The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/usjhye/this_is_the_bullst_canonical_wants_you_to_jump/

by bluedino • 4 years ago

129 175 4 years ago

old.reddit.com

version_five3• 4 years ago

Discussed a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678

corrral8• 4 years ago

An exchange from that thread:

> there is absolutely zero chance anyone on the other end is going to take the time to actually read and evaluate each of them
This is understandable to think, but is simply wrong -- I know because I'm a software engineer at Canonical who helps review these written submissions. They're sometimes read and reviewed by our CEO, though often he delegates that out to a pool of us reviewers. I always read mine thoroughly, whether they're 3 pages or 30. I don't have exact stats, but from where I sit maybe 80% of them are quality submissions.

Shuttleworth is directly involved in, and approves of, this "write ten pages about your childhood, then take a battery of personality tests, and then maybe we'll proceed" shit? Is this a South African thing? I know some cultures have very different expectations about how job applications should work.

morelisp2• 4 years ago

If 80% are good submissions it’s a useless filter and should be dropped.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

This is not a South African thing :)

The written interview serves multiple purposes.

First, it is a response to a massive flow of applications. We can more fully and fairly assess those who show they are willing to do some work to be part of our company.

Second, it helps address bias. The written interview is not a resume, which a hiring manager would read through bias like "I recognise that university" and "I like that country". The written interview is anonymous work, which can be assessed more objectively. We get it assessed, twice, anonymously, in the common case. For my roles, more than 100 people at the company help me with this, and I'm grateful to them for the work they do.

Third, it helps us focus our resources. We have very light resume screening requirements - be a plausible candidate from somewhere in the world - but we spend a LOT of time on the written interview, and interviews. So for those candidates who show they care, they have insights, and they are quick on the uptake, we can spend a lot more time on them.

Fourth, it helps avoid repetition. We can share a written interview with interviewers later in the process, and they get a lot of context on the candidate very quickly. They don't always read it before meeting the candidate, but they can and they should.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Some employers approach this as more is better.

I’ve had an employer do multiple days of on site psychometrics

Doubt that improved the hiring but that’s how they rolled

pengaru• 4 years ago

What this tells me is Canonical gets far more applicants than they have positions.

But the kinds of people this filter likely selects for doesn't seem like what I'd be interested in, just strange.

lmc3• 4 years ago

Exactly. This does not seem like a cool place to work.

tssva2• 4 years ago

The Canonical founder was recently bemoaning the lack of available talent limiting the growth of the company. The issue really seems to be a ridiculous hiring process limiting the available talent pool and therefore limiting company growth.

sosodev4• 4 years ago

Do you have a link to this? That's pretty funny if true

colejohnson66• 4 years ago

I’ve seen quite a few suggest that the “labor shortage” of this past year isn’t actually a shortage, but just people believing they’re worth more. Especially in the tech community; people are just more selective about how much BS they put up with in hiring.

bhhaskin3• 4 years ago

Sounds like their application process works. If someone is unwilling to fill out a basic questionnaire they are probably aren't a good candidate. The questions seem reasonable and they aren't asking for you to write a book for each one.

pc86• 4 years ago

25 questions, some of which would require a paragraph or more to adequately answer, is not "a basic questionnaire," is completely inappropriate to ask someone to do before even an initial phone screen, and is artisanal small batch bullshit of the highest (lowest?) quality. Whoever put this together should be fired, and the people defending it should be ashamed of themselves.

nieksand• 4 years ago

The questionnaire looks pretty reasonable, but I'd be concerned about the sketchy looking "Psychometric assessments" that's next in the list.

Also, at what point will the candidate be able to vet whether Canonical is a suitable match? Is that only after this questionnaire, psych test, and take-home assignment?

throwanem• 4 years ago

Yeah, I'm sure their application process works great, for keeping their pipeline nice and empty of potentially worthwhile candidates. These questions are anything but "reasonable", either in their quantity or in the depth of demanded response.

