51–60 of 460 posts
Insane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way. I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually cou…
Did anyone think it's a bit weird that they don't give you a laptop? Are you supposed to buy your own hardware or something?
You are supposed to bring your device. If you don’t have one you can get a loan to buy one and pay it off by paycheque deductions. Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is b…
I interviewed at Canonical, doing all of the written stuff, and got an offer. But in the end I turned them down because their compensation wasn't competitive.
Same here. And they’re a BYOD shop too, which I found strange.
Insane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way. I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually cou…
On paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience. I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such. Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not. But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago…
As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with my business partner to try to raise money to build accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No investor would bite.
But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since high school.
Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed, as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my interview is now up as well)
That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process, signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company. The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do not believe this to be the case.
So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a materiel leadership change at the top.
While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side. Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.
Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible. This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.
I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)
Insane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way. I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually cou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
Canonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand. This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available. Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth. I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technica…
Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.
But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.
Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.
> NIH
If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.
Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience. I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such. Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not. But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago…
> The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time. > Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then. i wonder what is preventing you from just lying. like, how are they going to confirm or deny what you're saying ? Frankly it seems like a way to have something they can use to reject you with something that's hard to debate against.