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Comment by jobmeplease | Hacker News Reader

I applied to Canonical a few months back and they made me write an essay describing my high school grades, extracurriculars, and test results. I've never had that experience in any other job app so it's pretty Canonical specific but it does happen.

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Canonical's interview process is legendarily invasive and dumb, and they get very touchy when you tell them so. I enjoyed how, when I pointed out that the questions about high school extracurriculars would narrow down many of my demographics and let you guess at a few others (and just the way I write would let you make strong inferences about others), they clammed up and told me I could do it or drop. I dropped.

I've heard similar things from former employees too. One glassdoor reviewer (so take with a grain of salt) said that they were called stupid by leadership for suggesting that the process might be biased, which of course it is. It also feels dehumanizing. It may take months to go from applying for a job to talking to a real human being.

I applied for a job with the FAANG that rhymes with "pajamas on" and their interview process was dumb as well. I told them so and got the interview ended right there. Good riddance, I suppose.

Similarly, I had an interviewer (same place) who just oozed “I despise being here”. Dismissed everything I said and gave me only the last 2 minutes to solve the problem he was supposed go give me. Didn’t bother to check back in with the recruiter after that.

My approach on these things is to put that in the essay and make them suffer through it.

> Canonical's interview process is legendarily invasive and dumb

Since they put an Amazon affiliate link in he start menu I've just assumed they are full of them self.

i worked at one startup that decided to emulate the Canonical interview process because one of the managers was the kind of guy that loved cargo-culting this kind of stuff. he decided to start doing these interviews without coordinating with the rest of the hiring team.

it's one thing for a large company to do these kind of interview when the interviewee is knows what they're getting into, but it feels very different when a you're interviewing at a random early-stage startup and out of nowhere this guy starts asking you invasive personal questions. it really starts pushing the boundaries of legal interview questions.

anyway... this guy has since founded his own company writes inane linkedin-friendly blog posts filled with inspirational stories about "leadership" that make me gag.

Wow, this is fascinating to me.

When I interviewed at Red Hat is was almost entirely technical. There was a computerized technical test (essentially "here's a VM, set up <several things>" and then a script grades it), a verbal technical interview, and then a panel/presentation that was specifically about the process I took my previous company through in adopting k8s.

I thought that part of the application was a bit odd. High school me is so different from current me that I might as well be writing about a different human being entirely.

These kinds of interviews just scream ageism. For younger applicants, High School may be the most significant bit of life experience they have yet had. For older employees, high school is just a distant memory that was at most a seed that has grown into a much more branched experience

It also selects for people that have spent their early life credential-chasing and turning their life into an easily repeated list of accomplishments.

A lot of great employees rightfully spent their teen years screwing around and having fun before settling into career mode.

What possible insight would they gain knowing what someone did both as a youth and more than a decade ago? I'm a 1000% different person than I was in high school.

That’s insane. I barely graduated high school, my extracurriculars were smoking pot and programming. Then I graduated summa cum laude at a top cs school and a very successful career doing pretty cutting edge stuff as IC and manager up to senior exec levels at FAANG and adjacents. Digging into someone’s high school career is frankly bizarre but convinces me to never consider working there and to stop using their products.

Canonical? As in the company that makes Ubuntu? Those guys?

yes

Yeah they're (in)famous for their onerous hiring process, and specifically for asking lots about high school.

See for example this Reddit thread posted by a rejected candidate (and note Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth is in the comments!)

https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...

or this HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34507640

I wish I hadn't found and read these posts. I have been an Ubuntu fan for the last 10 or so years. I will not be able to look at Ubuntu the same again...

I literally couldn't tell you what my SAT scores were. Those and my high school grades were good enough to get into $SCHOOL. I'm sure not going to bother to try to dig them out. Here are some extracurriculars I did--not that it's relevant at this point.

If I was asked something like this, I'd refuse and withdraw my application.

That explains why Ubuntu is so full of bad ideas (such as snap) and reinventing the wheel (Unity, Mir).

Imagine you did all of that, received and accepted an offer, and then they made you work on snap. Grim.

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