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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

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 Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".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

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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.

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

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.)

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?

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