Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
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What happened was this: By the time the first pick hires had been cleared, they had gotten another job. Same with second pick. Maybe even third, too.
Most people don't have the luxury or will to just sit and twiddle their thumbs for months and months, and those that do will just say fuck it and look elsewhere.
In our case, the place was a revolving door. ALWAYS hiring, never knowing who they'd hire - and those working there would carry the perpetually understaffed workload.
I can understand a hiring process like this if we're talking about fighter pilots, astronauts, special forces operators, scientists going to antarctica, or whatever. But software engineering? C'mon. Delusions of grandeur.
My wife interviewed years ago for a UK govt research agency. They took three months to respond but did eventually set up an on-site interview. She went along anyway. HR met her at the gate and took her to the office of the person who owned the opportunity. When they arrived and there was no-one at his desk it turned out that he had died two months earlier and that the HR drone hadn't known. Needless to say the interview was cancelled.
Sounds like a vacancy
1. Excruciatingly long application processes, especially when companies required you to use workday for applying (30mins - 2 hours)
2. 2 weeks to hear back from the recruiter
3. 1-2 weeks to schedule a recruiter call
4. 1-2 weeks for a phone screen
5. 1 week to confirm results
6. 1-2 weeks for another round if not moving to on-site directly
7. 2-3 weeks for scheduling an onsite
8. 1-2 weeks for results (more immediate if it’s an obvious reject)
9. Additional 1-2 weeks for finalizing an offer and signing it.
The shortest end to end I could manage to get was around 2 and a half months, which is crazy.
This sounds like a standard big-tech run around, but IME most companies that take hiring seriously (i.e. more than "churn management") are not this slow.
The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process for entirely human, rather than technical, reasons (before anyone at a startup chimes in with 'our platform makes this better!')
Well.. have you met their CEO?
The truth is once companies have a certain size and revenue, their software developers don't matter really that much. Yes it can be hell to work there, everyone is overworked, things are low quality, etc. As long as the checks keep coming in ( and they will ) there is really no critical problem to be addressed.
Now the funny part: once the alarm bells go off and they try to change course... not happens, the "ship" is unresponsive and in most cases it will sink. But depending on the size of the company that will take years and maybe even decades.
So the best skill everyone needs to have (I wish really technical introverted software developers had this more ) is: Develop "street smarts" and tell these people to go fuck themselves and shove their "hiring process" up their asses.
Candidates aren't going to wait 3 months and delaying all the other offers they are receiving, that's not going to work unless you are working in a FAANG maybe and the prestige of your company can make this work.
Or was the manager just interested in trivia?
I know someone who applied for a technical job based in antarctica and the interview process was much less arduous than the one described here.
It was hard turning folks down, and it pushed us to have very crisp reasons for saying no, but I think it made us better interviewers and more humane in the process.
Their lengthy process might mean they don't get your typical fast-flying FAANG engineer, but it does mean they get someone who's a die-hard Canonical fan.
Maybe they should spend more time hiring people that actually make competitive applications against Microsoft than die-hard nutjobs who think waiting a year to work for an open-source company is a good idea.
Microsoft might not have 70% of the desktop market if they'd done that.
Apple managed to claw back 15% of the desktop market to 20% with their BSD-clone OS, and it still has garbage software compared to what's available on Windows, but at least it's a start...
People who love Ubuntu, tend to love Ubuntu.
A very long hiring process pretty much ensures the only ones still waiting around are the ones who really want to work at Canonical.
> $X bad on purpose
> $X is made to appear bad for those who are not die-hard $X fans
You just invented a consipracy theory that has surprisingly huge explanative power in modern world
I am not sure I would stay motivated in another context.
There's a Joel on Software or Stack Overflow thing on this....
When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.
Thinking of cost like this is very shallow
The post is not doing any favours and it is not convincing anybody to apply to the position, quite the contrary
And guess what, your company is not the shining star that has to make absolute sure to never have a bad hire. Sure, take the low-hanging fruit as early in the process as possible, but up to a certain point, more interviews won't mean better results
The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.
