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

Thanks for replying directly, Mark. Do candidates receive transparent feedback and information regarding exactly how the standardised testing/behavioural assessment has been interpreted, how it has effected their candidacy, and relevant information regarding the background of those interpreting the tests? Is there any means to contest this interpretation and/or request a secondary opinion by a qualified professional chosen by an independent third party?

No, it's not normal. But your conclusion that I did this because I don't trust colleagues is mistaken. I did it to figure out how we should shape the hiring process, and so I could relate to the workload and problems that hiring leads face daily.

When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;)

We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding.

When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further.

As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard.

Now, however, most see the benefits.

Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns.

You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer.

Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :)

To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.

I can see how you would draw those conclusions, because yes, we have made mistakes, and we do have some products that are proprietary, and we have made some shitty software.

At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't?

That's my dispute with your position - it's flatly generalising and characterising ALL our work as if it was our least successful work. By all means, call us out on our mistakes. But if you think everything we have ever done was hopeless, then you must have some theory about why so much of what we do has in fact been widely adopted. Surely you can see how fragile your own arguments must be if they are at odds with some clear data.

I like challenges and criticism; it helps us get better. I know we have made mistakes, that helps us get better too. I respect people who have differences of opinion on what needs doing, or how it needs to be done. Why not take the opportunity to become a counterpart in a rich discussion, rather than a one-dimensional anti-everything-Canonical mouthpiece?

We killed Unity for three reasons. First, I ran out of money to fund it. That was rough. Second, we built some very shoddy pieces in that codebase (though we also had some teams that did amazing work). That was sad and taught me a hard lesson. Third, we were the fourth horse in a two horse race, and the telco and ISV ecosystems were clearly not going to engage.

I agree with you - the vision of Unity was and still is beautiful. It's probably right - convergence between phones and tablets and laptops is the future for laptops. I think it's fantastic that a small but feisty community continues to work with that code. I was therefor, like you, completely disappointed to fail.

But why hate on me, and Canonical, when we literally put everything we had on the line for that vision, but screwed up? Why be an ass to the sorts of people who are willing to put every ounce of strength they have into something that you really wanted to see succeed? We failed because we made mistakes, yes, but for heavens sake recognise an ally when you see one, even if they make mistakes.

You're welcome :)

People have different views of what matters, or how to do things. Whatever your views, there are going to be some people that agree with you, and some people that disagree.

Broadly speaking, when you lead something, the people who will step up to lead alongside you will be people who mostly agree with the position you take. Obviously. Why would they align and invest precious years in something they totally disagree with? It would be dysfunctional to have a leadership team in any organisation made up of people who have hugely different opinions about everything at a fundamental level.

Of course, that group has disagreements on stuff. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we disagree on, but we live with people we broadly agree with.

So from the outside it may look like the leadership team of any company are highly aligned. If you have been at Canonical, you know that in the leadership team we have lots of hard debates and discussions, all the time, in search of the best. You also know we are all working to the same goal, which is to help people consume open source cheaply and safely, at scale, across all kinds of compute.

So, here's how I interpret your comment. You saw a group of people that were broadly supportive of a position I hold, and which you disagree with. Sure, you disagree, and that's fine. Calling them sycophants is just finding a nasty word for people who happen to be aligned on something you disagree with.