This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew | Hacker News Reader

This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew

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129 pointsandrew_163 comments

The biggest problem I see with this isn't even that the questions are too onerous (which they are), it is that I know there is absolutely zero chance anyone on the other end is going to take the time to actually read and evaluate each of them.

My personal rule for the interviews process is – no matter how pointless it may seem, the company has to waste at least the same amount of time on it as they require me to. So 1:1 phone screens are fine. Onsite interviews are fine, even if it is like 6 rounds. Coding exercises are not, and this one is definitely not.

Uhm... I've rejected numerous applicants because they simply couldn't code, despite what was written in their CV, and this through whiteboard or side by side.

And I'm not talking complicated stuff, but simple things like reverse a string or implement the hashCode/equals-methods.

I'm all for giving people a chance, but requiring at least some basic knowledge for a coding position is fair IMHO.

Giving people a take-home test that takes them hours, especially before you even invest 30 minutes on a phone call to make sure they actually have a shot, is not the only way to make sure they can code. You can easily do that in a 15 to 30 min pair session.

It's a selfish way to make sure your company wastes minimal of the their own time, at the expense of the candidate's time. My days of working for companies that think that way (especially if they are in denial about it) are over.

The number of candidates far outstrips the time employees have to interview them

It's very simple. Don't pay placement agents tens of thousands of dollars for placing an advert and passing on cvs (at best - at worst biasing you the wrong way). Use that budget to pay the many candidates for their time. Short list of 30 candidates, you can pay each one $1k for time spent jumping through your hoops. Everything is better for everyone doing something like that, the company, the candidates who don't get hired and quality of candidates willing to go through the process. Just a straight up win.

That sounds good in theory until the company that does this is swamped by very strong applicants that have no intention in taking the job.

The right balance is equality: I spend an hour, you spend an hour. Rapid CV filtering and coding quiz, then 30 minutes Skype interview to verify claimed abilities: coding, technologies etc. This will filter out 90% of applications and give you a pool of "real candidates" that you should treat with utmost respect.

After this, if you need a 2 day coding test with production data, than you should call the candidate on site and pair them with one of your engineers full time for those 2 days.

This is nonsense. No strong applicant wants to waste time applying for a job that they don't want to earn less money than they'd get consulting. You'd get a few more who don't "know" they've always wanted to work for you since forever (ha) and instead want to find out about you, which is a win for you. Applying isn't a dead loss if you don't take it, allows you to be but more adventurous in your applications. "We want to hire Jill who is amazing but couldn't get the incentive to get her across the line is good information.

There's still the barrier of applying with a cover letter etc which is a hoop applicants are not getting paid for.

Paying applicants for their time once you know you want to talk to them at length is the right thing to do and a huge win for your company. Paying placement agents is just an expensive, dead loss providing zero value to anyone.

> No strong applicant wants to waste time applying for a job that they don't want

This is circular reasoning. You don't know the applicant is strong until they pass the interview, but you have to pay them to find out. It's a fantasy ripe for the the current seller market, enjoy it while it lasts.

> once you know you want to talk to them at length.

That makes them strong enough to pay for their time and if you don't think you can know that with a good enough accuracy to have the placement agents fees pay for it with no loss in an hour at most, maybe gardening is a better place to be than hiring people.

The number of companies hiring developers far outstrips the time any competent developer has to interview with them.

I've experienced this too, and after some experimentation I realized this is sometimes the result of a poorly written job description in the req.

You'll still get crap applicants, but 30 seconds of resume looking usually gets you a decent way through it.

There’s a distinction between a take home and a pair programming exercise. I am against the former but for the latter.

If you place an undue burden on applicants, just know that you are filtering away both the ones at the bottom who don't know how to code and have faked their resume, and the ones at the top who can't be bothered with jumping through your hoops because they have enough other options.

Exactly. Years back when I was more naive about how things work, I would do the 4 to 8 hour challenges they would send me. After a few of those and getting responses like, "we're sorry but this position is now filled" (an hour after I submit) or "we're sorry but we've decided not to fill this position" I realized that a complete lack of respect for my time is actually an important and powerful signal about what it will be like to work for them. They don't mind stealing my weekend from me in bad faith (when they already had someone they wanted to hire), so I doubt they would mind working me into the ground.

Once I started looking at the interview as a two way process (I'm evaluating them as much as they're evaluating me) things got a lot better.

> the company has to waste at least the same amount of time on it as they require me to

If you are good, you will most likely get a job within a relatively few interviews. For the roles I'm trying to hire at the moment, we need to screen many tens of candidates, sometimes into the hundreds to find people who meet the basic competence level needed. As long as you are getting the outcome you desire and the market is as hot as it is, your rule is fine for you, but I think proposing it as a general principle doesn't work, because the scale of jobs you are considering is so much smaller than the scale of candidates we have to consider to find someone appropriate.

I don't know what the answer is, but there has always been a shocking number of people with totally legitimate looking CVs and university credentials who apply for software development jobs without being able to read a line of code, let alone produce any.

If you're having hundreds of resumes pass resume screening for every hire you make, have you considered your resume screening might not be working very well?

Of course! That's the exact problem we're talking about here. Résumés screens don't work very well - they provide much less information about whether or not someone can actually solve problems with code than almost anyone would expect. That's the entire reason that a simple programming task like 'fizzbuzz' has value. It's the reason people want candidates to do something in addition to providing their résumé.

> there is absolutely zero chance anyone on the other end is going to take the time to actually read and evaluate each of them

This is understandable to think, but is simply wrong -- I know because I'm a software engineer at Canonical who helps review these written submissions. They're sometimes read and reviewed by our CEO, though often he delegates that out to a pool of us reviewers. I always read mine thoroughly, whether they're 3 pages or 30. I don't have exact stats, but from where I sit maybe 80% of them are quality submissions.

I'm not defending our interview process here: I agree with many that it's too long and could use improvement. But it's definitely unique and thorough.

>I always read mine thoroughly, whether they're 3 pages or 30. I don't have exact stats, but from where I sit maybe 80% of them are quality submissions.