I've had it before where I got an offer when I was in a job search from a place I approached from the last time I was in a job search.
Everything takes ages in the corporate world. Every hiring decision needs to be signed off by interviewers, managers, HR, and sometimes even executives. Someone in this chain is usually on vacation, but there's no clear replacement, so someone else needs to be brought up to speed. Meetings need to take place for everyone to touch base, and discuss the candidates. Coordinating this around everyone's availability is difficult, since they have other meetings to attend. It really takes some outside-the-box thinking to make it happen. :)
Also, depending on the size and popularity of the company, they might be evaluating dozens of candidates at the same time. This also clogs the pipeline considerably.
But not everywhere. I've been hired by a couple of major tech companies and didn't have to go through such an insane, lengthy process as this. I think a lot of it depends on the corporate culture.
As a lowly engineer trying to get subcontractor invoices paid I've had some very Kafkaesque struggles.
There are tons of companies that don't do this (at least in the US), though, so there's no real reason to put up with it.
In addition, Canonical is HQ'd in the UK, so it's not quite as easy to let someone go if red flags come up.
It's only after that it's hard.
The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here, where here liked to the US government website.
EDIT:
I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshuttleworth.com/work.html
Around 2004 it said:
"Brilliant. Tell me about things you've done in which you have truly excelled. I don't mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you've setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven't done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you'll fit in just fine"
The very last "here" was a link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/
https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.marksh...
I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment.
We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions).
> The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to.
Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc).
> Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available.
Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth.
I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.
They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.
But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.
Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.
> NIH
If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.
Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.
Credited for creating the most painful interview process.
Not to excuse the behavior, but different times were different times.
(Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)
Yeah, those drone strikes from the Obama administration were pretty bad.
Ubuntu has been underwhelming as of late. It’s fine, just underwhelming. Sometimes software becomes underwhelming as it matures but in this case, the hiring process seems designed to ship underwhelming software.
Then there is the particular issue. That kind of thinking/communication style doesn’t make me feel comfortable with Ubuntu (or any project he would have a leadership role in).
And finally, I’m really tired of how our industry seems to glorify jerks.
So we have:
1.) Ubuntu is rather underwhelming.
2.) The hiring process is so fucked that underwhelming software is the most likely result.
3.) There is a lot of competition and I can find projects with vaguely professional/secure leaders.
4.) I run more than enough jerk driven software.
Does it fit the somewhat quirky (but by far not unusual) interview process? Yes
Is it a sign of a moral flaw? No
I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.
There is no respected engineering leader who would look at this moron as inspiration for anything other than jumping out of a building. I can't believe someone who has no actual technical chops, no listed formal education, etc can be such a chode. Especially one infamous for the Ubuntu Unity scandal.
He's like a less important Elon Musk. Musk is a moron, but this guy takes the entire cake.
I guess it’s valuable to be a mildly smart kid in a really bad school.
But hopefully it stayed in the past
Maybe that's what it said what it said.
My essay focused on Ubuntu on ARM and how critical it would be for hyperscalers, which at the time wasn't really a thing at all (that should date me).
I ended up declining their offer mostly because nowhere during any step of the process but the very end they pointed out they could only contract, not take me on as a full-time employee.
I don't regret giving it a go, but it was one of the weirdest hiring processes I've ever gone through (including FAANG, MBB and think tanks).
Wtf? Couldn’t he have done that at a more convenient time?
Last year, I did 8 interviews (including 4 technical assessments and quizzes) to get an offer from AMD (in Germany) as a software engineer. For completeness, they reached out to me. I wasn't really looking at the time.
When I got the offer, salary+bonus was less than what I had at the time (a lot less now) living in a similar cost place, so I rejected the offer, obviously.
In the final call, the HR person implied more than once that I was a time-waster for going through the whole process just to get the offer and then say "no" to it, that I wasn't "committed" as I said...