I'm sure that the team at Canonical feels this process works for them, and maybe it does, but I'd love to see what metrics they have to show that it does. (Or maybe they for some reason have to practice "hire slow, fire never"...)

cogman10• 4 years ago

Honestly looks like an attempt to get H1Bs. "We can't find any qualified candidates! Please give us cheap slave labor!"

corrral8• 4 years ago

I ain't writing a fairly-long essay that includes a ton about what I did in high school(?!), for a chance at a job, unless the comp is insane.

nescioquid3• 4 years ago

Pretty entitled freshly-minted BS degree, no doubt. Goes from wanting to work for Canonical to wanting to "punish" them by telling them to stuff it and then posting a screed to reddit -- all from just seeing the application questionnaire.

Doesn't seem a good indication for conscientiousness, integrity, and tact, frankly.

corrral8• 4 years ago

Doesn't seem a good indication for conscientiousness, integrity, and tact, frankly.

Those things are for people. Companies can get fucked. They're a tool, and that's it. I don't practice tact toward a screwdriver. This application process is a joke, and warning other humans that this particular tool likes to waste their time is conscientiousness and integrity.

Being kind to the people employed by them is commendable, of course.

detaro• 4 years ago

According to their CEO last month, their biggest challenge as a company is that they can't hire enough.

bhhaskin3• 4 years ago

That is just about every company right now.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

To be clear, we are hiring lots of people every month now. We have 10,000-20,000 applications per month, it's just that we have a very high bar, and we are rigorous about it which takes time and effort.

Also, our process doesn't work as well for some roles and some locations, so we continue to evolve it.

But on balance, I am very happy with the growth of our teams and the calibre of our new colleagues.

ntoskrnl• 4 years ago

Psychometric assesssments, eh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics

such measurements are often misused by laymen, such as with personality tests used in employment procedures.

cedilla2• 4 years ago

I think that quote says the opposite of what you seem to imply it does.

It says that bullshit like Myers Briggs is misused by laymen. That implies that actual psychometric tests done by experts can be correctly used.

The real headscratcher though is that either Canonical thinks psychometrics work, but still bother with all the other nonsense; or they don't think they work but still leave it in in such a long hiring process...

JadeNB• 4 years ago

> such measurements are often misused by laymen, such as with personality tests used in employment procedures.
I think that quote says the opposite of what you seem to imply it does.

It says that the use of personality tests in employment procedures is a misuse.

nescioquid3• 4 years ago

I used to work at a company in which psychometrics were a major component. If you've ever taken a computer adaptive test, that test was based on a psychometric model.

For example in an adaptive test, question are trialed in order to determine how discriminating they are (i.e. which side of an ability estimate correctly answering places you), the likelihood of error in responding (maybe how confusing the item is or some other interference), likelihood of guessing, etc. It is essentially a statistical discipline with some grounding in psychology, but all of the pyschometricians I worked with considered themselves primarily statisticians.

I've never understood psychometry to be a theory about personality, though I suppose you could apply it to such a theory. Maybe its a case of the same term applied to two things?

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Psychometrics work, but they are only one dimension. Interviews and competence assessments give us other perspectives on a candidate. For a single role we will have 500-3,000 applications, each step of the process helps select the best.

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

They're likely lamenting how hard it is to find great people.

sosodev4• 4 years ago

Right? There's no way they're hiring good engineers with this BS. I ghosted them after they asked me to do the essay round because I was already nearing the offer stage with multiple companies. Reading the comments on this thread and others it seems I'm not alone in that decision.

bin_bash• 4 years ago

Personally I'd prefer to fill this out than have someone try to interview me and scribble some notes down that I later get evaluated on. I'm a good writer but I'm not the best extemporaneous orator.

Of course if it's this and then 14 hours of interviews (looking at you, Plaid), then it's a different story.

EDIT: for these kind of numbers? no way: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Canonical/salaries/Software-E...

cuddlybacon• 4 years ago

The bulls*t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

Can the title be updated with the other half of the sentence?

