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.
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
#72What 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.
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.
Do you have a link to this? That's pretty funny if true
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#73Though 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.
High school is relevant for people don't do much after high school. It shows the level of expectation they have for their candidates.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#74Psychometric 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 p…
> > 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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#75I 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 int…
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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#76When 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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reviewer…
If 80% are good submissions it’s a useless filter and should be dropped.
> If 80% are good submissions it’s a useless filter and should be dropped.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? I can easily imagine that this process is so laborious that plenty of people don't even submit anything. Like the person who wrote about this on reddit. -- Now what reason would we have to think that the people who don't want to go through the process would also be 80% good? This may be a very valuable filter for Canonical!
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#78I'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 i…
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?'.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#79Would 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.
Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The job is for a junior position.
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