That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me (I'm in Colorado, so they're legally obligated to provide a salary range) about a job that required a very specialized skillset at a senior level that I happen to have (although it's nothing to do with what I do /now/), and the top of the salary range was $20k/yr less than what I was making doing that same work in 2014, almost a decade ago and more than $100k/yr less than I make now. There's a HUGE disconnect between management at most companies, especially in HR roles, and the actual market for specialized technical labor. At least in the US, I attribute this to HR roles treating Department of Labor stats like the gospel, when job categories in DoL aren't modernized and therefore cover such a broad range of subjobs that they are diluted and meaningless, while at the same time average salary is heavily skewed by the fact that largest employer in the US across almost all job categories is the federal government, which has a notoriously low payscale for skilled labor (which attracts exactly the sort of toads on a log you'd expect).
I am not currently in the market for a new job, but I switched roles at the beginning of 2022 and I made it a point of starting my conversations with recruiters by telling them rather directly "I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?" The company I eventually accepted a position at had to go through a lot of internal bureaucracy to make my offer, but only put me through one round of interviewing before they did the legwork to make sure they could make it worth my while before running me through their entire process. I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).
I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.
The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs.
Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch.
Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.
This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.
I think this has an angle of the artificially created "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick a few people into lower paid jobs.
> I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?
That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).
My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $ to go around.
It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and supply & demand takes care of the rest.
I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60%
In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was wildly unstable in the 90s.
I won't even interview without a salary range being provided and then acknowledging my minimum. Otherwise it's a waste of everyones time. Any company that has an issue with this is going to be difficult to work for and treat you like you are lucky to be there.
Was bit bummed about this, I would love to work for canonical as they do great stuff and their embedded Linux offering is a great product. Just doesn't really make sense sadly.
I always ask what they're targeting first, but if they decide to be cagey, I'll throw out a range where the low end is comfortably above what I'm currently making, enough that I would actually consider the offer.
I already get paid pretty well, so I think this has saved myself and others quite a lot of time.
(I also tend to reply to recruiter emails with a polite "no, thanks, but can you share the pay range for this role?". Maybe half reply with numbers, which is enough to keep a good sense of where the market is at.)
In my case, they knew my current salary and expected salary from the first call.
They didn’t commit to anything beforehand, and maybe that’s my mistake. OTOH it is quite a bet to spend a lot of someones (mine, in this case) betting they’re going to accept a smaller salary just for the privilege of working for you.
If you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.
Tenure-track hiring is nothing like that. Is it rigorous? Yes. Do they take dumb formalized tests? No. Rather, they typically present their research to the faculty.
(I don't think it's true)
I don't know if this is what you're referring to by the phrase 'going on and on' but the phrase makes me think of my coworker who talks in circles about any topic, providing many words but little info. And the circles usually incorporate personal anecdotes. He hasn't realized people tune out immediately.
I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.
if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests.
if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology.
if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management and upper management are somewhat disconnected from the actual work that has to be performed.
I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.
Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for scammers, done.
And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread:
Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc)
They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about
I have people on both sides of these spectrums.
On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on
On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them
Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences
Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity. But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards.
It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way
I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually counterproductive, because talented people are not going to put up with it.
I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such.
Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not.
But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time.
Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.
Last time this came up here, Shuttleworth popped up to tell us it was just what they needed so there you go. No need to apply. :shrug:
As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with my business partner to try to raise money to build accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No investor would bite.
But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since high school.
Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed, as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my interview is now up as well)
That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process, signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company. The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do not believe this to be the case.
So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a materiel leadership change at the top.
They know, and it's been discussed often.
They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans would rock the boat and demand too much money, and dip when it's clear the middle mgmt are clowns.
Same! 30 years of experience. Technical and management. I applied to two roles and both auto rejected. I had contact with a human once to ask if I had a change at all since I don’t have a university degree and was told to not bother.
Their loss.
You're the one I want to get advice from on hackernews...
Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.
I don't do asymmetrical interviews. I'll consider a take in coding test in lieu of something else (or a very trivial one), but a written essay means I'm spending time and they are not. A phone or face to face interview requires an actual investment in their time, and doesn't treat my time as completely disposable.
> Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.
i wonder what is preventing you from just lying. like, how are they going to confirm or deny what you're saying ?
Frankly it seems like a way to have something they can use to reject you with something that's hard to debate against.
Integrity? Also the self-interest of not wanting to work with liars and yes-men.
Basically the same reason I don't lie during the rest of an interview process.
Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe overly positive unverifiable statements are actually negatives for them.
Why would you pay a senior engineer salary for someone who is just barely competent enough to bang out CRUD apps, when you could spend a little more time searching and find someone who's a force multiplier and can lead projects?
Funnily the engineer who was responsible for the application also sent a very bureaucratic sounding email acknowledging my withdrawal.
I can’t imagine their process for interviews doesn’t reflect what working there would be like - if it doesn’t then they really need to fix their pipeline
“How would you change the company?”
Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side.
Also, Canonical is still not Evil enough for the tech industry:
Perhaps you wanted a more pleasing answer... but Deconstructionism is rarely productive.
Best regards =)
Would look for a budget or have it reflected in their offer analysis though.
Like, sorry you didn't make it past the final stage, but here's a nice Framework laptop with Ubuntu.
What I learned is that large tech companies invented modern technical recruiting as a way of choosing between good engineers. Many other companies that don't have this problem then started a recruiting cargo cult of similar practices thinking this is how you found the best people. I don't think a lot of companies have thought critically about their recruiting experience.
1: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unluc...
My mail contained 43 separate questions.
43. I am not joking, I just went and counted them. Each of which probably wanted a sentence to paragraph answer. Some could be more.
As Blaise Pascal said: If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
Write a shorter letter Canonical. You told me so much about you in one step. You can't write a short letter, or you don't care.
From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.
High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".
We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?
Also I should say the overall recruitment process works, I was not the right candidate for the job, and the job wasn't right for me. But I think there were much stronger signals pointing to that during the process than what I did during high school.
It's sad because they were otherwise very convincing. It was too big of a red flag though.
Why they care? I've heard a couple of explanations:
- Like with the standardized test (cough IQ test cough) obsession, they kind of subscribe to the racehorse theory, namely that some individuals are just born smart and have excelled all their lives. They don't just want hard working individuals, they want hard working and smart individuals.
- It shows a constant progression. They want people that have excelled all their lives, and not those with random spurs of excellence
And of course, just another weeding function.
Combining that whole thing with the recent decisions around Snaps vs Flatpak, their interaction with LXD, and their general user hostility, I'm glad that I am not tied to their products in a meaningful way, and I've gone back to Fedora for my home systems. Really sad that they can't capitalize on the IBM murder of open source stable distros, but I've really never had major complaints with Fedora and I can always go back to OpenSUSE if I need to, given their recent renaissance.
Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.
This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.
I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)
ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.
It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.
[actually submitted in the usual manner, but marked as a dupe]
> And yes, we make mistakes occasionally, none of us are perfect.
> To be successful and get an offer, you will need to be both outstanding, and a little bit lucky. That's life.
haha. it comes across kind of salty to me.
never going to use ubuntu again.
But such people just say fuck you and move on when the process becomes tedious. Who are they trying to hire here?
I've been to a few companies which had way too more applicants than they knew what to do with, but most of the time it was because the majority were under qualified spam applicants, who assumed that eventually someone will give them the time of day.
Self-described "Linux users".
I’ve known people who’ve maintained Arch packages, kept Brew up to date, and maintained kernels for Android devices. Some of whom have attempted to get hired by Canonical. Some of whom had Canonical engineers begging to hire them.
Their process can’t hire Americans, is highly biased towards a British attitude towards long, laborious interview processes, and was described by one of my colleagues in diversity and inclusion as “the most trans and neurodivergent hostile environment I’ve ever seen in an interview loop, incapable of hiring the demographic that will make the most impact in their product.”
Some companies uses long and pointless interviews to discover and collect legally sound reasons to reject candidates without revealing the true reason of rejections (could be based on race, gender, age, disability, religion etc).
