Why would they be unemployed? Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, is reportedly obsessed with high school performance, to the point of rejecting otherwise highly competent candidates who passed the whole process before that based on high school questions alone.
You qualified for the interview, but did they qualify for you?
A highschool performance question is not odd. It is meant to filter me out - that is perfect, because why would I want to waste my time on an interview in a company with this mentality, in the first place?
But it offends some folks world view to live with folks who hire based on signals like this, vs raw capability.
So, we come to this forum to kvetch.
Right but given the pay, talent level, and more from Canonical, they should probably not be trying to invent new ways to filter candidates beyond what even top tier software shops are doing.
If Jane Street and Anthropic aren't rejecting candidates for high school performance, maybe your mid tier company with low tier pay shouldn't be either.
Exactly spot on.
Surely everyone would also agree with this and at this point, just don't bother with Canonical and ignore them. They do it because they are not interested in hiring at all, even if the post is there.
Would much rather go to Anthropic if I had my time again, which there is far more upside and pays extremely well than whatever pathetic amount Canonical could ever come up with.
There's two big reasons this is such a red flag: 1) Come on. Unless you are hiring highschool graduates directly, you have other means of finding out how good candidates are. If a highschool report card tells you more about a candidate than your own interview process, you need to fire everyone involved with that process.
2) Highschool performance is highly correlated with a bunch of causes that are very undesirable things to proxy-measure in your hiring process.
In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from, high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well. You need to be careful with such measures, as selecting job candidates based on class or race is both unethical and commonly illegal.
Again consider that these are high school results. A person who is born to unlucky schooling opportunities can still compensate for the learning they were deprived of by working harder in college/university or their formal career after that.
> high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well.
the degree to which this claim about wealth is true is impacted by confounders. it is generally less true than commonly stated. outside of the public sector, that a measure is correlated with race/ethnicity/class does not make it a priori illegal to hire based on.
Minor nitpick, but Mark hails from (and was schooled in) South Africa.
Agree with your overall point.
If I wasn’t desperate for a job I would declined to apply out of the idiocy of the question
who....cares?
I think we need to ask ourselves why we put up with this nonsense. Not even the serious tech companies and adjacent care about that aspect of your performance.
He would certainly have passed on Linus Torvalds if he applied to work at Canonical - because he did not got to some well known top high school or get the top marks Shuttleworth wanted.
> who....cares?
Presumably everyone reading the article. It’s about bad hiring practices and uses Canonical as the example, thus Canonical’s CEO and their inane contributions to the hiring practices at their own company are relevant to the discussion.