Canonicals Interview Process | Hacker News Reader

Canonicals Interview Process

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164 pointsdijit79 comments

This seems to be the canonical Canonical interview process – I've heard several stories like this over the years. It's always the same: interview process is overly long and a bit ridiculous, but things go relatively well. And then at the final stage Shuttleworth shows up to be a dick with a bizarre focus on high school, after which it's rejected.

Judging by Ubuntu's declining quality over the last few years, this selection process doesn't seem to be working too well.

Internally, toxic culture has resulted in large turnaround which is biased to the most experienced people in the company (those smart and valuable enough to realize they don’t have to put up with the crap and can do better elsewhere). It doesn’t matter how brilliant the new hires are, there’s no way to replace the lost institutional knowledge and experience when an old-timer leaves.

This was exactly my experience last year. I even did a SAR to get all my interview notes. Glowing praise and positivity until Shuttleworth didn’t like 16yo me’s exam results (which I disclosed as part of the weird 4000 word essay thing in stage 1)

Most of the folks I know that work or have worked at Canonical are smart and deeply humble, even worryingly so. I say "worryingly" in the sense that their hiring process seems to weed out people who could speak up, question authority or otherwise show hints of critical thinking. Not my cup of tea.

They all talk about Mark and make fun of him behind his back. Most won't say something to him to his face because he let's them know they would lose their jobs. Your paycheck requires you can't speak up. Take the cash or leave.

I thought that was business as usual everywhere, especially in companies where employees are encouraged to speak up. Yes, of course you can speak up, and this makes it ever so easy to judge you or throw you out.

Do your own time. Take your paycheck. Don't rock the boat.

Most of the folks that I've worked with, who have previously worked at Canonical, have been categorically unimpressive. "Senior" engineers with limited, even naive, understanding of the technologies and tools they're working with, and who are totally uninterested in feedback from, or collaboration with, any of their peers.

The interview process says a lot about a company.

Honestly, I would have run away at the very beginning with this weird focus on high school.

If you can't be professional in your recruitment process, it's a big red flag.

Assuming everything is true, he did actually dodge a bullet.

I suspect the make up of this company is going to be the most extreme of extreme mono cultures.

The ‘what marks did you get in high school mathematics’ alone as a screening question (apparently an auto rejection if it’s not top 10%) and the ceo interviewing everyone personally gives a vibe of ‘you must have walked a very similar path in life as the boss to work here.’

Like there doesn’t seem to be any room to be the slightest bit outside of the lane of the ceos personal expectations. What the hell is this company like on the inside? A clone factory i assume?

> A clone factory i assume?

Not necessarily, I would assume it's more of a 'yes man' mentality where you have to agree with everything the boss say (even when you didn't understand it lol).

Giving different opinion, counter argument, ... All the stuff that allows to make an educated guess and eventually take good decision is a big No-No.

The equivalent of fascism but in a company.

Usually the one who reach the top are those who suck it up, not based on merit. Overall bad working environment.

Thats how you end up with the famous Ubuntu-Amazon advertising relationship in the start menu, or the snap package.

I remember applying for a position a few years back. After I saw a bunch of questions related to high school I noped out due to weird vibes. Sounds like it was a good call

They did the same for me: I was - like the author - vague here, instead of "10/10 perfect score" and thus rejected pretty soon without any further information.

> I got three "strong yes", eight "yes", and a single "no" from Mark Shuttleworth

Mark interviews are always the last in the process but since they’re the only ones that carry an automatic fail despite all other interviewer scores, they should be done first.

An interview process that allows a single individual to have absolute veto power over multiple prior interview evaluators is, pretty obviously, broken.

Canonical’s interview process is all kinds of broken. This has been discussed widely on the internet and internally but as long as Mark (who is the main driver and firmly believes it’s a revolution in how hiring is done) and his hiring minions continue to justify it and refuse to change it, it will remain so.

Can't really change much if the CEO and founder think it's a good idea.

Nah, it's working as intended. The whole point of a CEO (boss) is to have veto power.

There's some weird twisted kind of logic here: Shuttleworth probably sees it as the other interviewers' job to weed out candidates so that he doesn't have to spend as much of his time interviewing candidates. It's a total waste in terms of man-hours spent interviewing, but it means Shuttleworth himself spends less time interviewing.

