Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

I don't agree. He could simply say "After reflection and thinking about what I want to do next in my career, I've realized it's time to part ways with Canonical.". Frankly, that'd be about as detailed as what he posted, but without the parting shot (it's not like he elaborated on his management complaints).

He owes no one a detailed explanation for his decision and it's perfectly normal to keep things like this close to the vest.

I'm curious as to why you put spaces before commas. It's incorrect and slightly obnoxious to read.

> or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management.

That's exactly what they expect.

Anecdote: MS was part of the tail-end of my interview process and after I brought up that it was a bit much asking me for justification of decisions I made decades ago, he stated - I'm paraphrasing here - that he believes that someone's decisions at that stage of their life are consistent with how they will react and respond later on, which is why they ask the questions to begin with. I nope'd on out afterward.

Only advice I can give is beware companies that cultivate a cult-of-personality around one or multiple execs. You will be required to drink the Kool-Aid and - when you invariably don't - that's that.

who even has access to their high school report card? I suppose maybe I could contact my high school? But I didn't keep a copy of my own grades for more than a week maybe even in school.

So they are actively discriminating against those who have suffered a life shattering event in which personal documents were lost? (Eg house fire)

Sounds rather evil....

Report card??? This utterly stinks of ageism. I wonder if my school district even has that, approaching 30 years later...

What a strange requirement. I can't imagine how I'd get that card. I'm guessing the record doesn't exist anywhere. Another commenter talked of how this is not ok for people who lose their paper records in a disaster. But is "high school report card" even the sort of record people have and keep? I have nothing like it in my personal records. I don't think I have anything at all from my school days.

Yes and I was applying for VP of IoT.

There seems to be a whole school of HR / recruiting which tries to make it taboo or uncomfortable to ask those questions early on in the process.

From what I'm reading here, I suspect a place like Canonical would end discussions early if you even asked. It sounds like they're looking for cheap talent.

Part of what I remember about the process is that you don't actually get to speak to anyone until quite late in the process. I think I only finally got to jump into a call with the hiring manager after passing both the written essay and the personality test. I also have to admit Canonical was the first company to get back to me during my latest job search, and I the time I had no other offers so I just kept moving forward with them. Their process is relatively lengthy, however, so when I reached the offer stage I was interviewing with other companies and even had some verbal offers, so declining wasn't too hard.

Ubuntu is cool and popular and that will drive a lot of applications.

> Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent.

Pay em less, make crazy demands, less chance of rebellion, no context to know if behaviors are crazy, etc.

Same idea with the video games industry, really

There’s only so many ways to say kubernetes. I don’t think LLM can write a pager on Canonical without sounding repetitive.

Ugh, you’re right, Mondays suck. Debian is also 6 letters. However, it’s Ubuntu that really brings what I love about Debian. Ubuntu is downstream. Debian is up. Debian will always have a place in my lab.

As mentioned, ChatGPT will just fill in. Want me to write 1,000 words? Fine, but let me chose the topic. I’ll keep it technical.

You are writing why you LOVE Canonical though. It's not enough to like them or respect them. You have to LOVE them. For 1000 words.

A good technical writer produces clear and concise text. A 1000 word essay about the company is more of an exercise in creativity (and one might even say an exercise in "brown nosing").

I'll write a 1000 word essay about something technical I've worked passionately on. What is that, ~100 lines of text? Trivial.

About loving your company? I'm pursuing employment, not trying to join a cult here.

Eh, because it sounds like the violation of labor laws in many places.

My company gives me a stipend for use of my own phone every month.

This might be OKish as long as Canonical doesn't insist on installing any management software or centrally-managed malware mitigation. You're still incurring wear and tear on your own hardware due to work activities though.

Only if the employment agreement upholds your privacy if you use your own device. I've seen employment agreements that claim the right to access your personal device at any time if you use it for work.

I don't know many other jobs that work this way. Imagine getting a construction job and having to supply your own jackhammer or take out a temporary loan to buy one. Doesn't the company have some they should supply you with? Gig-economy jobs work this way, e.g. Uber and Lyft, but those are problematic for the same reason (and a lot more reasons imho).

As another commenter said, you're adding wear and tear to your own device. Sure, I have my own computers, but they're all spoken for, hosting VMs and containers or acting as my lab. Why should I subsidize the profits of a multi-million-dollar, for-profit company by letting them use my computer at no extra cost?

Your e-waste point is a good one, but I don't think Canonical's managers were looking out for mother nature when they made that choice.

> That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?

Sounds horrible to me. Work and personal are always completely separate.

> That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?

Because it externalizes their costs to employees and creates a bidirectional privacy nightmare (company data is exposed to programs running on a personal machine, and personal data is exposed to company programs - worse if they have any sort of management software but iffy even if not).

The biggest reason I separate work and personal devices is that I do not want my personal devices subject to discovery if my employer is involved in a lawsuit. I can't stress this enough- if my employer is sued, I don't want the opposing law firm to get copies of my data.

The second reason is that I don't want my personal devices subject to security monitoring, and most companies that at least pretend to care about security require some level of endpoint monitoring.

I work in Contracting, so YMMV.

For me, I have a separate laptop for every contract I work on, sometimes more than one for a given contract (for complicated compliance reasons). The reason for this is to a) prevent cross-contamination between projects, and b) because the laptops could get caught up in legal shenanigans. If one contract ends up in dispute, the laptop could end up getting subpoenaed, and if it was my only laptop I would be SOL. Or god forbid, code from two projects gets mixed by accident, and now I'm in violations of multiple NDAs. In one case, the customer paid for my hardware during development, and when we were done they took ownership of the laptops along with the code.

Your work computer is just like your work code: At the end of the day it's not really yours, don't get attached.

Cause anything developed on your private device becomes company IPiif touched?

I enjoy closing the lid at the end of the day and leaving work behind. Separate user accounts doesn’t cut it. With WFH it’s tempting enough to spend too much time “at work”.

Specifically for Canonical, BYOD seems like a great way to dogfood running Ubuntu on all kinds of machines, rather than everyone having the same model of Dell workstation and a separate testing lab being the only place they encounter diverse hardware.

Not saying this is their reasoning - and if they're not too cheap, it would surely be better for tax purposes to buy your employees computers than pay them the equivalent in cash - but it's a reason at least.

Never access your personal accounts on a work device.

Thats just asking for trouble.

> So just add the cost of acquiring employer-specific hardware to the compensation package during salary negotiations, is it really a big deal?

It is a sign the company will resist spending modest amounts to improve efficiency and morale. Including pay increases likely.

> What was the Oxide process like?

Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there.

> What did they have you write?

Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire

> What was the role?

Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there.

Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.

Here's the application doc for the Product Marketing role (the only role that's currently hiring):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y3L6dXqkK3c5IN2j73HuZkda...

This is slightly specialized for the Product Marketing role; for engineering roles, the Market Analysis section is replaced with a similar section for engineering / system analysis.

(I work at Oxide, but this link is publicly available, albeit hard to find on the website)