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

I assume they ran out of space in the title.

Maybe it should be renamed to something more succinct, e.g. "Canonical's bulls*t Hiring Process"

markdown• 4 years ago

Or "HN's bullshit title rules"

metadat3• 4 years ago

OP- Thank you for linking to the less user-hostile "old" reddit portal.

juice_bus• 4 years ago

The day old is fully removed or stops working is the day I stop using reddit entirely.

I'm trying to get away from it more and more just to make the transition less painful.

baal80spam• 4 years ago

The day old is fully removed or stops working is the day I stop using reddit entirely.

I know it's not the same but there's always https://teddit.net

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

I know, right? What even is New good for? I’ll never find out. :)

aeturnum• 4 years ago

Though I think they should offer salary ranges (it's a legal requirement several places and is also just good practice), asking people to fill out essay questions seems...totally fine?

If you want to build an engineering culture which has writing as a core skill, this seems like a really good filter.

klyrs6• 4 years ago

Essay questions are fine. Their psychometric assessment is a personality test and a fast-twitch "intelligence" test. Unless the job involves quickly rotating shapes in your head, I fail to see the point.

sosodev4• 4 years ago

Asking me how I did in high school when I graduated over a decade ago is just completely pointless. It is in no way representative of who I am now.

ww5202• 4 years ago

High school is relevant for people don't do much after high school. It shows the level of expectation they have for their candidates.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Who you are, and what you have done, are of course two very different things.

klyrs6• 4 years ago

I jumped through their hoops once, only to be told that they prefer to hire active contributors from the community. No unpaid internship, no job.

latchkey5• 4 years ago

To be honest, that seems fair given that they are pretty community focused. You might view it as an unpaid internship, but my own contributions to open source and the community have always gotten me jobs. I view it as extracurricular activity... similar to what they pushed us to do in high school for getting into college.

klyrs6• 4 years ago

Sure. But I have a full-time job and a family. Combined with the essay's focus on the candidate's high school career, it's a pretty strong signal I'm too old to work there. I'm sure as hell not going to spend a year of my precious spare time on the gamble it'll get me a job where they expect me to continue working off-hours.

cmsj2• 4 years ago

The tragic irony there though is that Canonical commits very little engineering effort to contributing to upstream projects that they don't control. They'll fix a few bugs that are affecting customers, but there's no generalised effort to grow the garden they live in.

nix239• 4 years ago

To be honest, that seems fair given that they are pretty community focused.

That's Debian not Ubuntu/Canonical.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Either that was a mistaken position by the hiring lead, or they were just shy to tell you that you were not the best candidate. Either way, my apologies.

t_sawyer• 4 years ago

I posted this on the Reddit thread too but:

Yeah I was through 4 or 5 “steps” before salary was discussed. And I ultimately think that’s why they didn’t move forward.

Lesson learned. I wasted quite a bit of applying, doing an initial interview, a second interview with a teammate, doing weird aptitude tests that had me comparing images, a personality test, a coding test while a manager watched, and finally talking to an hr person about salary requirements.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

We generally discuss salary after we've got through early-stage interviews. By then we have a sense of whether someone might be great at Canonical, and we're trying to figure out where they might fit best. If a candidate has higher salary expectations, then that narrows the list of roles we could consider them for. If you had interviews after the HR interview, then I guarantee you that comp was not the reason not to proceed.

latchkey5• 4 years ago

I feel like it is hard enough to hire people, especially good devops, why turn people off this badly?

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Lots of people won't do this work, it's true. But the ones who will, are much more likely to make phenomenal colleagues. They care, they are focused, they are diligent. Things work better when you are in a team with more of that. Try it someday.

latchkey5• 4 years ago

Try what someday? Making people jump through silly hoops and run a business that gets ripped on for odd hiring practices? No thanks. I'll stick with my current hiring practices.