Obvious to me this is a classic boss battle.

Obviously Mark just wants someone to challenge him to a good old round of differentiating high school calculus functions or perhaps some 3D star-trek chess, then he knows you're an intelligent gentleman worthy of Canonical.

> since they’re the only ones that carry an automatic fail despite all other interviewer scores, they should be done first.

That would be impossible since there is only one Mark but a multitude of people who can conduct the previous interviews.

Similar experiences. I figured there's no way they wouldn't take me to the next round given my background. Answered GPA question honestly and got the auto rejected email in minutes.

Really weird as someone who's worked at a staff+ level at multiple FAANGs with over 20 years experience. Apparently my GPA from over 20 years ago isn't high enough for Canonical.

Shuttleworth sounds like a complete tool. His position seems to select for that.

> At some point, someone bought him a plate, and he started to eat, without excusing himself about doing so

Whoa, that dude is full of himself.

All these Steve Jobs wannabe's somehow always overshoot yet also entirely fall short.

I wouldn't hold Jobs up as a paragon to aim for. Falling short sounds like a good thing here

That's the point, though: Jobs was a very successful asshole, and people get their "becauses" and "despites" mixed up. The Jobs wannabes overshoot on the "despites" and keep falling short on the "becauses".

I don’t know how these people don’t make their own skin crawl. Sounds like scum of a human being.

I am fascinated at how this has actually lasted so long without imploding the place - did Mark stop being a cheapskate on salary so people will tolerate this process? Or is it just banking on their good name and mostly getting to work on free software?

It's entirely possible that it is imploding. Remember that a large percentage of Ubuntu's output is passing through the volunteer labor of the Debian project. Meanwhile, if there's not much management fiddling with existing employees, they might have their general processes well-automated.

The reverse is also true, Canonical employs a bunch of Debian developers who work on Debian upstream during their paid time when it makes more sense.

By all accounts it’s a great place to work, but not a great place to apply for work …

Certainly not all accounts. Certainly not from those of us who were there when the fun early days turned into the painful “Mark berates people in public” days. Certainly not those who were there in the more recent era where stack ranking style behaviours appeared.

Canonical people can be great to work with, but it is certainly not a great place to work.

Maybe the reality is most jobs aren't that hard once you have some baseline skills? While I don't love this interview process, I'm certain there are plenty of great people filtered out of the standard interview process in big tech.

If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.

the FAANG-esque process is extremely stupid, but it is entirely dependent on 1) getting a referral / passing a phone screen and then 2) passing the dumb interview process on the day, and perhaps some story about why you don't have a degree from a university the American elite thinks is elite enough.

that feels very different from Mark requiring your high school maths grades.

I had the same experience. The interview process was super long and nowhere near completion, got through a few phases, got rejected with no explanation in the middle of it.

The "psychometric assessments" were specially dumb and I started questioning if I wanted to work at Canonical at that time anyway.

There's places where HR and processes as a whole look like just incompetency. And other places where the amount of people, processes and steps sounds like a mafia to employ a lot of people to achieve absolutely nothing (32,000 open positions?). This REALLY sounds like the latter (even Mark complains about why he's wasting time with a duplicate application).

Very very clever actionable using GDPR. And totally within the spirit of the law. I'll use it.

> 32,000 open positions?

Honestly, I very much doubt a company with ~1200 employees has 32,000 open positions.

More likely it's HR reposting the same 20 job ads every day to keep them at the top of the linkedin news feed or some nonsense like that.

Canonical is a remote company so location doesn’t matter but - what they do is, they post the same ad but selecting specific countries or cities to get better SEO positioning in most geographies. You’ll see the same position advertised for a bunch of cities (hence the inflated count) but the job posting text will actually say it’s remote.

It’s like “growth hacking” but for hiring post positioning.