Even if both candidates and the Canonical did this diligently, it is still ridiculous in my eyes, it's religion.

Regardless, the asymmetry is offensively wide: it takes at least an order of magnitude more time to write a text than to read it. The candidate is also under pressure to create a well crafted and professional response, essentially a sample of his best writing. You on the other hand, can do a half-ass job reading it, stop for your lunch break and skip the questions you are not interested in - there is absolutely no written record or evaluation of your reading performance. You might read it but others might send it in the bin after the first paragraph.

Why would a company put such a large onus on the candidate, and little to none on itself, while the same could be achieved in a 1 hour skype call, where all these questions could be explored in depth in a symmetrical fashion? The only rational answer is that the company has complete disregard for the candidates and actively seeks out submissive people that lend themselves to easy abuse.

In the process of an interview I'd also like to learn something about the company and the job. Such practices require a substantial upfront effort from the candidate without them learning anything about the job they are applying to.

In the early days of Heroku, the founders had the same equitable investment from all participants approach to interviewing. I loved it. It really forced me to reconsider a lot of very standard hiring practices. It didn’t prevent take home coding challenges. But your never, as a hiring manager, going to spend 4 hours reviewing each submission. How much are you going to spend? 30mins? Ok, then the assignment can only be expected to take at most 30mins to complete.

The hiring process we had there had its own problems and biases. I did love this simple heuristic for quickly assessing what was fair though.

First hand experience: ICs and management have been complaining about this to higher ups for a while now. These interview requirements appear to be a choice from the very top.

What's even worse is that despite through all these hoops, it's been difficult to hang onto employees. Staff should be treated with (more) respect.

Read glassdoor reviews, they're not exaggerating things. Avoid this place.

I disclose this information not to because I want to disparage Canonical and the good work they do, but because I want it to improve. Mark, you need to work on making this a more enjoyable place to work.

It sure says a lot about Canonical itself. Anybody who puts that much emphasis on your social behaviour at high school and university has never mentally left there, so you can expect a juvenile corporate culture full of cliques and lots of high school, child-like emotional abuse scenarios coming from management.

Massive red flag for me.

Agreed. The disparity between EQ and IQ reflected in that questionnaire is truly breathtaking.

Honestly, as someone who's done a lot of hiring and interviewing over the years I don't hate this concept (specifically the open questions), but oh god this is such a bad implementation of it. A handful of open-ended questions would be fine, allowing for a wide variance in detail and depth. And even time boxing it, in terms of telling the candidate not to spend too much time on it unless they really feel like they have a lot to say.

I would much rather ask these sorts of questions this way than in a live interview, where only a very narrow set of personality types are able to come up with good answers and you pretty much have to accept that good candidates will sometimes answer poorly.

And then I think the actual interviews can start off on a more informed footing, with some things to talk about. A lot of time in short interviews is wasted just getting on the same page, especially about softer questions like this.

I agree with some sibling commentary that it's good that people are experimenting in general, because tech hiring process right now is abysmal. It's rarely anything but an excuse to hire people like the people you've already hired, and so inevitably fails to ever really grow a team beyond its initial limitations.

Tech hiring is abysmal for sure. This didn't even freak me out that much considering some of the other ambushes I've seen.

The problems with this seem to be:

- too many questions

- unfocused questions

- poor guidance on how much to write

- Or maybe canonical don’t hire much?

I feel like they probably came from either a big brainstorming session, adding to some standard template, or trying fewer questions and then adding more when candidates failed to intuit the right kind of responses.

That said, it feels like it’s on-the-margin good for companies to be experimenting with different hiring processes in general and trying to reduce bias in the process is a noble goal so I’m not massively sad about this. I think oxide also do some kind of written submission based hiring process for example (and they do it with the very reasonable claim that they think written communication is important so they want to hire for it).

If you’re good at passing ‘standard’ interview processes then it’s probably fine to skip this one and maybe you’d wish they’d go for the same process as everyone else. If you suck at the standard ‘algorithms’ questions, maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists (though maybe there are still algorithms questions later) and keen to give it a try. That could end up biasing canonical’s candidates towards people who are undervalued by the market which could make it cheaper for them to hire (by spending less effort trying to close on candidates with lots of competing offers)

> If you’re good at passing ‘standard’ interview processes then it’s probably fine to skip this one and maybe you’d wish they’d go for the same process as everyone else. If you suck at the standard ‘algorithms’ questions, maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists

This is a good point I didn't consider. (I made two other posts in this thread criticizing the process)

If someone is going to spend hours revising for another kind of in-person interview due to their discomfort with the prospect, and would rather invest the same time in providing written answers, they may view this as a better alternative, and that's fair.

I don't know enough about the overall process to understand if putting good work into the written part gives them a break on other parts where they may otherwise not perform well. And I still think that making everybody do this is asymmetrical. They could ask everyone to do it and assess them algorithmically for example, wasting huge amounts of peoples time.

Maybe if it's given as a choice vs a "get to know you" interview by a recruiter, and it's explained how both are equivalent?

I agree, I think the idea of a "written" interview is interesting and might be a good idea.

The problem I have with this is that there's not enough Canonical skin in the game. They have you do this before they invest any of their time in you. That means that if it takes you 20 hours to respond to all of these in writing, it's nothing from them to trash can your application. They aren't incentivized to make sure they're balancing the value they get with the time it takes to do it.

They're basically that person who orders the Lobster and several rounds of imported beer because somebody else is paying the tab. If it was on their dime they'd be a lot more reasonable.

At least, at a minimum, do this toward the end. Do the culture fit interview and the aptitude test first so a lot fewer candidates waste their time writing the book you asked for.

> maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists

That’s the thing though, this is only the beginning of their larger interview process which still includes all the usual suspects:

> The stages for this application are: - Review of resume (done) - Written interview (this step) - Standardised aptitude and personality assessment - Culture, HR, peer interviews and tech assessments - Hiring manager and senior lead interviews

Yeah and that “personality assessment” is another term for building in bias at most companies. “We were impressed with you, but you weren’t a ‘personality fit, so we’re going to pass.’”