Thanks for Ubuntu by the way. I've got well over 15k servers running it right now and wouldn't even consider anything else.

valdiorn2• 4 years ago

How would you know, if you reject everyone who doesn't fit your predetermined box? Have you ever actually tried a different strategy for hiring, or building a team?

Also, for people standing outside the company looking in, things do not look happy and healthy at Canonical, which makes it even more likely you are being fooled by some of your own staff, or the figures they present to your, into thinking things are better than they are. I've failed to find a single positive review of working for Canonical, yet we have a smorgasbord of bad reviews all over the internet. You may want to evaluate that as "evidence" that something isn't right.

robonerd2• 4 years ago

These are such inane questions.

What was your first Linux distribution, and why did you start there?

"Red Hat Linux, and I started there because I found a CD to install it in the cover of Red Hat Linux For Dummies at my local library."

What does that say about my qualifications for the job? I can scarcely imagine. Clearly the questions are prompting for answers that will be evaluated in some vague bullshit way, so why not evaluate the questions themselves in the same manner? I see a lot of questions about what I was doing in highschool. I therefore conclude these questions were written up by an airhead do-nothing who's life peaked in highschool and they've been dwelling on the past ever since. Am I doing this right?

corrral8• 4 years ago

Considering another step is psychometric testing, and given the nature of these questions, I assume there's some woo-heavy tea-leaf-reading process to evaluate the submissions. "This person used 'I' too few times while writing about themselves, so they're clearly not confident enough" or whatever.

robonerd2• 4 years ago

And if they think this is a good idea for hiring, they probably don't stop there. Imagine all your work emails being run through such evaluations every year during performance review.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

psychometric testing

I love these, they always fool employers that I'm a lot better than I actually am. For some strange reason, these tests always determine that the kind of people who write tests are ideal employees. "System builders."

version_five3• 4 years ago

In fairness (not that I think it's a good hiring process), your story about linux obviously shows that you were interested enough to get a linux book with CD from the library. That's more interesting (and in a real interview might lead to a more interesting follow on discussion) than someone who first encountered it in university because it was part of a course.

nix239• 4 years ago

What was your first Linux distribution, and why did you start there?

Mandrake Linux because it was the only one that worked with my 56k Zyxel modem ;)

claytongulick• 4 years ago

Mandrake was my first too, but it was because I was at some tech "flea market" show thing in San Diego in the 90s, and they were selling Mandrake CDs for $5.

At the time, I was frustrated at the cost of WinGate, a socks proxy, and I wanted to be able to play games with others on my local network with remote friends.

I had a clever idea, that I could dynamically rewrite IP packets to an internal IP address based on the port assignment (I had essentially re/invented NAT). So I wrote it in pretty low level c, got it mostly working, then a friend told me about this thing called Linux that had a feature called ip masquerading that did everything I was trying to do.

Mandrake had an easy way to compile the kernel with IP masquerading support, and I immediately fell in love with all things Linux.

I remember showing friends the customizable desktop, with silly things like snow falling. They thought I was a leet hacker :)

bladernr• 4 years ago

Slackware downloaded in the format of ... 13 or 14 1.44MB floppy images from a BBS using my crappy 2400bps modem over many nights. Got it installed, played with it a bit but realized I couldn't run any of my games, shrugged and re-installed Windows... stayed like that until Red Hat 5.2 and then I've been running Linux as a daily driver ever since.

smcl3• 4 years ago

To be fair, in an in-person interview talking about something like this can be a nice way to settle into the interview and steady any nerves they might have - it's a question that doesn't have a wrong answer and doesn't (or shouldn't) have a "gotcha" attached that the candidate can be afraid of. It can spark a little conversation that could lead to other, more specific topics - but if it doesn't then no worries, it's served its purpose.

It's a bit odd to be asked to write this out ahead of time though, because if when it comes up in the interview it's like you're being questioned by the police on a statement you had previously given them and being tested what you said. Weird.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Or, it allows for the conversation to start naturally from that point. "In your written interview, you observed that... can you expand on that?"

