervisor who outright states their intent to hire but then has to jump through a bunch of HR hoops. A prudent person would probably be on their guard because they can sometimes fall through but it's rare enough that I wouldn't fault the candidate for assuming they have the job.

A friend of mine got a provisional offer from a highly funded UK startup which was then rescinded explicitly on grounds of age. Before I could convince him that this wasn't acceptable they folded. I think we'd all be surprised at the shit that companies that enjoy the smell of their own farts pull.

Provisional offers are common in the UK if the company uses references (which are being used less often nowadays) or requires a DBS check.

> never interview at Canonical, never work for them, don't even entertain the idea of seeing yourself getting a paycheck while working on tools that seemingly have zero traction outside of Canonical

All this vitriol seems like an over-strong reaction to an executive panel rescinding his offer. Canonical should definitely have been clear about the entire process up-front, but making decisions before you have a full confirmation doesn't seem sensible.

When we hire we send out an offer letter after all the interviews are done, but that offer is explicitly still contingent on right-to-work checks and satisfactory references. This is normally a formality but there's always a chance something might go wrong.

If you look at his work history on LinkedIn, I can see why there would be an issue. Many jobs held less than a year. That's not a pattern anyone wants to hire.

You'd be surprised.

I've done a mix of contracts and perm jobs. Had one interview say that, and the next interview it was seen as a plus and was hired.

For the employer it’s a business, for employee it’s personal life. Many businesses are simply not worth more than couple of months of the employee’s life.

Yeah - I'm still looking for that job fit. Takes a while sometimes.

Problem is, if I'm looking at hiring you I'm not sure if I'm going to get my money's worth. Hiring is not cheap, plus there's the ramp up time, and the impact on other people's performance while you're ramping up.

If your work history shows you're not likely to stick around for a couple of years, that will count against you in any consideration.

Some times you need to make decisions about how much crap you'll put up with, so that your job history makes you more marketable.

Your resume / work history is one of the first things a recruiter or hiring manager will see about you. It has to speak for you on what kind of employee you are, and you have to assume they're going to take it the worst way.

I got asked a lot of hard questions in recent round of interviews about the one gap out of a history that's quite long. Haunts you if you don't have a good story up front.

The same applies to short periods of employment. Take your time during updating the CV to create convincing language-neutral explanation, because „they were among the stingiest cheapskates in this part of the continent”, or „their codebase was monumental dried pile of Java” will not work in your favor.

> instead of getting a stipend for a work laptop you'd ordinarily have to hand in after leaving the company, you instead get an interest-free loan that's spread over the course of 3 months that's used to pay for your equipment and whatever else you need for your remote work space.

I am missing why this is better in any way.

I never understood why company's don't just give you the equipment, to keep, forever.

A laptop/monitor/chair/etc is a trivial expense compared to the person's salary and you don't end up with a bunch of random weird ergonomic devices floating around from the ghosts of employees past.

"to keep, forever" <-- they would need to include this on your W2, versus the current situation where it is depreciated equipment over 3 years or whatever.

Personally, I woud be fine with that. I think they could even call it a "signing bonus". From what I understand, some signing bonuses are even contingent upon your staying for at least a specified period of time, or you have to pay it back.

You don't understand the tax implications, you'd have to pay income and payroll taxes on the laptop, depending on your marginal rate that could cost you an additional 40% of the cost of the laptop. And the company would pay payroll taxes on it as well. Versus the company buying it as their property and being able to fully deduct it over time.

So people don't ever get signing bonuses either then, right? Gotcha.

ps. Don't assume that people don't understand something just because they don't hold your opinion.

Data protection policies may apply to the hard drive.

> you instead get an interest-free loan

My employer has lent me money in the past. While they were happy to do so interest-free, they were advised by their accountant that if they did so, what would be at least the prime rate interest they were foregoing would be declarable by me (on the basis that you generally cannot get an interest-free cash loan in the market).

(Which is tangential to your point and even so, it could easily take $5K-10K to set up a workspace. That could be a big loan to repay in 3 months.)

also, it seems like it leaves the door open for this laptop to be a personal item, which makes IP murky when you are offsite and use it.

If this is to be taken at face-value I'd view it as "poor show" on Canonical's part. An offer of employment was made and later rescinded. However, while a "provisional" offer might seem unusual, from a UK-perspective it would normally be down to things like eligiblity-to-work, ID checks, and references (a "provisional offer based on satisfactory references" is quite normal).

I'm not sure if the author would say, or know, the reason _why_ the offer was rescinded, but, on face-value, it presents Canonical's HR and recruitment process quite poorly.

On the other hand, if Canonical requested and could not get references, or references were negative, the offer would quite understandably be withdrawn.

From the article, all we know is that Canonical advertised a position, the author was provisionally offered the position, then Canonical withdrew the provisional offer.

There should always be transparency in this kind of situation, so that - at the very least, the person can address the issue going into the next interview.

They never asked for references.

If you need a job, why would you reject other offers before accepting an offer from someone? That really doesn't make sense...

You can get into a situation where you have multiple offers you need to decide upon at the same time. It's not entirely ethical to say "yes" to all of them, although one lesson here is that you have not really said yes to an offer until you sign.

Why would anyone associate his name forever with a failure or problems? Internet will not forget and all kinds of people will search and find it and have some fucking stupid ideas. Im missing the time when job was a job and nobody gave a fuck about what you did five years ago or who are your friends and relatives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com