> trying to reduce bias in the process is a noble goal

I feel like this does the opposite. The first half is about how well you performed in high school (WTF? High school was 30 years ago for me. How is that relevant?), how well you did in college, and how well you did compared to your peers in those situations. What if I didn’t graduate high school or college? What if I come from someplace where schooling is done differently? What if I did poorly in one of those but my peers were geniuses? What if I did well but my peers were idiots? How does this give them any signal at all?

Yeah I deliberately didn’t claim that it actually reduced bias. (Though I think I’d be more worried about class signifiers in the language/content/choice of the answers). It also feels somewhat questionable to me whether working hard to reduce bias is worth it for the company. Obviously there are legal obligations to avoid discrimination but being fair to everyone can mean more work per hire making the process more expensive. The best argument in favour of trying to be fair is that it increases your chance of finding a hire with outlier performance, though I think it is pretty easy to drop such people at other steps.

I think a "written interview" for a remote position is actually a really good idea; it shows writing skills, and ability to communicate in a remote position.

I don't like the questions about high school, especially the personal questions. It's been 25 years (and longer for others), it wasn't particularly good period for me to the point of being traumatic, and I'm a completely different person then I was then. I don't see how it really matters for any aspect of the job either (technical, social, or cultural).

We could argue a bit about some of the other questions, but overall it should be entirely doable to complete this in 30 to 60 minutes, the time a regular video chat would take, and it's probably less stressful for quite a few people. I don't really see how this is an "Interview from Hell".

1. The questions on both high school and college should be meaningless for anyone 5+ years into their career. I am a different person than I was in high school.

2. It is unclear from the prompt how much detail to provide - many of these questions could have multi-page responses. Is that preferred, or penalized?

3. There are far too many questions (37!). "Choose 3 of the above, and write 10-20 sentences on them" would be a much better prompt if your goal was to evaluate writing skills and communication ability. Good writing takes time.

4. The asymmetric time spent between candidate and company. So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions. The company is wasting time of candidates that would not be a good fit for the role.

5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.

I think you can (and should) use your own judgement in how much detail you want to provide. It's the same with a normal interview question: on any question you have the choice to give a short concise answer or go in to great detail. For some of these questions I would provide a fairly short answer, on others a much more expansive one.

> So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions

I don't know who gets this assignment: maybe they're very selective about it, or they shotgun it to loads of people. The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned, but hard to be sure.

Most intro calls I've had were 100% a complete waste of time for both of the participants by the way, where they just read what's on the website and job posting ("I can read thank you"), and you just repeat what's on your CV ("surely you can read too?"), after which you're typically given some technical assignment or a second (actually useful) interview.

> 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.

English is the language in which Canonical communicates, and selecting for English proficiency makes sense, just as selecting for proficiency in $technology makes sense. Does this advantage native English speakers? Sure, but that can't really be helped I'm afraid. I've worked with non-native coworkers (as a non-native speaker myself, I should add) that were a pain to work with because half the time they wrote some documentation there were so many odd grammar mistakes that it was hard to read, and in some cases very unclear. So the bias is skill-based.

> The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned

Given that they asked questions about high school, and also questions about being an 'industry thought leader', I disagree.

maybe too many prompts, but yes, what happens during a first interview is generally these sorts of discussions followed by the interviewer jotting down notes.

asking candidates to submit short essays where they can choose what to highlight and how seems like a fine idea.

just needs a "pick a few from each category" and "400-600 words please" designation.

probably also more suitable for people who work in product design / management or data science / business analyst / staff swe hybrid roles (roles where defining the work is part of the work) than people who are looking to complete predefined task assignments or solve issues with high velocity.

I agree that the idea is fine, but this is way way too many questions and would take me more than 60 minutes, especially given that there are no guidelines provided about length of response. I would find this agonizing to complete, personally. A conversation is much less pressure for me. The length and complexity is a red flag, and the questions about high school are just absurd. Who cares?

Overall it should be entirely doable to complete this in 30 to 60 minutes,

This is ludicrous of course. There no way you can sanely expect someone to answer 37 open-ended / largely interpretive questions of this sort in 30 minutes. Or even 90.

unless of course the answers are of roughly the same length as the questions themselves.

Which makes them basically meaningless as questions.

Anonymous because I work there. I applied for a senior software engineer role and the interview process was similar. I got the job offer at the end of the process and they sneakily changed the role to "Software Engineer 2" from the "Senior software engineer" role mentioned so prominently in the job postings and the interview invites. No one bothered mentioning this in any of the many face-to-face and email conversations that I had with people/managers/director/HR from Canonical. I wouldn't have applied for the job if they had not lied that it was for a senior software engineer role.

Due to my bad luck and my excitement about the job, I missed catching this till my first week at Canonical. This was a big mistake and I should have done better. When I found out about this and spoke to my manager about this, I got some ambiguous answer about how they mention "senior" in the job description to weed out junior folks from applying and that "software engineer 2" would be the appropriate role according to their internal engineering career path. He and his successor both agreed to pass on the feedback to the upper management but I am not sure if they did and if the feedback made any difference.

I ended up continuing since the team and the work was good. But this is unprofessional and unacceptable.

...so if you put "senior software engineer" on your resume for future positions, there's a clear case that SDE 2 aligns with "senior software engineer", just like SDE3 must align with "principal" or "staff" engineer.

We know this because roles they advertise as senior software engineer are assigned an SDE2 title.

My issue is that no one explicitly mentioned this at all and I found out about it in my first week working there.

Sde-2 in Amazon and Microsoft is the role below Sr-SDE.

There's no standard for that though, what might be called a director in a startup might match sr in a fang. This doesn't matter as much as the responsibilities and cash you put in front of it.

See https://levels.fyi

Leveling is very new to Canonical. So, SDE 2 is Senior there.

I am fine with the so-called career path and leveling. What rubbed me the wrong way is that no one bothered mentioning it even though sneaked it into the offer letter. It is my mistake that I didn't catch it until it was too late. :(

Some random advice – job titles mean absolutely nothing in the industry at large. Your years of experience isn't changing. Your salary (presumably) isn't changing. Call yourself "architect" or "code monkey" or whatever else you want, absolutely no one will care.