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

Well, as a start, it is a loaded question

But I get it. They're trying to get people that "love linux". It's part of the cultural fit, sure

Now think for a bit about hiring for people that "love something" and what does that tell about the professional environment of that company. Wouldn't it be better if they actually hired people that are good at the job?

For all the talk about diversity and inclusion, this is a very good example of how the opposite looks like.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

Yes, I do want to work with people who are passionate about what we do.

It makes for more interesting meetings, more interesting ideas, more interesting software. I love what I do, and I choose to set things up to maximise the chance that the people around me are equally excited about what impact we could have in the world.

Life is short, the way I want to use it is to help people who contribute to open source - all open source - have the biggest possible impact from their generosity. By making open source easy and cheap to consume and rely on in production, I think we amplify the contributions of others, and I feel very good about that. We also try to innovate on pieces of the landscape, and those are fun too.

But you may be confusing the first step of our hiring process - the written interview - with the whole of the process.

If someone does well on the written interview, which is usually twice-assessed and done so on an anonymous basis, they get additional screening tests and interviews to assess professionalism and experience and competence, which helps us place them in the best part of the company for them. It also helps them learn about us and how we work to make sure that they are making the right choice for the next segment of their career.

In the past I think we over-prioritised passion-for-Linux relative to competence, and we paid a price for that. So now I'm pretty focused on looking for both, and ensuring discipline in the offers we make across the whole company.

gopher_space• 4 years ago

Wouldn't it be better if they actually hired people that are good at the job?

The context of this whole conversation is an attempt at automating a process that doesn't take well to automation. This thread isn't about hiring people, it's about building a system that hires people.

allarm• 4 years ago

Funny enough, I have a great answer to this question - my first distro was exactly Ubuntu, in 2005. They shipped me a couple of dozens of CDs that I distributed in my city, mainly to my collagues and members of the local LUG. I think I still have some CDs from this batch.

aaaaaaaaata• 4 years ago

LUG == Linux User Group

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

You're welcome, and thank you :)

Ekaros• 4 years ago

I don't see too much issue with this type of questionnaire. Even though the education part smells lot like bullshit from my European perspective.

Those questions can end up in interview too, so written answers and chance to properly articulate those isn't bad.

Still, way too many steps and hoops otherwise in the process.

manofmanysmiles• 4 years ago

I’d love to take a questionnaire like this. It gives me then impression they are trying to get to know the people applying as people. I know bias sneaks in. I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately we are people, and will be working together as people. You can’t make everything unbiased and precise without treating people like replaceable robot cogs. Maybe some people like this or feel it is fair. I don’t.

nix239• 4 years ago

It's a job NOT my family.

>Describe your familiarity with Linux performance debugging and tuning

Don't use snap and add more cpu's and ram.

corrral8• 4 years ago

It's a lot of work, to still be very early in the hiring funnel and not to know what the comp is likely to be.

Plus, I personally hate writing about myself, and writing something a bit boastful about myself is probably my single least-favorite thing to write. It feels really uncomfortable and gross. It's the kind of thing I hate enough that it might prompt me to go do something else I hate, like re-painting a room, to put off doing it. Résumés and cover letters are bad enough without "please write 500 words about your accomplishments in high school".

But that's just me. The large time commitment for only a sliver of a chance at a job granting unspecified compensation, is why it's bullshit for everyone.

_t4za• 4 years ago

I noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is:

    - Initial screening (done)
    - Personal essay (this stage)
    - Standardized aptitude and personality tests
    - Meet and greet with an engineer
    - General interview(s)
    - Recruitment screen
    - Technical assessment
    - Role-specific interview(s)
    - Hiring manager interview
    - Senior leadership interview

I highly doubt the initial screening is done by a human. So they want the essays and personality tests done before you speak to a human at the company, and they are probably not even on the team you're applying for. If you're unlucky, every human involved in the process will be on a different team until you get to the hiring manager interview, which is at the very end.

