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Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

stgraber.org

81–90 of 141 posts

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#81
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied and got to the essay and turned back. Feels like college admissions all over again. I’m too old and too mature for that. Technical questions? Fine. Behavioral, sure. Firing squad of 5 engineers for 3 hours of co-programming, ouch but ok… 1,000 words on why I love Canonical? I have just 6 letters: Ubuntu. If you really want to shave the neck beard down to 5: Debian.

I wish more companies screened for writing competency. The better the writer, the smaller the 1000 word hurdle is. With async & remote work this skill is as important as ever.

I'll write a 1000 word essay about something technical I've worked passionately on. What is that, ~100 lines of text? Trivial.

About loving your company? I'm pursuing employment, not trying to join a cult here.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#83
post #73

Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company. Sample report https://www.docdroid.net/3hDIf3Y/perform-sample-report-may-2...

is this the same laundry list I got twice from its HR? so lengthy that I gave up right way, it asks from high school courses all the way to your adulthood, the stupidest questionnaire I have ever seen for any jobs. By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.

24 questions, each question describes a situation, you select which adjective describes you most and least. you end up picking random words because non fit.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#84
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages. One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and i…

> It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always prefe…

I enjoy closing the lid at the end of the day and leaving work behind. Separate user accounts doesn’t cut it. With WFH it’s tempting enough to spend too much time “at work”.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#85
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages. One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and i…

> It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company. That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always prefe…

Specifically for Canonical, BYOD seems like a great way to dogfood running Ubuntu on all kinds of machines, rather than everyone having the same model of Dell workstation and a separate testing lab being the only place they encounter diverse hardware.

Not saying this is their reasoning - and if they're not too cheap, it would surely be better for tax purposes to buy your employees computers than pay them the equivalent in cash - but it's a reason at least.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#86
post #2

On a side note - has anyone applied to Canonical for a software job? Their first step is a written interview which requires as much, if not more, effort as a graduate college application.

It's horrible. Yet somehow they still manage to hire and have a thriving company ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Seems to work for them.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#87
post #43

He is a great guy , i helped debugging ZFSMount problems with him - which causes LXD Container restarts to fail. It was just solved in previous release ( usual suspect , it is because of snap. ) . I would like to contribute on his new opensource projects.

Can I ask about the unusual punctuation? I’ve never seen a country where you put a space before the comma or where you space around parens like that. I’m only aware of the French adding a space before ! and ?

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#89
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oxide was similar. Something like 12 pages written just to be ghosted.

What was the Oxide process like? What did they have you write? What was the role? Thanks!

> What was the Oxide process like?

Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there.

> What did they have you write?

Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire

> What was the role?

Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there.

Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.

Re: Stéphane Graber has left Canonical

#90
post #2

On a side note - has anyone applied to Canonical for a software job? Their first step is a written interview which requires as much, if not more, effort as a graduate college application.

I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages. One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and i…

My daughter once took a job at a place that did personality/compatability tests before hiring. As it turns out, it wasn't to help them avoid hiring crazy people. It's because they were the crazy people, and needed to find folks who are compatable with that ;)
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