The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

(Side note: it's kind of a Proof of Work...)

FWIW, our normal process is 4 interviews… phone screen with the recruiter, 1 interview with hiring manager, a live tech screen (could be another manager, could be a senior IC), and a quick chat with director or VP. We try to get a candidate through to offer/decline within a week. I really can’t see the additional value of additional rounds of interviews.

But for an average developer at an average company? That just sounds insane to me.

But, suppose you did have a degree and specialized training in these tests. Do you think such a person can reasonably predict job performance and fit? It's reading tea leaves. The two biggest predictors of on the job performance is first, previous on the job performance and then general intelligence. After that it is all noise. You can go to an office and talk to a shrink for weeks and they still won't really grasp how you think or be able to make predictions about your future. If you dispute that, show me the research.

It's phrenology and biases all wrapped under the blanket of "objectivity".

Example of bias: Test X output Y shows correlation with OTJ performance (really, peer reviewed and all that). Cool! Correlation, not equivalence. Which means at least some portion of the population will do poorly on the test, but great at the job, and vice versa. What are the chances that neurodiverse people are in that category, or women, or blacks in a white culture, or.... And, regardless of that, suppose you are one of the people, in no particular protected or disadvantaged group, that does poorly. Should you never get hired, or get offered lower pay/responsibilities, because you do bad on this standardized test that gets run by so many companies? Is this what we want from society? Even pretending that the person seeing the results of the test in fact has the training and ability to interpret the results. There are cultures where they tend to show up as lying on these tests, but it is a cultural artifact. We know this. And a real medical professional consider the tests as indicative or suggestive - a point from which to start. Are you actually paranoid, or did you have a bad test day, or does your culture value something that pings poorly on the test? You don't know without a lot more investigation. HR is merely going to say "pass". Well, they'll ghost you, but anyway.

I'm sure someone can come up with some good examples of tests (well, maybe not sure, but I'll credit it is possible), but these tests all seem to be someone's hobby horse, promoted because it makes things seem objective and fair (so we don't get sued!), or because it is woo.

I've overstated my case a bit, but cmon. No one interviewing is a doctor, they shouldn't be using tests designed for medical relevance, and we should strive for inclusiveness. Can you code and not insult your interviewer while being questioned? Sounds like a hire to me. Oh, the MMPI says you are on the introverted side, or have issues with depression? Go fuck off, interviewee? I don't want to live in that world.

When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;)

We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding.

When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further.

As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard.

Now, however, most see the benefits.

Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns.

You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer.

Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :)

To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.

A hiring lead is expected to find the best candidates, not just the ones with a higher number on a simplistic test. Your point is correct that a hiring lead with bad judgement or low engagement might get a bad result, but what hiring process cannot be undermined in that way?

When you don't like something, it's common to mischaracterize it with anecdotes of stupidity, then say it must be stupid. The argument is basically "a biased and obnoxious hiring manager could misuse that data to make biased and stupid hiring decisions". Yeeeeeees. Obviously.

The psychometric test we use is a series of numbers covering different aspects; it's simplistic, but not as simplistic as I reflected with a single number.

Hiring leads often progress a candidate that didn't ace that test because they see evidence of excellence in other data. And I often reject offers to candidates who aced that test because I think the result doesn't gel with reality, although I will usually interview a candidate if I have concerns about an offer.

Broadly speaking, when you lead something, the people who will step up to lead alongside you will be people who mostly agree with the position you take. Obviously. Why would they align and invest precious years in something they totally disagree with? It would be dysfunctional to have a leadership team in any organisation made up of people who have hugely different opinions about everything at a fundamental level.

Of course, that group has disagreements on stuff. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we disagree on, but we live with people we broadly agree with.

So from the outside it may look like the leadership team of any company are highly aligned. If you have been at Canonical, you know that in the leadership team we have lots of hard debates and discussions, all the time, in search of the best. You also know we are all working to the same goal, which is to help people consume open source cheaply and safely, at scale, across all kinds of compute.

So, here's how I interpret your comment. You saw a group of people that were broadly supportive of a position I hold, and which you disagree with. Sure, you disagree, and that's fine. Calling them sycophants is just finding a nasty word for people who happen to be aligned on something you disagree with.

I've been around for those years :)

When we need something difficult and fundamental thought through very deeply, because it has to be precisely correct, I've learned to trust our CTO. Others usually want to go faster, or fix-it-later, or we-don't-need-a-spec-just-be-agile. That creates tension. But when I think it needs to be done very carefully and correctly, some tension is worthwhile.

I wish we had been more careful with some of the foundations for Unity, for example, because they would then have served others better even if the project itself failed.

"He noted that Canonical’s revenue last year was $175 million and that the company’s biggest challenge right now is that demand is bigger that the company’s ability to service it, in large part because there isn’t enough talent on the market for the company to hire."

In any case, "personality tests" is not the same as psychometrics. Just like astrology being fraudulent doesn't imply astronomy being unscientific, Myers Briggs being bullshit says nothing about the validity of psychometrics.

It's astonishing. If this line of reasoning was used against other fields of science, many people here would call it out immediately, but psychology is apparently always fair game.

(NB: I don't believe psychometrics are very good indicators in the hiring process.)

In practice it's not like this though, it's probably true that < 10% of what goes on in most interviews actually differentiates candidates.

I think part of it is it's just hard to figure out which 10% is the useful part. Though certainly if 80% are passing an early step in the process, it should just be scrapped altogether.

How did you arrive at this conclusion? I can easily imagine that this process is so laborious that plenty of people don't even submit anything. Like the person who wrote about this on reddit. -- Now what reason would we have to think that the people who don't want to go through the process would also be 80% good? This may be a very valuable filter for Canonical!

* Have ample time to write multi-page essays about themselves. Quality candidates are in demand, with multiple offers or solicitations for interview all the time.

* Feel comfortable sharing fairly intimate details about themselves and their lives - I personally would never, ever want to share some childhood trauma stories with my potential future colleagues, or complete strangers.

* Are willing to put up with ridiculous, time-wasting tasks - maybe you want this, because these employees will be more easily managed and manipulated, but just understand you ARE selecting for it, whether you intend to or not.

* Have a personality that you personally, or someone at your company, has decided is "an acceptable fit", thus missing out on a wide variety of potential candidates that might offer qualities you never even thought to test for.

It all seems very misguided, and that's the reason why there have been numerous posts both here on Hacker News, Reddit and other forums on the internet, lambasting your process. It's broken, and most people outside your company seem to realise this, while you do not.

I am curious- how do they get so much RDT API quota?

Odd that Canonical would want such people.

My original point was in the sense that passion can also cause a bit of tunnel vision. On the other hand I certainly can't say Canonical isn't innovative.

If you want something, you will have to jump through hoops. I'm not saying the hoops are legitimate, but you will have to jump through them anyway. My comment was about the person, not the hoops.

If he really didn't want the job that much, then don't bother. If you do, jump through the fucking hoop. It honestly just seems like the person didn't want the job enough to invest in actually applying, but enough to bother publicly attacking a potential employer. What does this really say about the person's character?