But, you probably don't want to work for a bad company anyway, so I guess just be happy for the fact that now you don't have to.
My main problem is the uncompetitive pay
It's a shame because the product and my Hiring Manager seemed great, I'm curious what candidates make it through.
compliant ones I would expect, which seems to be the aim of the process.
When they first started, they didn't have all that stuff. In fact, I remember them running around and hiring basically anyone with any role in the Linux/Debian space. For a period, I had quite a few conversations at LUGs where I was told "Oh, that guy you met last week? He's the <insert Debian package here>, Canonical just hired him...".
I wonder if that original hiring spree (which was fishing heavily from academia, and seemed very informal) burned them so badly that they sat down and devised a process that is the exact opposite.
From outside it looks very much like HR is out of control.
Disclaimer: I work for Canonical and help with recruiting.
I'd love it if our hiring process was shorter or tighter, but the written interview part (the part people seem to protest the most) I actually think is helpful. We're a fully remote company, and written communication is very important, so I think it's important that we evaluate how well someone can relate their experience and get technical ideas across. I personally review several written submissions per day, I read them in full, write notes of my thoughts, and evaluate them carefully. So your effort isn't wasted!
> Imagine if – as a job applicant – you could put yourself right in front of the hiring lead, and tell them, in your own words, in your own time, without interruption or distraction or pressure, why you think you’d be an excellent person for the role. What kind of applicant would benefit the most?
A liar
Canonical also re posts every month or so to also benefit from higher placement for more recent listings.
Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years.
Source: former Canonical employee.
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the work-controlled laptop.
I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense. Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to work.
I do understand why each job had their way of doing things though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the laptop any more.
Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.
That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20 years all work I've done has been using my own devices except for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-supplied laptop to be unusual.
The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
* autocorrect manualfixes
I just got a referral from someone I used to know for a company, and my technical interview was mostly chatting through what I’d built in the past. Then they asked me to go over in about 5 minutes how I’d build a link shortener. That was it. Why would I bother going through multiple rounds of interviews including quizzing my life story?
Most companies have no reason to believe their process is better than taking a random resume (which selects for people who want to work for you enough to send a resume) and making an offer. Sure they have elaborate processes around interviews, tests, and the like. However are they helpful or just processes for the sake of process.
I know there is research on how to interview people. However I don't know where to find it, and most processes seem to have been created without looking at it.
Canonical, isn't the Ubuntu company? I don't know much about it, but I can't imagine it's high-stress and fast-paced.
says it all really. just about done with this silly industry.
Unless something has changed, but when I worked there, the big customer problems they were trying to solve were being solved by talented people in a NIH culture with all the friction that introduces. MAAS, Juju; good ideas hindered by the execution pipe, but that’s just my opinion.
Then half a year later they've sent me an email asking how my experience with their hiring process was. I'm still holding off the reply.
Thank you for applying for a position as a Cloud Field Engineer - Americas (Remote) at Canonical!
I am the hiring lead for it and will steer you through the process. I have reviewed your resume and moved you forward.
The hiring process has several stages:
initial resume screening (done) written submission (this stage) standardised aptitude and personality tests Face-to-face Meet & Greet interview Online 15min Linux/Networking quiz Online 2hr Python Coding test Live 1hr Linux Troubleshooting interview Talent Interview (HR team) Hiring Manager interview, Hiring Lead interview If we think you are a fantastic fit for Canonical then we will find you the best role for you at the company. We are committed to run a smooth and fast hiring process, ideally reaching an offer in 2 weeks time.
The current stage is your written submission.