I lasted about 18 months at Canonical (thankfully I didn’t have to deal with this interview process) and I can say that this description of an interaction with Shuttleworth rings true. The poster really did dodge a bullet by not getting hired. Enough time has passed that this now gives me amusement instead of making me feel outright angry. Shuttleworth is an autocratic micromanager who sprinkles arbitrary mandates into every aspect of the business, which accumulate to make it impossible to deliver anything effectively. The promise of the project was huge (this was over 10 years ago) and he hired many brilliant people but then largely ignored their expertise in favour of his own whims. You may notice that the things Ubuntu does well are mostly things that he didn’t find interesting enough to interfere with.

What an interesting use of GDPR. Boy do i wish there was something analogous where i am. Have had identical experiences with large-named places. I guess its just hard to run a fan club where everyone wants in, you have to grasp at straws to dismiss. Paraeto at work again.

Interestingly this mirrors in parts my experience with Mozilla. I have experience with couple of megacorps and they were always more organized than those folks and the folks in this story.

Maybe an open source org hiring problem?

based solely on anecdotes and rumors and feelings, I wonder if it's a nonprofit problem. Reminds me of the kind of grift you read about in various NGO charity type organizations

Canonical isn't a nonprofit. It's technically a for-profit.

Has always been openly a 100% commercial company, no need to qualify it with a “technically”. Maybe you’re thinking about the Ubuntu Foundation?

It's really great. Snowflake ghosted me when I asked politely for interview feedback. I identified their likely DPO via LinkedIn, sent them my compliant and quickly recieved all of the interview notes and feedback.

The "top 10%" thing doesn't make sense mathematically. That depends on the average performance of your classmates. If you were in a school with brilliant students, in a small class, you could be in the top 50%. But with the same performance, just attending a different (low performing) school could put you in the top 5%.

So, keeping performance constant, attending a lower-performing school gives you a higher chance of being accepted at canonical. How crazy is that?

It is crazy. I believe their thinking though is that people have different opportunities, so you should have basically risen to the top at whatever place you were. Yes it is nonsense!

The fact that you'd use that number to automatically disqualify candidates is just insane. It doesn't give you a globally objective measure of a person's performance, because, like I stated, it depends on the competition in their particular group.

I could objectively be better at math than John from another school. But MY school is extremely competitive, so I'm probably in top 20%. But John doesn't have much competition in his school, so he might be in the top 10% in HIS school. But your system will reject me because I'm in the top 20%, and probably accept John because he's in the top 10%. Total absurdity!

So it’s another inhumane interview process from a company led by an apparent psychopath. The author certainly dodged a bullet and graciously wrote this warning. Don’t work for them, they are vampires. Go elsewhere, your life is worth more and you always have a choice.

"So now I'm really curious about the decision process here, as it seems that every interviewer's opinion is ignored if Shuttleworth puts some red marks."

Umm yes? That's how it works everywhere, highest boss in the chain has right of refusal on new hires.

It is unusual to be interviewed by someone more than three levels above the position you are applying for.

At a small company, you might well be interviewed by all of your teammates, your prospective manager, the HR person and the owner/president/CEO... in the course of one day.

At a large company, an IC might not even see their supervisor's manager's director's vice-president until they had been working for six months.

>It is unusual to be interviewed by someone more than three levels above the position you are applying for.

This happened to me, and it was by far my worst interview ever.

Early on in my career right after graduating I got interviewed for a Jr. Sysadmin position at a high frequency trading firm of approx ~1000 employees. The first few behavioral interviews they repeated the exact same questions, including some soft linux knowledge questions (what would you use to troubleshoot network problems lol). Then they took me for a 4 hour on-site gauntlet where they asked the same questions, again, and then I had to do a python leetcode whiteboard problem which I immediately bombed because I hardly did much coding back then. The application said "familiarity with bash/python scripting". If I remember right the problem involved binary search trees which I had no idea about at the time. I didn't know my ass from my hole.

Suffice to say after that, we had lunch. all 4 employees on my team. And all 4 employees that were in the office at the time, which was pretty much empty, because apparently nobody really went in. They gave me a really cold, wet, and soppy burrito. This was the off the mark "vibes" interview where they shot the shit and pretended to be friendly to gauge my personality. I embarrassingly had to play along even thought we all knew it was a total waste of fucking time.

Afterwards, I was shuffled into a big empty meeting room where the CEO interviewed me on screen from California. I was asked the exact same fucking behavioral soft questions down to what I would use to troubleshoot network problems, then he asked me to walk through an example. But at this point I was pretty much mentally blown up from the whiteboard problem and had no motivation to continue. My mind went blank. I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me.

