Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex • Hacker News Board

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#281

Post by tschwimmer » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #275

whatshisface wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's a die-hard canonical fan?

Who's a die-hard Mozilla fan? People who love Ubuntu, tend to love Ubuntu. A very long hiring process pretty much ensures the only ones still waiting around are the ones who really want to work at Canonical.

This is not exclusively true. You will get people who are willing to jump through a lot of hoops to get hired. Some of them may have strong affinity for Canonical, some may just really really need a job and have no other options.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#282

Post by voakbasda » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #268

TrackerFF wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fatal error here is to believe that the hiring process follows a linear curve, so that the outcome is directly proportional to the effort spent. When in reality I believe the hiring process follows some kind of logistic curve - after some point you're only getting very, very marginal returns on the extra effort spent.

You may be assuming there is any kind of rational process here, when Mark Shuttleworth thinks it is important to find out what you did in high school.

I think that emphasis makes it obvious that they only want high school or recent college grads. It's a clear signal that real experience is not valued.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#283

Post by danenania » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 8:55 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #249

TrackerFF wrote: post #175

Having 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…

Well, you see, the potential cost of losing a good candidate is much less than the potential cost of hiring a bad candidate, so every effort should be made to prevent the latter. There's a Joel on Software or Stack Overflow thing on this....

Unless you are paying at the very top of the market or are doing something so extremely prestigious/cool that it makes top people want to work for your org specifically (SpaceX, NASA, OpenAI, maybe a handful of others), a process like this seems guaranteed to only select for candidates that have no other options.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#284

Post by madrox » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #277

madrox wrote: post #266

When I became an engineering leader, it was my turn to design a hiring process. Most other companies similar to mine copied what Google did. That led me to this essay [1] and I realized copying what other big tech companies do probably wasn't right. I didn't have a "I need to pick from several good engineers" problem. I had a "I need to find a good engineer quickly" problem. I really don't know which problem Canonica…

That was a really patronizing thing to read.

That's fair. I had two competing thoughts in my head and neither were communicated clearly. My thesis is that I think recruiting pipelines are either optimized for something that is anti-candidate or not optimized at all and simply copying what others do without critical thought.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#285

Post by deaddodo » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #267

deaddodo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cod…

I think you shouldn't undersell the impact of Ubuntu shipping with binaries/installers for proprietary drivers, media codecs and things like adobe flash. These were easy enough to install on other distros, but for a noob user Ubuntu was more streamlined. Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.

No one's underselling this, you're overselling this. Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn't become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases. 2-2.5 years after the first version.

SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.

There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.

Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#286

Post by cdchn » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 9:00 PM UTC

marcusverus wrote: post #255

delecti wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama certainly could have done a better job at stopping them (and done better at many other things as well), but those drone strikes started under Bush2, along with the rest of the mostly disastrous "war on terror". Given we experienced our first non-peaceful transition of power, it's absurd to pretend anything else in US history compares.

[flagged]

Maybe the ones that all the indictments just happened for?

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#287

Post by liendolucas » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 9:01 PM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #234

thiht wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would imagine he is on the phone 8-12 hours a day when not at the office, and still 4-6 hours a day at the office. Someone at his level, especially as a founder/owner is talking to somebody pretty much at all waking hours, and meals happen during calls unless it's an exceptionally important meeting.

If you were that busy you wouldn't even care interviewing anyone, you're supposed to delegate responsibility to the HR team. What would be the point to get involved in a one-time interaction with someone that is (I assume) in another plane to his day to day management of the company? I kind see this like: "Our king has the very last word on the matter, so good luck with him" which is nonsense.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#288

Post by S201 » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

hobr wrote: post #257

S201 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also gotta shit. Should I do a Zoom call while on the toilet? It's a matter of where is your attention. If you're eating you're not fully focused on the other participant you're interacting with and not being fully present for them is rude.

Isn't this a false equivalence? I'll often eat with other people, but I wouldn't take a sh*t with them.

If society agrees that eating during workplace meetings is acceptable, then so be it. My point was that "it's a biological need therefore it's acceptable" isn't an excuse to use for eating in a meeting (working lunches excluded as all participants understand the intention of those).

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#289

Post by Alupis » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

tschwimmer wrote: post #281

Alupis wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's a die-hard Mozilla fan? People who love Ubuntu, tend to love Ubuntu. A very long hiring process pretty much ensures the only ones still waiting around are the ones who really want to work at Canonical.

This is not exclusively true. You will get people who are willing to jump through a lot of hoops to get hired. Some of them may have strong affinity for Canonical, some may just really really need a job and have no other options.

The folks who really really need a job are probably not the people Canonical is looking to hire.

They are being extremely deliberate with their length hiring process.

However it is true, it's not a universal thing of course.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#290

Post by depereo » Wed, Aug 09, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

gen220 wrote: post #264

darth_avocado wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had the misfortune of trying to find a job in a rough hiring market. I was appalled by what I saw. Very few companies move fast. Here’s what I saw on average for a software engineering role: 1. Excruciatingly long application processes, especially when companies required you to use workday for applying (30mins - 2 hours) 2. 2 weeks to hear back from the recruiter 3. 1-2 weeks to schedule a recruiter call 4…

Did you interview at any startups? This sounds like a standard big-tech run around, but IME most companies that take hiring seriously (i.e. more than "churn management") are not this slow.

Working at a startup is not an aspiration for most. Long hours and low pay for a lotto ticket's chance at a windfall is attractive to a very niche crowd.

The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process for entirely human, rather than technical, reasons (before anyone at a startup chimes in with 'our platform makes this better!')