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Comment by autarch | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised no one else has brought up Oxide's process, which has a similar writing-heavy stage as part of the application. See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgD... for what they ask for.

It's not quite as much as Canonical, but it's still a _lot_ of writing to go through just to apply for a position. I considered applying there during my last job search but I just wasn't enthused about it enough to spend all that time writing before I even knew if they had any interest in me.

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It's still a bunch of work but I think i like that one a lot more. It's more open ended and less 'worship us, btw what is your favourite distro?'.

Yeah, it's not as ridiculous, for sure. But I think it'd be better to allow people to apply first for an initial screening and then ask for this stuff in pieces over the course of the process. It's really not right to front load so much work into an application, IMO.

True. And I guess that's for a full-fat engineering role?

I think it's for all of the engineering roles. Not sure what "full-fat" means here, though.

There's merit to the idea of having a writing sample from a candidate. If you want to know that a candidate can communicate effectively, you'll want to both hear them talk and read their writing.

That said, I'm not sure whether or not these interview processes were set up with that in mind. If they were, they should also consider that writing can take a long time to produce and so the writing sample should be adjusted to not be too long.

> There's merit to the idea of having a writing sample from a candidate. If you want to know that a candidate can communicate effectively, you'll want to both hear them talk and read their writing.

Absolutely. I'm all for asking for a few paragraphs of writing later in the process, or for candidates to submit existing work early on.

IME, writing something short and well is significantly harder than writing something long and well.

Famously, paraphrasing, "my apologies for the long letter, but I did not have the time to write a short one" :)

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