Not only this but on Glassdoor I found dozens of people saying that they ghost you before the hiring manager interview so you could spend tens of hours interviewing and never speak to anyone on the team.

alistairSH3• 4 years ago

Wait, they have SEVEN distinct interviews? Meet/greet, general, tech assessment, recruiter, role, manager, senior leader? Holy shit. Wow. That’s insane. What a waste of everybody’s time.

sosodev4• 4 years ago

So many tech companies are bloating the interview process with seven or more interviews. For my current role I did several interviews and the record during my most recent cycle was ten IIRC. The particularly annoying part is that most of the time the rounds are almost complete duplicates of each other just with a different person.

edit: I just checked my calendar and I had nine meetings/interviews with Cruise before they rejected me.

gurchik• 4 years ago

At my current job, I did about the same number of interviews. Not counting an initial 15 minute screening call, I had a 30 minute phone call with two of the engineers on the team, a technical panel interview, and 3 exec interviews. So that's six interviews. I would be working with all of these people directly and I wanted to avoid "broken stair" coworkers I have had in the past. While I found this valuable, I didn't feel the same way about the Canonical process and refused to proceed. Each stage of an interview process needs to provide value to both sides. As a candidate, a personality test or an essay does not help me at all except to raise a red flag. And speaking to many people who I might never speak to again is useless to me.

justinjlynn3• 4 years ago

Standardized aptitude and personality tests

These are almost always extremely discriminatory when it comes to neurodiverse populations and I'm saddened that Canonical uses the equivalent of phrenology in its hiring process.

sigh

FabHK2• 4 years ago

the equivalent of phrenology

I mean, there are plenty of bad tests out there (Meyers Briggs etc.), but good aptitude and personality tests might well be the best (objective, reliable, valid...) tests of aptitude and personality there are, no?

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

To be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two.

I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.

Q3Jhenkh2• 4 years ago

Do you think it's normal for the CEO of a 800+ employees company to be reviewing resumes? It sounds like you don't trust the people you hired to do that job, and decided to do the job yourself...

Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this?

And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.

hshshjjj• 4 years ago

That’s why I show them middle finger and went and worked for MSFT. I am not going to talk about why I installed Arch linux 12 years ago, when I am applying to work on kernel.

Beltalowda• 4 years ago

2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

The trend in screening toward length and complexity, IMO, is not healthy. To me it suggests little confidence on the employer's part (either in HR and in working staff-members) -- and an attempt to remedy that squirminess by methods supposedly 'scientific'. A truly more 'scientific' approach might compare the 'results' of such a gauntlet with the predictions of a tea-leaf reading and an I Ching toss.

I'd rather work for them free for a week, then let them decide, and have something to show for this goofy Wechslering.

JustARandomGuy• 4 years ago

I once interviewed at Northern Trust for a programmer role. Interview was 2 hours long divided into 4 - 30 minute segments each with different interviewers.

None of the interviewers asked anything about tech. Absolutely nothing. All of the questions were in the style of “if you were a (blank), what type of (blank) would you be?”. And each interviewer asked the same questions in the same order working off the same interview sheet. By the third 30min interview I was concerned that I was stuck in some sort of time paradox. By the fourth 30min interview I just wanted to get out of there.

They ended up offering me the position but I declined. Don’t know what happened but they felt very disorganized to me.

hermitdev• 4 years ago

I worked with Northern Trust tangentially for a few years (I left my role in early 2010s) in a quasi consulting role (it was actually a joint venture where we did the software, they ran it sort of thing). NT was hands down the most painfully bureaucratic company I've had the displeasure of working with. Something simple like a DNS change for a server was a 6-8 week turnaround. On top of that, they weren't exactly the best at following instructions, either, so it was often multiples of these multi month cycles to get even the smallest thing done.

Very frustrating. You likely dodged a huge bullet by declining the offer.

autarch4• 4 years ago

I'm surprised no one else has brought up Oxide's process, which has a similar writing-heavy stage as part of the application. See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgD... for what they ask for.

