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Comment by bananapub | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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