This is just a creative take on the utterly broken interview process from software companies, that we all are probably too familiar with.
Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
81–90 of 460 posts
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#82Insane. 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…
The best tidbit of insight to hiring processes I've heard is that once your initial application/resume has cleared the first hurdle the company is basically looking for reasons to not hire you.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#83Did 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?
I don't think it's weird. At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops ev…
Isn't that a problem with the company policies? Any company with heavily locked down laptops probably won't be happy to let you BYOD. I have a work supplied laptop but I run my own OS on it.
The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#84Here 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.
Yeah, they're hiring process is biased towards people that love talking about themselves over and over again.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured…
Please, desktop was plain GNOME.
Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#86This 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…
> It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. I guess it’s valuable to be a mildly smart kid in a really bad school.
I always hated the kid at school who took easy classes and got a 4.0 vs doing worse in hard classes.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#87Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
> Huge red flag What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing.
Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I believe most recruiting processes are worse than chance so skip the weights. Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for scammers, done.
As an American in California, watching the extreme lengths people went to, to find specialists fitting some very exacting requirements and literally bringing people from around the world and then rejecting them in large numbers, I was told that in China in the dot-com boom time they formed companies with very skilled people but basically formed the teams with whoever showed up. It was a completely different method, and the difference is the virtue signalling and status cues for the founders and their inner circle. In Silicon Valley, it was anti-status to NOT search the world for particular resume contents, and that got weird sometimes. Secondly the "google style" interrogation of new candidates with "you just got out of computer science graduate school so you learn to present like this" whiteboard sessions, evolved in the hands of callous or worse managers, into a sort of repeated hazing of programmers, by non-programmers or the like.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#90This is not the worst process I’ve seen, but likely the funniest stats bleeder scam I've seen in years. “How would you change the company?” Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side. Also, Canonica…
Can you elaborate on what a "stats bleeder scam" is?