Bill Gates can sleep happy knowing Ubuntu will never be a challenge to windows
Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
191–200 of 460 posts
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#192I recently went through this for a job posting that changed after I started the process and then had the weirdest, least coherent interviews I'd ever sat through. They didn't have any idea who they wanted or a scope for the role (building out a new business line in safety critical software) and despite multiple interviewers telling me that I passed their round, I wasn't selected. In the end, I think that was better f…
I left Ubuntu for Fedora because of how slow/awful Snaps are. I can't imagine going through the described interview process and then having to work on _Snaps_.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#193I 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 majori…
>Who are they trying to hire here? Self-described "Linux users".
The vast majority of Linux kernel engineers I know wouldn’t have the time, endurance, or care to complete this bullshit.
I’ve known people who’ve maintained Arch packages, kept Brew up to date, and maintained kernels for Android devices. Some of whom have attempted to get hired by Canonical. Some of whom had Canonical engineers begging to hire them.
Their process can’t hire Americans, is highly biased towards a British attitude towards long, laborious interview processes, and was described by one of my colleagues in diversity and inclusion as “the most trans and neurodivergent hostile environment I’ve ever seen in an interview loop, incapable of hiring the demographic that will make the most impact in their product.”
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#194Insane. 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.
Generally getting qualified candidates is the hard part. Once you can program basic things like fizzbuzz the only question is are you so bad we don't want to work with you even though you can do the job.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#195Earlier 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…
> So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions).
> The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to.
Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc).
> Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#196That one time when Canonical answered to my CV, I passed after had received this list of few dozens of questions. I really wanted to tell them what they want to hear but honestly I had no idea what that would be...
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#197(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…
That sucks. Personally, I won't go beyond the first interview without at least a brief discussion of salary.
I always ask what they're targeting first, but if they decide to be cagey, I'll throw out a range where the low end is comfortably above what I'm currently making, enough that I would actually consider the offer.
I already get paid pretty well, so I think this has saved myself and others quite a lot of time.
(I also tend to reply to recruiter emails with a polite "no, thanks, but can you share the pay range for this role?". Maybe half reply with numbers, which is enough to keep a good sense of where the market is at.)
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#198Did 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?
The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made some sense: They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed. In practice however I don't think…
Having people source random laptops to help increase compatibility doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but the company definitely should reimburse you for the purchase. I certainly can't blame them for dogfooding their own OS either.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#199Having previously worked at a place where it took minimum 3 months to hire someone (but often 6-12), I'd be amazed if Canonical actually ever gets to hire their first choices. What happened was this: By the time the first pick hires had been cleared, they had gotten another job. Same with second pick. Maybe even third, too. Most people don't have the luxury or will to just sit and twiddle their thumbs for months and…
Having done a lot of interviews for my company, I also agree. If your whole process takes more than 3 weeks, you are losing people to competitors.
Candidates aren't going to wait 3 months and delaying all the other offers they are receiving, that's not going to work unless you are working in a FAANG maybe and the prestige of your company can make this work.
Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex
#200(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…
Did you agree to 8 rounds of interview, without knowing if there is a match between your salary expectation and their salary range?