The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give • Hacker News Board

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#181

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 21, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #176

nix23 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>simply over-generalising Yes a bit, but: Snap-Store? Ubuntu-One? You always try to create a wallet-garden with proprietary software as the main-repo/server with no additional gains against other opensource OR closedsource competitors. Then you guy's see that it's not adopted as you wished, then you stop supporting it. It happened with Ubuntu-One and it will happen with Snaps. Both times you made the server closed, b…

I can see how you would draw those conclusions, because yes, we have made mistakes, and we do have some products that are proprietary, and we have made some shitty software. At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't? That's my dispute with your position - it's flatly generalising and characterising ALL our work as if it was our least successful work. By all means, call us out on o…

[deleted]

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#182

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 22, 2022, 12:45 AM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #129

_t4za wrote: post #36

I noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is: - Initial screening (done) - Personal essay (this stage) - Standardized aptitude and personality tests - Meet and greet with an engineer - General interview(s) - Recruitment screen - Technical assessment - Role-specific interview(s) - Hiring manager interview - Senior leadership interview I highly doubt the init…

To be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two. I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.

[deleted]

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#183

Post by nix23 » Sun, May 22, 2022, 8:32 AM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #176

nix23 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>simply over-generalising Yes a bit, but: Snap-Store? Ubuntu-One? You always try to create a wallet-garden with proprietary software as the main-repo/server with no additional gains against other opensource OR closedsource competitors. Then you guy's see that it's not adopted as you wished, then you stop supporting it. It happened with Ubuntu-One and it will happen with Snaps. Both times you made the server closed, b…

I can see how you would draw those conclusions, because yes, we have made mistakes, and we do have some products that are proprietary, and we have made some shitty software. At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't? That's my dispute with your position - it's flatly generalising and characterising ALL our work as if it was our least successful work. By all means, call us out on o…

First and foremost, thank you very much for taking the time to answer my comment.

>At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't?

It's not about the mistakes, but about the way you create new stuff. It always feels that canonical try's to copy other technologies but not to make them better but to own them (snaps).

>counterpart in a rich discussion, rather than a one-dimensional anti-everything-Canonical mouthpiece?

I am totally not against canonical, it's extremely important to have a professional alternative to rpm-based (RHEL,SLES) distribution's, i am just not happy how ubuntu/canonical changed in the past ~10 years, maybe you see it as hate, but for me it's a bit more like a friend who betrayed me, i know sound's stupid, but ubuntu was that friendly distro who send free disk's around the world and is now the most proprietary one who had a Amazon search function.

>But why hate on me, and Canonical, when we literally put everything we had on the line for that vision, but screwed up?

Wait, no one hates you...quite the opposite.

>Why be an ass to the sorts of people who are willing to put every ounce of strength they have into something that you really wanted to see succeed?

Then stop brewing always your own soup, or at least make it better then the rest. Linux already has a massive NIH-Syndrome, and here i have to admit that Ubuntu/Canonical made the right choice with ZFS, when others (SLES) use that terrible BTRFS.

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#184

Post by gravypod » Sun, May 22, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #126

FabHK wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then, how many job applications do you do? Maybe Canonical wants to filter out people that apply to hundreds of firms, and only consider those for whom Canonical is on the short list - and a list short enough that a few hours spent on those questions is not a big deal. (Side note: it's kind of a Proof of Work...)

Yes, that's one significant benefit of the written interview. We had 110,000 applications to Canonical last year, which is a lot to process for a company of 800. We offer a very high-quality remote-first employment experience, with international travel twice a year for up to two weeks so teams can plan, bond and play. That's attractive to a lot of people. Candidates these days apply for between 5 and 75 roles in a ba…

Food for thought: I care about open source and I'd say I'm the kind of engineer canonical would benefit from hiring (not to flatter myself too much) but at this point in my career I no longer look for work. People try to poach me and usually offer to skip interview requirements. Good engineers are never "looking" for work since the work finds them. Increasing the bar of application just means filtering out top candidates.