Consider this to be a written interview, and a prepared statement for interviewers to read in advance of your meeting to cover your interests, priorities, experience and ambition. Please answer the following in a PDF document:
Education
How would you describe your high school interests in mathematics, physical sciences and computing? In these subjects, which were your strengths and what were your most enjoyable activities? How did you rank, competitively, in these subjects? What did you do after high school? Why did you choose that? Which course and university did you choose, and why? Which university courses did you enjoy the most, and which ones did you perform best at? How did you rank in your degree? Outside of degree requirements, what were your interests and where did you spend most of your time? During your time at high school and university, what did you achieve that you consider to be exceptional? Experience
What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which development environments, languages, databases? How extensive is your experience of Python software engineering? How do you test Python applications? Outline the applications that you have led in Python, and your takeaways from that experience. How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of Linux is, from the kernel up? How have you gained this knowledge? How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of networking is? How have you gained this knowledge? Describe your experience with private and/or public cloud technologies (Openstack, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). What is the next technology you want to learn about, and why ? How do you plan on learning it ? Do you have experience with customer-facing roles ? Outline your software documentation experience. Context
Outline your thoughts on the mission of Canonical. What is it about the company's purpose and goals which is most appealing to you? What is it that you think is risky or unappealing? Who do you see as competitors to Canonical, and in what ways do you think Canonical needs to change in order to be a more effective competitor to them? What do you see as the current dynamics in the cloud software industry that are favourable to Canonical? Which are unfavourable? Why do you most want to work for Canonical? Which sorts of Canonical products and services would you most like to work on? Please take the opportunity to re-read your submission and make sure you have put your best case of exceptional ability forward.
Please make your submission as a PDF at the URL given below. I have set the system to hide your name and details from me, please do not put identifying details in the submission itself.
Thank you! I look forward to reading your answers, and perhaps meeting later in the process.
Camille
--
My reply: I got a rejection letter from greenhouse within about an hour.
This is ridiculous. Why do I care who your competitors are? Hint: it’s not my job to care. What dynamics in the cloud computing industry are favorable to Canonical and unfavorable? Don’t you pay your marketing department for these answers?
I was laid off, I am looking for a fulfilling career. I need a job and I bring to the table a skillset spanning my entire adult life. One that fits the criteria of what you posted about.
I want to pay my bills and enjoy what I do for work. A simple transaction. I bring to the table something to help push the company’s agenda forward that you need (and are posting about for a job). You, in turn, help me keep my family fed and my bills paid. My past is my past outside of the relevant work experience and credentials necessary to do the job you are posting about. The rest is simply put, none of your business. I’m sure my 11th grade chemistry teacher would agree.
I don’t need to write a college admission application essay on why I want to work here.
High school was 25 years ago and irrelevant. Do you actually think you’re going to pick me on whether or not I participated in the science bowl or what my score was in an AP Biology class?
I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, supporting Software as a service on linux-based servers for almost that long. I’ve worked at ISPs hosting e-mail and web servers, to supporting a geographically low-latent software application supporting Fortune 500 companies so they can figure out how many of their website visitors are actually buying things and in turn adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. I’ve moved data centers and been on teams where I was directly responsible for portions of the effort to migrate them to the cloud. All of this is demonstrable and verifiable.
If you are interested in the relevant experience and credentials I posses that qualifies me for the job, OK. But I won’t be answering any of the rest of below that is irrelevant to the application process.
i guess its because people are passionate about the product
Please could someone explain how is this, claiming that someone's race and ethnicity defines their bias, not in itself racist?
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
You started a flamewar with here and perpetuated it downthread. We're trying to avoid these things on HN as they are tedious, repetitive, and predictably turn nasty. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The fact is that demographics have a lot to do with bias because people from the same demographics have similar life experiences. Having someone else with a different set of experiences can help to mitigate bias by giving their perspective in the group. It is a simplistic way to determine 'tendency towards bias' by focusing on demographics, but it is also a pretty good indicator that when you are in a group of all the same demographic then there is going to be some bias that will go unnoticed.
To answer your question -- the race part is incidental. A 30 year old college educated white male from an urban/suburban US upbringing is more than just 'white'. This is why it is not racist -- because race is one aspect of a demographic.
Hope this helps.
Hmmm, thinking back over it maybe she's internalised the US diversity thing and is judging everything through that lens?
I don't have a gene test on hand to confirm, but I'm pretty sure my heritage is all over the place.