That is what I am doing - calling myself a 'Senior Software Engineer' in my current job. As someone who has been a "Senior software engineer" in the past couple of jobs, it would definitely look odd to say that I am a "Software Engineer - 2" in my current job as that would look like a stepdown in level.

Untrue. Recruiters will look at it, people down the line will look at it. Practically it doesn't matter, but for marketing purposes it does.

This answers a different, but important, question for the person doing the hiring: “how much do you value your time?”

This is a step for the applicant to signal “not much” way before salary gets discussed.

Which is why this type of screening is great for keeping down wages, but really not great for getting talent.

Canonical's revenue per employee is only ~275k USD.

Which means there's a pretty hard cap on talent compensation. I suppose this kind of "interview" like you said is a pretty heavy-handed way of filtering out candidates who are aiming for the top ends of compensation that they could get at MAANG firms.

That cap isn't so hard if you're willing to hire outside of California or the US.

That's revenue though, not profit. Subtract office rent or home office expenses, laptops and other hardware, server running costs, overhead like this hiring process / HR / legal / sales / ..., employee-specific overhead costs like health insurance (if I get $50k/y then a few % is subtracted for health insurance, but half of that % I never see and the employer has to add on top of the agreed-upon salary)... and maybe you want to keep a buffer for unforeseen events (having to do without your Ukrainian employees for a while, sick leave, new covid wave where anyone with a child is at like 50% capacity, etc.). I'm no businessman but this is just what I can think of that my employer has to take care of from a developer-level position myself.

Even if in most countries the rate is less than half the USA's, without doing the actual math this sounds like quite a tight margin to be honest.

Maybe if they spent less time on requiring life essays from applicants and more on product they could afford to pay more.

Well OPs point is that these essays save you time because you filter out applicants that aren’t serious.

Anyone who has interviewed recently will know the amount of time wasted by organising interviews people don’t even turn up for, or show up and are completely winging it. This is designed to weed these people out, because it’s a way of demonstrating that the person applying actually wants the job and haven’t just sent their CV out to everyone who is hiring.

I don't disagree, but it's a band pass filter, rather than a low end filter.

You are also weeding out the good engineers who recognize that you're asking them for a huge investment without any showing of good faith. I would honestly be shocked if the interviewers even read half of the answers they're asking.

I think that's a great questionnaire, but not for the intended purpose. Seeing that early in the interview speaks volumes and makes it so easy to just say nope and move on.

That questionnaire says two things. Either:

1) This is the hurdle you need to clear just for us to deign to speak to you in person, maybe. If you're lucky. You mean that little to us as a candidate.

2) We're completely oblivious of the lack of respect for you time that this shows. You mean that little to us as an colleague.

3) This is what "management / HR" says we have to do for new hires. You mean that little to us as an employee.

I'd love for that to be a false dichotomoy (trichotomy?), but I can't think of an option where this is interpreted as respectful to the candidate. Anyone have any ideas?

You're going to be asked many of those questions anyway, at least in this format it's a no-time-pressure, no-public-performance way. That's the best silver lining I can find.

It's just plain too many questions though. Maybe they intend for you to only answer some of them, the ones you have interesting answers for? Or maybe they _should_ intend that if they don't.

> You're going to be asked many of those questions anyway, at least in this format it's a no-time-pressure, no-public-performance way.

The problem is that Canonical has no skin in the game.

Yeah. This should happen at a later point, or spread out more over time.

The only thing I can imagine is that its filtering for people desperate enough to lick cool aid and drink ass.

I could see the idea of a written initial interview maybe being okay or useful, but wow, this particular one is awful. I think I'd rather write a bunch about how it's terrible than answer it.

This is a full page of huge open-ended questions. To really answer all of them fully for someone highly qualified could be book-length and take more than a week of full-time work to produce. No way I'm doing that for any company. A good written interview would have to be time and length restricted to like an hour or two and a couple of pages max.

There's a tremendous number of questions about high school life. This is basically absurd - I graduated high school decades ago, nothing that happened there is relevant to my potential work performance. I'm a very different person from who I was then, and I don't much care to dredge up a bunch of irrelevant old memories for a job interview.

The high school and college questions seem to fly in the face of the claimed goal of diversity and elimination of bias too. I think of it like, imagine the schools in Season 4 of The Wire. In a truly bias-free process, someone who went to a school like that and decided to pursue the straight life and get into tech and did pretty well at it could get hired. How do you think whoever is reading this is going to react if your real answer to how you spent high school was "Academic achievement? Lol. Nobody gave a shit about that, we spent our time slinging dope and laughing at the teachers." Or "College, what? I spent 5 years in jail for dealing drugs. I decided the gangster life isn't for me, but computers are cool, so I taught myself coding. Turns out I'm actually pretty good at it, but I don't really have time or money for college." Maybe they're actually okay with that, but the questions they're asking signal that anyone not from a white-bread background with good high school and college experience need not apply.

To my mind the "high school" stuff hints on a generalized approach to hire the new grads. They forgot to use some templating and skip that that part for the candidates with >1-2yrs of experience.

Yeah, as I was reading through all those questions I was thinking: "Well, this is easy. I didn't go to high school" I stayed home to code. I had a cool mom.

When considering my last job move, I had only a little time to invest in searching, and realized that I had to decide between spending precious handful of weekend hours cramming for Google's interview rituals, or spending the same amount of time on Oxide's bespoke tenure packet thing.

In hindsight, I wish I'd disregarded the company that asked applicants for large upfront investment specific to their company -- and instead put it into the company that not only paid 3x as much, but also for which the application prep was mostly transferable to other companies. (Not that I approve of Google's rituals, but it would've been relatively better in that case.)

I wonder if you would be willing to share how it worked out with Oxide? Did you submit the candidate materials and go further into the process? Of course, feel free to ignore these questions. :)

I (like many people around here) think Oxide looks like an awesome place, but I was disappointed to discover how onerous their initial candidate screen is. For me it's just a huge risk to put in a lot of work for a single company because they may (for whatever reason) not follow up afterwards.