I'm not even the best SWE in the world, just in a very special niche (which Ubuntu IoT serves poorly). Engineers who are better than me have it way easier than I do. It's exponentially easier to job hop at every skill percentile.

> We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume.

The SATs essay portion is known for giving horribly biased signals. My assumption is this selects for essay writers, not technical design excellence. There's a lot of great stuff I've seen come out of canonical (MaaS, etc) and a lot of horribly designed legacy tech that no one enjoys using (juju). It seems like getting someone in the pipeline that can sort out a clear modern infrastructure vision would really help canonical and the broader ecosystem at large but I think it won't be happening largely due to hiring practices.

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#185

Post by valdiorn » Sun, May 22, 2022, 4:07 PM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #138

corrral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An exchange from that thread: > > there is absolutely zero chance anyone on the other end is going to take the time to actually read and evaluate each of them > This is understandable to think, but is simply wrong -- I know because I'm a software engineer at Canonical who helps review these written submissions. They're sometimes read and reviewed by our CEO, though often he delegates that out to a pool of us reviewer…

This is not a South African thing :) The written interview serves multiple purposes. First, it is a response to a massive flow of applications. We can more fully and fairly assess those who show they are willing to do some work to be part of our company. Second, it helps address bias. The written interview is not a resume, which a hiring manager would read through bias like "I recognise that university" and "I like t…

I'm sorry Mark, but you are also indirectly selecting for candidates that:

* Have ample time to write multi-page essays about themselves. Quality candidates are in demand, with multiple offers or solicitations for interview all the time.

* Feel comfortable sharing fairly intimate details about themselves and their lives - I personally would never, ever want to share some childhood trauma stories with my potential future colleagues, or complete strangers.

* Are willing to put up with ridiculous, time-wasting tasks - maybe you want this, because these employees will be more easily managed and manipulated, but just understand you ARE selecting for it, whether you intend to or not.

* Have a personality that you personally, or someone at your company, has decided is "an acceptable fit", thus missing out on a wide variety of potential candidates that might offer qualities you never even thought to test for.

It all seems very misguided, and that's the reason why there have been numerous posts both here on Hacker News, Reddit and other forums on the internet, lambasting your process. It's broken, and most people outside your company seem to realise this, while you do not.

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#186

Post by valdiorn » Sun, May 22, 2022, 4:14 PM UTC

markshuttle wrote: post #140

latchkey wrote: post #24

I feel like it is hard enough to hire people, especially good devops, why turn people off this badly?

Lots of people won't do this work, it's true. But the ones who will, are much more likely to make phenomenal colleagues. They care, they are focused, they are diligent. Things work better when you are in a team with more of that. Try it someday.

How would you know, if you reject everyone who doesn't fit your predetermined box? Have you ever actually tried a different strategy for hiring, or building a team?

Also, for people standing outside the company looking in, things do not look happy and healthy at Canonical, which makes it even more likely you are being fooled by some of your own staff, or the figures they present to your, into thinking things are better than they are. I've failed to find a single positive review of working for Canonical, yet we have a smorgasbord of bad reviews all over the internet. You may want to evaluate that as "evidence" that something isn't right.

Re: The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give

#187

Post by cmsj » Wed, May 25, 2022, 4:12 PM UTC

nix23 wrote: post #183

markshuttle wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see how you would draw those conclusions, because yes, we have made mistakes, and we do have some products that are proprietary, and we have made some shitty software. At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't? That's my dispute with your position - it's flatly generalising and characterising ALL our work as if it was our least successful work. By all means, call us out on o…

First and foremost, thank you very much for taking the time to answer my comment. >At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't? It's not about the mistakes, but about the way you create new stuff. It always feels that canonical try's to copy other technologies but not to make them better but to own them (snaps). >counterpart in a rich discussion, rather than a one-dimensional anti-e…

> but to own them

that is the key insight here. All of Canonical's marquee software projects over the years have been attempts to single-handedly control a given space, and they have essentially all failed.

Canonical is good at integrating other peoples' software though, which isn't surprising since that's been the core function of the company since its inception.