2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#52The 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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#53Psychometric assesssments, eh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics > 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 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...
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#54Though 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.
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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#55These 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…
> 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 ;)
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 :)
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#56They're likely lamenting how hard it is to find great people.
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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#57OP- Thank you for linking to the less user-hostile "old" reddit portal.
I know, right? What even is New good for? I’ll never find out. :)
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#58Sounds 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.
According to their CEO last month, their biggest challenge as a company is that they can't hire enough.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#59I 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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#60Sounds 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.
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.
> 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.