It's not quite as much as Canonical, but it's still a _lot_ of writing to go through just to apply for a position. I considered applying there during my last job search but I just wasn't enthused about it enough to spend all that time writing before I even knew if they had any interest in me.

lmc3• 4 years ago

It's still a bunch of work but I think i like that one a lot more. It's more open ended and less 'worship us, btw what is your favourite distro?'.

autarch4• 4 years ago

Yeah, it's not as ridiculous, for sure. But I think it'd be better to allow people to apply first for an initial screening and then ask for this stuff in pieces over the course of the process. It's really not right to front load so much work into an application, IMO.

justin_oaks• 4 years ago

There's merit to the idea of having a writing sample from a candidate. If you want to know that a candidate can communicate effectively, you'll want to both hear them talk and read their writing.

That said, I'm not sure whether or not these interview processes were set up with that in mind. If they were, they should also consider that writing can take a long time to produce and so the writing sample should be adjusted to not be too long.

autarch4• 4 years ago

There's merit to the idea of having a writing sample from a candidate. If you want to know that a candidate can communicate effectively, you'll want to both hear them talk and read their writing.

Absolutely. I'm all for asking for a few paragraphs of writing later in the process, or for candidates to submit existing work early on.

thrill• 4 years ago

IME, writing something short and well is significantly harder than writing something long and well.

ww5202• 4 years ago

In return, I would ask them couple questions before going through the process.

* What is the salary range?

* Who was the person coming up with the interview questions?

* What is that person's psychological profile?

* What is that person's biggest achievement since high school?

* Who are the people working in the team?

* What are those people's psychological profile?

* What're their education levels?

* What're their work experience?

* What're their biggest achievement since high school?

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

* What is the salary range?

That of course will vary based on role, experience and location. We have hired people from 50+ countries which is remarkable for a company of 800. We tend not to hire in the most expensive locations because we get fantastic talent who live in less polluted, congested and occasionally self-important environments.

We do pay competitively; we have hired people out of FAANGs, and we constantly benchmark pay against our market data around the world. True remote work is worth an extra 20%, and quality of colleagues and focus is priceless. We also rigorously assess pay raises for gender equity.

* Who was the person coming up with the interview questions?

That would be me, mostly. I generally would have reviewed them, though occasionally some slip by.

Some of the role-specific questions would be from the hiring lead on the role, who is usually a senior person in that part of the business who has been through an onboarding process run by our global head of HR and me, and who handles applications for multiple jobs. These hiring leads are less susceptible to bias, and more experienced, than first-level managers, and it frees the first-level managers to focus on their teams and get good at being managers.

* What is that person's psychological profile?

If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use. If you really mean psychological profile, I don't know. I've been called all sorts of things over the years, but not by professionals ;)

* What is that person's biggest achievement since high school?

That would depend on what one values.

As a student I helped a small newspaper in Cape Town be one of the first in the world to be online. Started a company, Thawte, that helped lots of businesses outside the US get certificates for secure trading. Sold that well, and then trained to join a flight crew on Soyuz to the ISS. Ran several experiments in space, including the first stem cell experiments, which helped shape stem cell therapy research here on earth. Started a foundation which has funded tens of social change leaders working in health, digital, civil society and environmental areas. Started Ubuntu to democratise access to open source, made some mistakes but stuck with it to help Canonical survive and now thrive. Learned not to yell at people, learned to hire, hired hundreds of people. I also have helped start some botanical gardens because I like them, and am active in helping a small country chart a course for themselves that has made a measurable difference to the lives of that population. What, I wonder, do you value?

* Who are the people working in the team?

They are generally outstanding technically and socially, from all over the world, with a strong sense of shared mission to help open source be easier and cheaper to consume, personally and professionally, for companies and individuals.

* What are those people's psychological profile?

They vary greatly, it's useful to shape teams that complement one another.

* What're their education levels?

Generally but not exclusively they have undergraduate and graduate degrees.

* What're their work experience?

That varies widely, we hire both new graduates and people who could happily retire but like what we do and how we do it.

