This process isn't accidentally awful; it's deliberately targeted to exclude anyone who isn't a young true believer.
Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
131–140 of 460 posts
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#132Here 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.
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…
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Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Huge red flag What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
Yeah I don't see working Canonical as an obvious target for the most ambitious, but there's nothing wrong with him having aspired to that at some point. The dig agaisnt the government is completely reasonable. Also somehow ironic because nobody has more hoops to jump through as an employer than the government.
Over much of the 2000s, it's fair to say that Shuttleworth/Canonical had pretty grand ambitions. They're still around--which is a not inconsiderable achievement in its own right--but in an era where the cloud providers have their own Linux flavors and other distros have generally leveled the usability playing field, Ubuntu just never really broke out.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages. 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…
> 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 They know, and it's been discussed often. They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans would rock th…
Ugh ... that's depressing.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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) 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. :-)
... Now I'm trying to imagine a train made out of Al2O3:Cr .
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#136This 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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Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#137This 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’s time for me to leave Ubuntu behind for good. I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole.
I mean, if Mark wrote that in 2004, he was dunking on an administration that was widely believed to be the worst ever.
(Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#138(A bit off-topic, but to give another example of where convoluted hiring processes get you to...) Last year, I did 8 interviews (including 4 technical assessments and quizzes) to get an offer from AMD (in Germany) as a software engineer. For completeness, they reached out to me. I wasn't really looking at the time. When I got the offer, salary+bonus was less than what I had at the time (a lot less now) living in a si…
Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me…
> I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).
I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hardware companies simply don't pay as much as software companies in industry. I don't fully understand the reasons, because hardware is often more difficult to deal with than software. That said, I have found that there has been a rash of companies / recruiters reaching out to relatively senior people making offers that wouldn't have been acceptable a decade ago, much less in 2023. I recently had one reach out to me…
> I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen). I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR p…
My comment wasn't saying that HR wasn't important or that their job was easy, it's saying that it doesn't require skills which are hard to acquire in the labor market. If we use credentials as a corollary for skills (which, ironically, is understating my case), then there are a vastly higher number of available persons in the labor market with the necessary credentials/skills to be in an HR role than to be in a technical knowledge worker role like software development, operations, or even product management.
The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs.
Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch.
Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#140> exactly how unbiased is it when every person I interviewed with was exactly my demographic? (White, female, American/western European) Please could someone explain how is this, claiming that someone's race and ethnicity defines their bias, not in itself racist?
I have a follow-up question: what kind of race is "western European"? Is skin tone not enough?
I don't have a gene test on hand to confirm, but I'm pretty sure my heritage is all over the place.