Canonical Under Attack | Hacker News Reader

Canonical Under Attack

status.canonical.com

69 pointsta98829 comments

Discussion yesterday (194 points, 63 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972213

Related: Pro-Iran crew turns DDoS into shakedown as Ubuntu.com stays down (80 points, 78 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47975729

I remember seeing Ubuntu hiring recently, like a half a year ago or a year ago.

Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".

Well, well, well, who would have thought "maths geniuses" are really bad at DDoS protection and running infra in real life. And academic marks / IT degree mean nothing in real IT work.

Think twice next time you hire people, Canonical. People without a degree, but with extensive experience you rejected might have prevented this situation in the first place.

I'm not connected with this DDoS attack in any way, just in case, but I remember their arrogant hiring attitude and now it's amusing to see the outcome of it.

> Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".

Man that like barely scratches the surface of the surrealness of canonical's hiring process

I remember reading an article describing Canonical’s predatory hiring practices, but I can’t find it any more. Do you have sources?

https://dustri.org/b/my-experience-with-canonicals-interview... is one example

> We have hired outstanding individuals who did not attend or complete university. If this describes you, please continue with your application and enter ‘no degree’.

But not if they got bad grades in HS lol?

I don’t remember it as particularly surreal. They did a remote programming interview over Zoom (in 2014 or so) and it was a really interesting problem - to make a PRNG for a specific range of integers using two other PRNGs. Their solution had a branch and mine was branchless and decently random. It was, at least then, a very personalistic company, centred around Shuttleworth, but his influence didn’t usually extend more than two org levels, and different parts of it behaved as different companies.

I don't think the specific individual technical interviews are the surreal part about canonical's hiring process

You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).

I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.

Cray cray

I can’t help wonder what kind of people end up being hired in places like that.

Geniuses like I’ve never even met? Weirdly hyper-specialized types? Ambitious con artists?

Maybe friends of current employees get to skip the BS gauntlet?

The over ambitious and underperforming, might be a good indication of why they can't keep a website up :)

These are the people who brought you the Snap package manager. The one nobody asked for. The one that constantly harasses you every half hour to close programs that you have open because there's always something with a goddamn update waiting. Then when you close it, it doesn't get updated, and you have no idea. Then you wait 30 seconds because every Snap app is slow as dog shit to launch. Then it tells you to close it because it needs an update.

Their hiring process apparently leaks through to the general design of ubuntu, which is trash.

No to mention the absolutely absurd questions they ask. I looked at a sr position there and they were asking about performance in individual courses _in high school._ I haven't been in school for 20 years. I've learned and forgotten so many things since then, like I'm going to remember or care what I did in econ 101 multiple decades ago... It was so silly I didn't bother applying.

I've read some surreal recounts of the Canonical interview process. The CEO appears to have a fairly extreme fixation on candidates' high school experiences.

Needless to say, this is just absolutely bizarre. What kind of kid you were is a terrible proxy for professional competence or even present-day fit. (Not to mention that people's high school experiences are very likely to differ greatly based on things like socioeconomic status, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and imposing a normative idea of what high school experiences ought to look like would probably unfairly discount candidates through no fault of their own.)

Yeah, I considered applying once, but saw others online saying their process was long and outdated. In my case, I applied anyway, but during the screen call I asked if I would have to use Ubuntu even if I didn't use, and also their new (at that time) Juju for all tasks, even if that wasn't the best tool for the job. The position was related to automation of services. They told me I would to use both Ubuntu and Juju, and I couldn't use other tools if those two worked, which I understand, but I thought being stuck using Juju probably wouldn't help my career after a few years.

> They told me I would to use both Ubuntu and Juju, and I couldn't use other tools if those two worked

Dogfooding is a valid strategy to improve their product, but you’d be heavily invested in Juju’s success.

Seeing as how Canonical launched several Kubernetes products, this strategy didn’t survive for long.

Canonical has a tradition of inventing something that’s ahead of its time only to see nobody else is going the same way as they are. Sometimes they realise it was a mistake and follow everyone else.

Juju had a different problem: it was big-bang rewritten in Go and that froze features for too long for them to keep their mindshare. Rewriting was the right decision, as Python had poor concurrency back then, but doing that while freezing features was a mistake.

This is surprising. Has Canonical built something recently that requires "math geniuses with top grades at school"?

The last time I remember using any of their software was Unity. I'm not a Unity hater, but where is the headcount going?

This is quite reasonable compared to the rest of the process.

I thought I was catfished by North Korea when after the third round of requirements was sent.

I find this take a bit silly. There are perhaps a dozen companies that could put as complex a surface out as Ubuntu has and actually expect to defend against any sort of sustained interest from a nation state. Canonical absolutely could have made better decisions in the design of many things for this situation but doing that as a corporation that isn't under attack is extremely hard when no one wants long delays for theoreticals.

All components are Operational now:

https://status.canonical.com/

PPAs are still timing out for me in apt update.

Ditto, launchpad.net is also extremely flaky.

And now the GB mirror is down. I know DDOSes are hard but they're not showering themselves in glory.

The status page lies. ppa.launchpadcontent.net is still timing out.

Still completely borked for me.

Err:1 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu noble/main amd64 git amd64 1:2.54.0-0ppa1~ubuntu24.04.1 Could not connect to ppa.launchpadcontent.net:443 (185.125.190.80), connection timed out Err:2 https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu noble/main amd64 git-man all 1:2.54.0-0ppa1~ubuntu24.04.1 Unable to connect to ppa.launchpadcontent.net:https: E: Failed to fetch https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu/pool/ma... Could not connect to ppa.launchpadcontent.net:443 (185.125.190.80), connection timed out E: Failed to fetch https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/git-core/ppa/ubuntu/pool/ma... Unable to connect to ppa.launchpadcontent.net:https: E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

Down again this morning. Docker builds are real slow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com