Live data from Hacker News

Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

old.reddit.com

151–160 of 460 posts

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#151
post #94

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…

It’s time for me to leave Ubuntu behind for good. I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole.

They also buy email lists from ZoomInfo to spam people then don’t take GDPR requests seriously after you chase them for answers. So yeah, good riddance.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#153
post #18

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?

With fear of creating another Putnam moment on HN what exactly did you do that is so much greater than Ubuntu?

So they should compare their accomplishments to something that has had hundreds of full-time employees working on since 2004?

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#154

> 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?

Yeah. I was going to make the same point. It seems like this person has some kind of issue with peoples skin colour or something.

Hmmm, thinking back over it maybe she's internalised the US diversity thing and is judging everything through that lens?

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they're hiring process is biased towards people that love talking about themselves over and over again.

and oddly, even though I'm probably the best at going on and on about things that I find interesting, no one seems to want to want to hire me. I don't think this is the full picture.

OK, here's a possibly better picture from having hired many engineers over the years.

I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and oddly, even though I'm probably the best at going on and on about things that I find interesting, no one seems to want to want to hire me. I don't think this is the full picture.

I think the interview process is tricky for people that like to dig into technical details as a lot of companies just want to hear adulation from the candidate towards the company, under the guise of excitement for the company mission. or whatever.

HR might be somewhat interested in that. Most managers won't give a rat's ass.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#157
post #142
post #101

A few years back, I actually made it all the way through to Mark, who interviewed me while having dinner (on his end). My essay focused on Ubuntu on ARM and how critical it would be for hyperscalers, which at the time wasn't really a thing at all (that should date me). I ended up declining their offer mostly because nowhere during any step of the process but the very end they pointed out they could only contract, not…

> interviewed me while having dinner (on his end) Wtf? Couldn’t he have done that at a more convenient time?

Doesn't seem that odd? I imagine he has a pretty busy schedule.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#158
I don't understand this at all. The only type of person who would have the time to go through all this would be someone with considerable amounts of fuck you money.

But such people just say fuck you and move on when the process becomes tedious. Who are they trying to hire here?

I've been to a few companies which had way too more applicants than they knew what to do with, but most of the time it was because the majority were under qualified spam applicants, who assumed that eventually someone will give them the time of day.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#159
post #68
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take a less doctrinaire approach to including software that was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time) than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-box experience for casual users.

At this point you might have been rolling your own video drivers and hoping your CRT didn't explode, so it was a bit of a step up.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#160

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.

At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.

If I did that, I wouldn't land the job with ~2 the compensation of what I'd have otherwise and the best job overall.

It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.

Post reply on HN