* What're their biggest achievement since high school?

If you can get a place in the company, you could ask them yourself.

Q3Jhenkh2• 4 years ago

If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use.

So you're confirming that these "psychometric profiles" can be summarized as a number. Which means it's very easy to automatically apply a filter (reject any candidate with a score lower than 80), and even if there is no automated filter in place, you understand that people with access to this number will immediately be biased because of it? ("I have to review this candidate, but he fared 70 at the psychometric test, where every other candidate fared 90 or more...", and then obviously, during the interview, and after, the reviewer will be biased by that number.)

pictur• 4 years ago

Most of the questions are very funny. It's like when someone comes to you and says, define yourself as a human being. I would like to meet the very smart engineering managers who prepared these questions.

filmgirlcw3• 4 years ago

When an almost identical interview questionnaire was posted a few months ago, I was hoping it was some sort of anomaly, or that Canonical would learn from the feedback and alter it. To see something so similar (for a different role) two months later makes it seem far more likely that they have one of the worst hiring pipeline processes I have ever seen.

I’m good at these sorts of written/verbal assessments, and even my eyes start to glaze over just reading the list of questions, let alone thinking about how to answer them. A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour and that’s before you even get into the actual interview process or hear a salary range.

And as dumb as questions about high school and college are for professional job interviews (unless you are hiring straight from undergrad, I just don’t see how this is relevant. And even for college recruits, I have a lot of problems with this approach.), it would be one thing if I thought the recruiter or hiring manager was actually going to read each response from each candidate. But I cannot imagine they will.

For a company that has openly expressed its struggle to hire, it’s stunning to see them double-down on such a terrible recruitment process.

The people who you want for this job probably have better things to do than waste an hour or more answering an overly-long questionnaire before they even find out the salary range.

notRobot• 4 years ago

A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour

Maybe I'm an outlier, but it would take me way longer than that. At least a couple hours.

filmgirlcw3• 4 years ago

Honestly, it would take me a few hours too. I just wanted to undercount the projected time, in the event there were “I could do this in X minutes” responses. But yes, it would take me a few hours to do this too.

manfre• 4 years ago

I applied for positions there late last year. I appreciated that they were upfront about the steps of their process. It made it a relatively quick decision to not continue.

hedora• 4 years ago

Meh. I switched away from Ubuntu years ago, but it still makes me sad to see they're this broken of a company.

I guess it explains the plummeting quality of the technical decisions they make.

nix239• 4 years ago

Bring opensource to the people, but if we create something it has to be closed-source, and of questionable quality :)

dekadetera2• 4 years ago

Would not recommend working at Canonical. The CTO is incompetent, and bullies people out of the company if they disagree with him. Suggesting that the hiring process might be discriminatory may get you told that you "must live on fairy island" from where you should "send a postcard" on a company-wide email chain.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

That was a regrettable exchange, and contrition was expressed.

moosenuts• 4 years ago

It’s always the same story Mark. Sorry not sorry and the cycle continues.

Happens when you surround yourself with sycophants and can’t see it.

dekadetera2• 4 years ago

Please, please, please, find a new CTO. You've been led astray by the current one. Canonical has done amazing work building the foundation of large parts of the tech industry, but that is all despite, not because of, the current CTO. I'd love to continue recommending everything Canonical works on as best-in-class, but that sadly can't happen with the current technical leadership.

psychometric123• 4 years ago

I applied a few weeks ago for a different (more junior) role, got hit with a very similar email: https://pastebin.com/bJsLijXV

Decided it was not a place I wanted to work.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

Whenever I see an unusually obnoxious hiring process, I assume they're hoping that only desperate H1-B's apply, so they can be as abusive as they want to their workforce.

markshuttle33• 4 years ago

In our case, we are remote first across 50+ countries, so not really in the business of trying to import colleagues to one country or another.

the_only_law2• 4 years ago

If an interviewer starts asking me about my general High School experience it’s over right there.

The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

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