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Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

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Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#121

(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 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 think this has an angle of the artificially created "crisis/layoffs" headlines, which never clarify that there is a huge lack of senior people in the market, much bigger than any layoff could produce. In this way, they managed to trick a few people into lower paid jobs.

> I have no concerns about my ability to do whatever is necessary within the job, my only question is are you willing to pay me what I'm worth?

That is a great line to start with. I'm not looking into a new job right now, but certainly am being upfront to any recruiter that reaches out, and asking the salary and full details of the company (e.g. in case they are not upfront with the company name, which is a massive red flag to me).

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#122
I got a couple of interviews to be a traveling support and I was super excited. I was upfront about having little experience and I passed the first interview, and the interviewer said they were looking for inexperienced juniors. Second interviewer asked me all kinds of technical questions I had no idea how to answer and was confused why I was so inexperienced. Never heard from them again. Really unpleasant.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#123
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questio…

On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes

>what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process.

That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME and that experience was the same as any other distro running plain GNOME.

What set them apart was the installer and the rest of their post.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I did that my senior year. I was focused on my extra-curricular studies of music and philosophy, so I only took 2 AP courses instead of the 4 or 5 the school wanted me to take so that I'd have more free time.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#126

(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…

This is exactly why companies need to list the salary range for a position.

This is exactly why most do not, unless they legally have to.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#127

Earlier 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.

Eh, a year ago I interviewed at a startup that has since died. I was on round 8 when I bailed. SaaS has imported the bureaucratic mindset of the universities that cranked out all these founders.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#128
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.

Honest question why?

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#129

Here 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.

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.

Re: Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the back of the envelope math points to new hire failure rates of around 50%, where failure is if the candidate is still there in 18 months. Only about 19% would be considered "successful" hires. Also only about 11% were not successful due to purely lacking technical skills. like I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or something, but in man…

>I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or something

Not knowing how to do that, or not knowing how to google how to do that?

I also joined some jobs as a noob when switching domains, where I was lacking skills that the more seasoned people would consider as being "basic", but I could also google what I was lacking most of the time and learn on the fly.

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