More generally, I don't care for how education and social-status assessment is conflated. School shouldn't be a competition. Education is compromised by the assessment aspect.
WTF with high school questions?
21–30 of 238 posts
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#22I did terrible in high school and ended up going to university 6 years later and did very well. High school is barely a faint memory of my past and being judged on that would definitely irk me.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#23A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good peop…
The article's contention is that highschool GPA is literally irrelevant for the jobs in question. Coding interview questions are at least pertinent.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#24A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good peop…
> A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest.
OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.
Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#25While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#26Related: This was the first step in the interview process at Canonical – I withdrew (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678
Good grief, that's definitely the bigger WTF. Each of those engineering questions could be its own essay. What's even left to talk about if you answer all of those?
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#27I think canonical gets a bunch of applications so they make the barriers to entry sufficiently annoying so only those who are truly interested will complete the application.
FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#28I'm 50. High School was a long time ago. I love Ubuntu, and I love Java (they were looking for people for Enterprise Java tooling), but the inane high school questions were, for me, a strong indicator that "oldies need not apply."
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#29Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?
Seriously. Here is how to do it.
I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:
1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?
3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?
Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.
Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.
Re: WTF with high school questions?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about Canonical's motives and reasoning. Perhaps the question about language indicates that they're only looking for people who wouldn't have closed their tabs.
I would be able to give "impressive" answers to those questions, yet I'd still close the tab. Canonical is shooting themselves in the foot. The next worst thing they could have asked was my Myers-Briggs personality category.
I think OP was just pointing out the irony of complaining about high school English questions while making a high school-level English usage mistake (would of vs. would have)