Fastest rejection response I ever got.

Had a similar experience with a VP recently... not >3 levels up, but still. "I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me." feels close to home.

I made time during a family emergency, and attended a call on US west coast time while living in EU (was supposed to be 9PM for me but they pushed it to 10PM right before due to recruiter messing up the invite and having it off by a week).

He didn't ask any relevant questions. He didn't seem interested. He just looked like he was doing a favor to someone that asked him to give me a shot. Original call was supposed to be 1h, then after reschedule it was 30m, but he thanked me for my time after 20 minutes. Ofc I got rejected after, even though the people before had good opinions of me.

All in all, if you're doing hiring, at least try to look interested. phew.

Imagine a world where you are only allowed to work for cooperations such a this. Putting all the bureaucracy aside, to be filtered like this is such a Kafkaesque feeling.

Some of this tracks, but I don’t remember there begin so many steps when I applied (almost a decade ago). Mark was civil if a tad unconventional, but I remember the biggest reason I said no was that it turned out to be a contract position, not an FTE.

Canonical brought us some interesting concepts, like cloud-init, and it's been my first choice for cloud-images, but this toxic culture of them motivates me to choose a better image. Or just something like Nixos.

just because it is ubiquitous doesn't make it good. I spent my fair share in cloud-init land and it absolutely sucks. The complete state flow is a mess with exceptions all over the place.

> Their application was a duplicate with the same email address,

Why do people use "they" and "their" for a single person? Is this the requirement for not misgendering someone?

Using a 3rd person possessive pronoun like this isn't unusual or "promoting woke", it's English.

Thanks. I rarely saw this usage before, hence the question

It's been standard conversational English since the 1300s.

Thanks. Somehow when I was learning English, the instruction was to use she/her to refer to an unknown third person, so did I when writing essays in a college here. That's why it felt strange when I saw they/their for 3rd person.

No, it was not standard conversational English to use the third person plural to refer to a known individual man or woman. It has been used to refer to a non-specific person.

Far from "standard", more like occasionally used.

It's more common in less personal, more formal contexts. Another place you might see this in addition to hiring notes is police reports. It's fine English in any context though, just convention driven.

When handling hiring notes, I do this to clearly separate my point from the gender of the candidate.

Anyone know what "that canonical article" is, as referenced at the very end of the timeline?

The one you just read?

I mean that doesn't make any sense, but okay.

He probably previously mentioned that he wanted to write an article to the friend and the friend asked about it, reminding him.

Unbelievable!

Unubuntunable.

These days, the effort required for company-specific long essay applications hardly seems justified. With Generative AI readily available, it’s easy to tailor essays to appeal to particular—even narcissistic—preferences, unless someone genuinely enjoys the writing process.

As a result, the whole system has devolved into a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise. What began as a meaningful way to assess candidates has largely been undermined, and the original intent behind these evaluations—whether skills-based or culture fit—has been lost.

I'd love to know at what rate the long essay questions are read. Maybe we get to a point where applicants have AI write them and then no one reads them!

I agree, but for a different reason (and one which isn't recent, either). Essay questions on job applications are most effective at selecting for candidates who are adept at telling stories about themselves. It doesn't necessarily give you candidates who are more knowledgeable or better at their jobs.

I interviewed in November 2022. Sounds unchanged, with the essay (24-pages) and bizarre focus on my early life.

Progressed pretty far into the process. 94% on intelligence assessment and positive on the behavioral. Then in a call with HR, I was was told a COVID vaccine was required. I said I was unwilling to take an mRNA vaccine. Rejected by email after that. (I did get Novavax a couple of months later when it became available in my area).

Overall, my impression was negative. Success at Canonical means you fit into a narrow model, subject yourself to unwarranted character judgments, and don't have an opinion about much.

> So I exercised my GDPR rights, and asked to be communicated everything pertaining to my interviews.

This is amazing. Does the US have a similar law for us to get interview feedbacks like this? I can become a single-issue voter for this law /jk

Now I feel better about the immediate rejections from Canonical the couple of times I applied there.

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