Sorry, I don't have a useful anecdote about that.

We try not to be overly bespoke, and I would like to believe that writing down the answers to the questions we ask can be helpful in one's own search, wherever it may take them. I'm sorry that you found the experience to be unhelpful; one of the biggest challenges for me personally at Oxide is that we are oversubscribed as a company -- we have had to turn away people who I think would very likely be successful at Oxide.

For others, the portfolio-based questions we ask:

- Work sample

- Analysis sample

- Writing sample

The questionnaire:

- What work have you found most technically challenging in your career and why?

- What work have you done that you were particularly proud of and why?

- When have you been happiest in your professional career and why?

- When have you been unhappiest in your professional career and why?

- For one of Oxide's values, describe an example of how it was reflected in a particular body of your work.

- For one of Oxide's values, describe an example of how it was violated in your organization or work.

- For a pair of Oxide's values, describe a time in which the two values came into tension for you or your work, and how you resolved it.

- Why do you want to work for Oxide?

We know this is a lot to ask, but other than the final question (which is a very important one!) they are not really specific to Oxide -- they are asking people who want to work with us to reflect on their own career. Again, speaking personally: processing when I was happiest in my career was really important to figure out how we wanted to build Oxide.

Please let's not overlook the sheer idiocy of "Don't tell us your name so we can assess you anonymously" coupled with "Give us your personal blog, social media accounts, industry event & conference presentation links"

The sheer unmitigated idiocy of sending those instructions out to intelligent humans. Canonical.

High school achievements? Jesus. "How did you beat the other sperm to the egg?"

This is something else.

And one thing I've noticed at Canonical especially. They seem to love to keyword match and have the flexibility of a slate.

"Describe your experience with WSL". What kind of BS question is that? If the person has already answered about Windows and Linux, why do you have this as a question? Do you also think JS programmers can't do typescript?

"Describe your speaking experience at industry events" Loaded and exclusionary question.

To be fair: because it's not Linux and it's not Windows and you'll wish it was either.

The networking in particular is a monstrosity, there's interop which works okay sometimes then trips you up, there's no systemd, mounts like Google Drive Filestream disappear on you, it's kinda Hyper-V but kinda not...

so yes I can see why they'd want to shortcut the process of hoping someone survives the mental anguish if learning this, if they already know both Linux and Windows.

I had similar thoughts on Amazons hiring process. They can shove their "leadership principles". I know they're going to churn through all potential applicants someday and have to start acting like real people.

IDK maybe I've drank the cool aid too long but the leadership principles are actually what I'd want in a teammate.

There is nothing wrong with having principles like "Deliver Results" or "Learn and Be Curious".

What's weird is making interview candidates memorize these and come up with a canned performative story for each one.

I recently did their final round of coding interviews plus leadership principles. It's not a bad idea in theory, but the way they go about it makes it very clear that you're just supplying input to an algorithm where the output is hire or no-hire, and the person asking the question only cares about taking the answer and fitting it in to a nice text box on their screen to send to HR.

I realized pretty quickly with their followup questions that there was no point in answering truthfully with your real reasoning and thought process. I think you're much better off making up a story that perfectly covers the principle they're asking about, so they can take it and just put it down directly on their form. It felt like they had leetcodified non-coding interview questions.

Only problem is - the Amazon process doesn't filter for your belief in, or ability to, you know, actually abide by those principles.

But simply your willingness to memorize and recite them.

>But simply your willingness to memorize and recite them.

And lie (ie: come up with fake stories to highlight how you followed the principles in the past). A great trait to look for in a future teammate.

Every single one, as I understand from Amazon people I’ve met, can be interpreted as a weapon against someone to justify a PIP/termination.

I recently interviewed at Amazon, and failed.

It was quite memorable in a bad way, it felt very unwelcoming and mechanical. I even wondered during the interview if I was actually talking to a human being or to a very elaborate AI + deep fake.

Nonetheless, their leadership principles are bookmarked for later reuse. They're very good general purpose guidance.

> I was actually talking to a human being or to a very elaborate AI + deep fake

I've also had similar experiences talking to people at Amazon. I can associate most of the big tech companies with various negative traits (and some positive ones too), but Amazon is the only one where a significant number of the people seemed to be inhabitants of the uncanny valley. One ex-amazonian I know gradually seemed to 'de-program' over about 3 years after he left.

Not being terribly familiar with the internal culture, I'm not sure what causes it, but perhaps it's what naturally happens if you're the kind of person to succeed at a company that wishes that humans were as predictable as automated processes.

Oh boy, the next step is "standardised personality and aptitude assessment"! If you make it that far, don't forget to Strongly Agree with the things that would make your boss happy and Strongly Disagree with the things that actually describe you!

I fucked off an interview with Amazon when the recruiter tried to make me do code exercises on a piece of paper and read them back over the phone.

As a question bank this isn’t terrible.

As a home assignment it’s a sign of mental illness

Too many questions for senior candidates. Can’t see anyone capable really doing this. I actually approve of the sentiment that doing well in Maths helps, etc. It’s just that no one is going to write up an essay who is worth it.

The problem with having pool X and then attempting to shrink it so your interview volume is tractable is that it is trivial to shrink it in a way that changes its distribution against your intentions. It’s just self sabotage.

Sucks for them. Canonical made Linux accessible to me (dial up so hard to get CDs) but they’re probably just hurting themselves.

The updated hiring process is not loved, and a major point of contention with senior management. I do believe it is well intentioned and an attempt to improve diversity and hiring and retention of talented people. However, the result is obviously going backwards. The process has caused a number of resignations, including more senior management. It is particularly grating to staff hired in less formal times, who recall being recruited at a conference or who's application resulted in a few phone conversations about interesting subjects with intelligent people. But now Canonical is hemorrhaging staff. Difficulty hiring means low staff levels means high pressure means lower retention, which was the problem. And this newer solution is a death spiral where staff are leaving much faster than they can be replaced, and management responsible for hiring leaving themselves because they can't do their job themselves due to lack of staff and inability to replace them. There have been lower level staff with no management chain between them and the CEO, and managers parachuted in to get teams back on track where there is not enough team remaining to even tread water and all institutional knowledge gone. I do hope things can get back on track, as I honestly believe Canonical is a good company to have around in the industry and should be a great place to work.

