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

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

#31

Post by corrral »

robonerd wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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

#32

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #14

> 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?

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"

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

#33

Post by cmsj »

latchkey wrote: post #26
klyrs wrote: post #17

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.

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by manofmanysmiles »

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.

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

#35

Post by corrral »

cmsj wrote: post #33
latchkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Which is a huge difference from Red Hat, which contributes heavily and is very good at leveraging the resulting control of important projects to their advantage. It's why they keep out-maneuvering Canonical, as far as I can tell.

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

#36

Post by _t4za »

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.

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

#38

Post by version_five »

robonerd wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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

#39

Post by robonerd »

corrral wrote: post #31
robonerd wrote: post #25

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…

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.

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.

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

#40

Post by nix23 »

manofmanysmiles wrote: post #34

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 d…

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.

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