61–70 of 460 posts
This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…
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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.
Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field, you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-level analyst position. We're a hospital.
ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.
Here is the funny part: If you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.
This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…
Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
Credited for creating the most painful interview process.
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understandable, as each interviewing systems effectively selects people good at passing that system. if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests. if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology. if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management a…
Randomness in interviews is underrated because it offsets these over-selection effects. I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.
Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for scammers, done.
This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here , where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshutt…
I guess it’s valuable to be a mildly smart kid in a really bad school.
I’m just annoyed at how much they spam LinkedIn by posting the same remote job listing in 500 different cities.
Job searches take your location into account and sometimes won’t show remote-only positions if you do something like scoping your search to your area. Posting remote listings in specific locations allows those to show up in search results more frequently. And it works - it’s kind of gaming job search boards but it did result in Canonical getting an absolute deluge of applications for each position. Canonical also re…
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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…
> I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. 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 a…
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.
Like, sorry you didn't make it past the final stage, but here's a nice Framework laptop with Ubuntu.
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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.
Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe overly positive unverifiable statements are actually negatives for them.