Provocative view but, I'm thinking that if you have a job today and you aren't doing at least one interview somewhere else per quarter, you are one of the people enabling crappy interview and hiring practices in the market because you aren't using your leverage to engage the interview process and walking away as a candidate when it doesn't meet your expectations.

If you want better hiring processes and jobs, use your job as leverage to interview more.

If you're willing to switch, you're better off doing a bunch of interviews at the same time. One interview per quarter is suboptimal in terms of negotiating power, it's strictly worse than e.g. three interviews per year but scheduled to get offers at the same time.

In CA, I'm not sure all these questions would be legal. And it can't be to "eliminate bias." For example, I'm so old that there _was_ no computer program in my high school. California law allows me to sue them for simply discouraging me from applying, and you can make a good argument that this application does just that. I haven't been in high school for a long time.

This looks like a list of great ideas of what to write in a motivational letter. They could have said: "these are types of things we are looking for in a motivational letter. we've listed them to make it easier for you, but you don't need to fill all of them in" and it would get a much better reception.

Motivational letter requirement is a proof of developer shortage being a myth.

These two ideas:

1) It's so hard to find qualified developer.

2) Our hiring candidate-wall is not high enough. There are too many applications.

Are non-conflicting in HRs heads.

It's possible to have both a talent shortage and a woefully irrational and dysfunctional hiring culture. As this industry seems to have.

I recently went through the same process for a director of engineering position and it was OK up to the point where a VP thought that asking me low-level detail questions specific to his particular project which I had zero knowledge of was the appropriate way of assessing the potential of a candidate applying for a position spanning the company's entire product portfolio; needless to say, I didn't do that great. The peer-review stage is a tricky one because if a single person on one of the 12-ish interviews doesn't like you then that's the end of it, and you might have the luck of running into some uninspiring automaton with a military background like I did.

I actually like that a lot. Clear roadmap of what's going to happen next. Some specific questions that call for specific answers. Plenty of chances to show off. Quite a lot of these would usually come up on a in-person interview as well and would be much harder to answer right away there. An interview process like that seems like could take a lot of usual stress out of my mind.

One criticism I have is that it's a bit too much, especially for a multi step process. I'd suggest marking a significant chunk as optional "helper" questions. It should also be made explicit that for most of them there's absolutely no need to answer with full formal paragraphs.

Oh this. I applied for an engineer position a few months ago and really spent a few days writing up a document to answer everything listed. Guess I should have moved on before submitting to this bullshit.

What was their response to your submission?

> Thanks for your application to joint[sic] the Ubuntu WSL engineering team.

Typo in the first sentence of the application.

It's possible the HR person that composed the automated response maybe didn't do very well in high school. This raises the question of how they themselves were able to pass Canonical's essay admissions process though.

mixed feelings about Canonical's written questions as shown in the OA

1. very good and I'd totally understand why they'd want to learn them

2. however very assumptive and patronizing of the "applicant" -- an equal counter-party whose time is valuable and usually has tons of alternate uses of their time. myself I'd probably tell them my professional fee for spending the time and effort to write that PDF for them would be, say, $2k. paid half upfront, half upon delivery. more parity, plus you'd get evidence that (a) they are interested in you enough, and (b) actually have cash to pay engineers.... you know, just like they cant be bothered to read your resume/CV, or insist on a coding test when you have public code visible -- it would be a mere formality, and help me judge their fit and attractiveness

The global sofware engineering hiring marketplace is a two-way street, and the better shops will learn that and apply it, or... get beat out by peers that do

I don't see a huge issue - the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. These absolutely exist, and in interviews, where we talking about first impressions of many people, I would say they are endemic even given the best intentioned interviewer.

Taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable.

This is a 35+ question essay exam that simultaneously asks whether candidates are industry thought leaders and "strong architects" and includes not one but four questions about high school achievements. It's among the top 5 worst hiring processes I've ever seen.

Not sure what the big deal about asking for high school achievements is. To me that seems to be done to be inclusive of people who didn't graduate college, which seems entirely reasonable to me.

"What sort of high school student were you? Outside of required work, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for, if we asked them?"

Given how many people I know in the tech industry who had a horrible time at high school (nerds got bullied in the 80s and 90s, is that still true today?), this question carries a whole lot of baggage.

I reckon these questions started as "in college", then someone in meeting #8533 rightly said "but what about people who did not go to college?" and so it was turned into high-school.

I suspect what this tells us about Canonical is that they have too many HR folks running riot.

Or too many folks still hung up about how they ranked and what they were able to "accomplish" in those years.

A competent HR department exists, in fact, precisely for the purpose of preventing the adoption of inane practices like these.

I strongly suspect HR has nothing to do with any of this, because some of these questions come close to the line of inappropriate and problematic.

"Mostly they'd remember me getting wasted on super-strength cider, but people who knew me a bit better might also remember me playing Warhammer 40,000."

I'd withdraw my application too.

People in high school are children. I don’t expect an employer to ask me my favorite flavor of ice cream either, because I’m an adult. This is an absurd waste of time for any serious professional.

I don't have an engineering degree and let me tell you, if you asked me to answer these questions about my high school experience at this point in my now 23 year long career, I would not take you seriously.

Never mind people who didn't graduate high school or got a GED, at which point you've just excluded a different class of people for an even more irrelevant-to-their-work set of questions.

I've seen the application, and there are questions about maths and grades. I know a lot of people with great grades and this doesn't translate into programming or innate understanding of CS in general. Similarly I've seen people with mediocre grades and great academic careers.

Also, writing down all the questions will generate a sizeable document. That should be done orally, and even if it's done orally, there is some strong emphasis on the wrong points.

And exclusive of people who dropped out of (or barely made it through) high school -- which as a category includes some of the most responsible and accomplished people I know.

If they ask about "industry leadership experience" and "high school achievements" in the same form there is a lot wrong.

This is not a form for a junior hire as I understand.

Industry leadership experience should not be in the form aimed at junior staff and high school achievements should not be on the form for hiring "industry leaders".

Unless you really are hiring whizz kids it is total waste of time to ask both questions on the same form.

If someone has industry leadership experience you compare candidates based on that and if one of them had some high school achievements it might be a plus, but it would not have much weight on comparison. Because if two candidates would have industry leadership experience if one is better than the other it would show there.

Maybe it would be even more inclusive if they just asked about school, not high school or college specifically.

It is absolutely not inclusive of people who didn't graduate college: those questions are followed with --- I swear I'm not making this up --- a question about which college you chose to attend and why you chose it.

You can just go read it it see what a nightmare it is; it's not that long (unlike the response it demands).

I applied for a Canonical job and was turned off by this. I was smart in high school but I wasn't an overachiever. In fact, I was into computers above and beyond what my high school was able to offer, and I was bored of the place as a result! But more importantly, that happened a lifetime ago; I'm an adult with 20 years of professional experience, focus on my high school is completely inappropriate and I don't think it's a stretch to call it ageist.

But the hiring manager told me that they actually hire people from the community -- in other words, folks who have done a free internship. So in truth, I'm not sure why I even jumped through their hoops (including the personality and intelligence tests). What a lark.

Notice the number of commentors defending it, even praising it. This is why no one really treats software engineers with respect or has sane hiring practices. They love to be subservient and jump through hoops for any sort of praise.

How do you even know where you ranked in your classes in high school?

I can't even remember what grades I got.

Fuck, even university was long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot of academic details of what exact courses I did.

What would my peers have said about me? In high school, no idea. I expect most are dead, in prison or full time alcoholics or drug addicts.

I only keep in touch with two people from university too. I've had a whole professional life in twenty plus years since then, who gives a fuck what I did extra curricular twenty plus years ago!

The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end. Additionally, while I'm a huge advocate for removing biases in hiring and recruiting, this approach hoists all of the actual work for doing it onto the candidate, having them submit what is ostensibly an essay explaining why they deserve this job. If you want to remove biases in your hiring, it should be done internally via training and understanding, not by relying on anonymization. Without that training, the "human" piece of bias being understood, your anonymous reviewers are still going to implicitly bias against ESL candidates, and those biases are going to appear anyway at the in-person stage of the process.

Funnily enough, half of the questions are biased towards a specific type of candidate, one who was passionate about maths, science, and technology by the time they were 16. Why are there so many questions about high school? The version of me in high school is so far removed from the adult version who would apply for this job that it might as well be an entirely different person.

"The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end"

... which is then completely invalidated by this question:

"Do you have a public platform were you communicate about the industry? Medium, Twitter, YouTube, a personal blog? Please provide links."

Even if it eliminates in-person bias during the step in which it's used, (a) it's effectively still part of the prescreening, so the bias, if present, will still get introduced during the actual interview process and (b) it creates the potential for a whole new set of biases based on how the person writes and how they choose to interpret the questions (if you give short terse answers, is that seen as efficient or not taking it seriously, if you give long, detailed answers, do they even get read? What if someone doesn't like how you structure your thoughts, your writing style, diction, etc, especially when it's not clear whether these actually relate to the job.

The more I think about it, the more confused I am about how they use this instrument internally to advance the hiring process. It it a writing test, are there right or wrong answers, are they really trying to get to know the candidate (in which case they've chosen an extremely inefficient way). It's their choice, but I wouldn't expect them to find highly qualified candidates lining up to do this for them.

That's definitely not the purpose here. They start out by assuming you've finished college as a baseline. That is a bias.

The job listing lists "Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical field." as a requirement.

Right, but likely not needed.

Some of these questions are reasonable (if asked in a more targeted way),but IMO there's some red flags. Asking grown adults about their high school classes seems like it would actually be a really effective way to introduce new biases without explicitly taking into account an applicant's race/national origin/socioeconomic status.

Many of us have wasted a few years working on what could/should have been a good project but was hobbled by poor leadership, and aren’t eager to do more of that.

To me, this lead doesn’t know how and/or care enough to identify and focus on key issues and definitely doesn’t mind wasting people’s time with a flood of busywork in lieu of paring this down to some thoughtful incisive questions.

I would expect this to weed out a significant fraction of the good candidates.

> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases.

Except it doesn't eliminate bias at all! In fact, it has the potential to further increase bias.

For example, the question "what university did you choose and why" assumes the candidate even had a choice (or went to university at all), and you can't consider a question about extra-curricular activities without also considering the candidate's situation (because candidates from under-privileged backgrounds are afforded fewer extra-curricular opportunities).

> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases

how on earth does any of this do that

> taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable

wow, just wow

Written, async interviews give candidates who are better at the job an advantage from those who are just better at schmoozing and exaggerating their resume.

So a C+ for effort, but this is a great example of what NOT to do.

1- This is hiring by committee. They sent out a call for questions to a bunch of people and then didn't curate it. Everyone's question get in 2- Too long for the candidate. The best candidates will bail. Companies targeting ~10 minutes on a phone get great response rates 3- Too long for hiring committee. NOBODY is going to read this for most candidates. The reasons resumes win is because they're short for the hiring team, not because they're high-signal

So shorter and more-curated wins

The time required to fill this out (in how much detail?) is bad enough but imagine the time required to read all those responses? The manager or even just the recruiter is simply going to skim them, if they read them at all.

Strong red flag.

I would bet money they're not gonna read it, probably run it through their sentiment analysis algorithm (or, more likely one from a SaaS that they pay for):

    get_text "${application_id}" \
      | extract_answers \
      | analyze_sentiment \
      | sort \
      | head -5

Then move those top 5 forward to the culture interview. Once you get to the very end, they might read some of your answers before they make an offer, but for the vast majority of candidates it was a complete waste of their personal time.

Imagine fact checking a candidate's responses about high school :-)

I would much prefer some kind of written questionnaire or essay to an interview via a video call, although some of these questions are irrelevant at best and demeaning at worst.

Don’t forget that this written thing is an early step. Followed by IQ and personality test (a personal bugaboo), then the endless personal interviews.

Uh oh looks like they let a finance person run amok.

You think a "finance person" is sitting writing interview questions about devops?

Is this the norm this days?

I'd say it's the exact opposite, especially for dev jobs. People don't even want to submit a cover letter.

I would have withdrawn my application too. In my mind, a key aspect of the process is reciprocity. I don't mind interviewing, including coding, but I'm not doing anything major that is "free" for the hiring company in the sense that they don't have to invest anything but can make me do a bunch and then just ignore me if they want

That is exactly what is wrong with this format. They (Canonical) think their time is more valuable than the applicant's and don't want to waste it having a discussion, they just want to make him do all that work on his own and then decide if they want to engage. That is not a positive relationship to have with a potential employer

It is wildly not the norm.

It is not. The closest I have personally encountered was a company(Illumina) that had as part of their screening process an automated video interview where they provide prompts, you have 60 seconds to formulate your answer, and then you are expected to give 2-5 minute answers.

I noped out on question 1, which was the usual fluffy question about "what makes you so excited to work at Illumina?" It's not worth wasting my time if they aren't going to even have a human speak to me.

This is exactly why I tell people the best time to search for a job is when you are gainfully employed. If I was unemployed and running low on funds, I might have followed through with that interview. Because I already had a decent job and was just looking for interesting work in an area I wanted to be in, it was very easy for me to have standards and say no.

Most definitely not the norm. In fact this is borderline absurd even by the prevailing trash heap of recruiter behavior.

Is this not basically conducting an interview over email? One that may or may not get a response. This seems like a huge red flag. I'm guessing these same recruiters also complain about how hard it is to find good candidates. Can someone say is this college submission essay request symptomatic of the culture over at Canonical?

This smells like a company trying to say there aren't enough qualified candidates, we need a bunch of h1bs.

> Standardised aptitude and personality assessment

"Free Personality Test" -> It's a cult.

Now I know where Shopify got the idea for their "Life Story" interview. They do have this open ended stage where you do not even know what to talk about. Canonical at least tells you what to write about. LOL

This is from a company that leveraged volunteer open source to build its business, and thinks selling it out to the WSL gambit is a good idea.

I have a general dislike for Canonical, and I've been very critical of many things they've done in the past, but I don't think this criticism is fair, for a few reason.

Canonical has pushed a lot of code upstream. They could definitely be better at this, and of the big Linux companies they're among the worst at it, but open source has without a doubt benefited greatly because of Canonical's efforts.

The code they used is also licensed by its authors to allow what they do.

Now that I've defended Canonical, I need to take a shower to try to feel clean again ;-) (just meant to be a light-hearted joke)

> big Linux companies

I'm not sure the company can be considered a big one. The headcound was like ~600 last time I checked. Compare that with SUSE (~2k) and RH (~12k, bet just their engineering is more than the whole of Canonical).

Yes thank you, that's a good thing to point out.

It's tough to pick winners for tech in which to become proficient to expert in this game. A reasonable first order approximation is anything championed by Ubuntu should be dropped like a hot brick.

Mir, Bzr, the phone, the ubuntu desktop the list goes on. At one time they had a policy of not paying for any new development ever, ie contributing nothing back but using and polishing, branding & packaging contributions from their competitors. They got popular by paying Matt Garrett(?) and resourcing him to make suspend work on a bunch of laptops, I recall seeing a photo of a pile of abut 50 by his desk, so Ubuntu worked better than RedHat or debian or whatever else on your laptop, eventually that work found its way back to mainline, it was their edge that drove adoption before it did.

Has any other development they've funded worked out? It must have, right? Has any of it worked well enough to be adopted by their competitors? Eg contribution to the commons, like for example paying for Gnome and GTK+ developer time like RedHat do?

I am biased on this and I want to state that bias clearly so you can adjust for it if you want to. Shuttleworth turned up at LCA one year (Linux conference in Aus/NZ run on the smell of an oily rag by volunteers - a genuine comunity effort) in a private jet and was notably absent from the dinner which usually involves some kind of charity auction and raises a few thousand dollars, no more than that, from the community, most of whom aren't particularly wealthy, for something worthy. Had money for private jet leasing, fuel, pilot wages, landing fees etc etc but $0 for the community charity drive.

Bug #1 in the ubuntu bug tracker was something like "Windows is more popular than linux." They've closed it because Android, which had nothing whatever to do with their efforts.

another issue I have with Canonical's approach:

1. if you don't have a resume/CV, people ignore you and say you need one

2. write them, then people DO NOT SEEM TO ACTUALLY read it, or, rather treat it like a big set of lies by a malicious scammer out to get them

so their questionaire, however well intended, smells like yet more unpaid makework which the "applicant" can count on being treated like #2 above

Who are we to say that this is a terrible process? If it's working for canonical then more power to them.

> Thanks for your application to joint the Ubuntu WSL engineering team.

just as bad asking for Masters degree for front end developers.

This is goofy, but doesn’t seem that wild compared to the big tech process

The whole idea of resumes makes little sense. Suppose all of the facts check out, so HR has to give up LeStrade-ing your background so they can gleefully pounce on something.

What do they know? Where you worked, what on, your title. No idea what you learned, or retained - how much was original. How long it took, how well it worked. How you grew or soured as a human being. What wonderful ideas you might bring with you.

The most valuable insights would come from a peer you sit down and chat with for an hour or two. But then they'd have to actually trust a trusted employee with a proven talent. Nope nope. You might conspire to form an 'actual talent' cabal. Remember Fairchild!

If you don't like it, don't apply, or ghost them. Who cares. If you want to work for Canonical so badly, there's ample room in the Linux ecosystem for an Ubuntu competitor: Fork Ubuntu and do it yourself. Show the world what a good hiring practice looks like. Run Canonical out of business by hiring the best engineers that won't jump through this Q&A email hoop. Don't just snarkily call it "from hell" and ragequit.

Forking ubuntu by yourself and launching a competitor would take Terry Davis levels of insane determination

How did Ubuntu founded? It's not magic. You just need a business plan and funding.

It isn't hard to fund it when you're a multimillionaire like Mark Shuttleworth.

> Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.

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