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Comment by juice_bus | Hacker News Reader

It feels like Canonical does this silly shit so only the truly desperate will apply, and thus take lower compensation.

I would of closed the tab pretty quickly.

I agree. This is a great filter for companies you do not want to be a part of. Keep in mind that your future bosses will evaluate you based on useless and silly metrics like these.

There are a great many other places to work that DO value your actual accomplishments.

Unless this attracts the desperate who wouldn't apply without these filters, the compensation necessary to secure the winner will be unaffected or might even go up as the smaller pool of applicants will have Canonical over a barrel.

More likely they do this because they have so many applications coming in that having to pay more to a lesser worker is worth more than having to hire many more HR staff to process all the applications. The hope is that it will scare off most people, and if that fails a machine can filter on these values. It could be any arbitrary value – race, religion, random number – but courts have effectively ruled that any filtering mechanism that isn't directly related to the job or school could face severe legal consequences, so this keeps the lawyers happy.

Truly desperate or people with ulterior motives maybe, don't want to be paranoid but maybe only someone who is working undercover for some agency would want to go through that lengthy process of the interview. Maybe Canonical thinks this way it can detect this kind of people. idk

It's more likely that they had someone junior write these questions and no one senior ever looked it over. This reflects badly on the HR department at Canonical, it's probably not some conspiracy to find desperate people.

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about Canonical's motives and reasoning.

Perhaps the question about language indicates that they're only looking for people who wouldn't have closed their tabs.

I would be able to give "impressive" answers to those questions, yet I'd still close the tab. Canonical is shooting themselves in the foot.

The next worst thing they could have asked was my Myers-Briggs personality category.

I think OP was just pointing out the irony of complaining about high school English questions while making a high school-level English usage mistake (would of vs. would have)

English prescriptivists are even more ironic-er. If they'd of bothered to take even an undergraduate level course in linguistics, they'd understand how wasteful a pastime "grammar nazi" is.

"Would of" is just is a misspelling of "would've".

Irregardless of that fact, if enough people misuse a word or grammatical construct long enough, it becomes de facto correct

> Irregardless

I see what you did there. And you’re right, but “would have” is not there yet, it’s just a common mistake like swapping your/you’re.

Sure. I'll give it a couple hundred years.

Can you define a couple of hundred? Just to be clear I am a language descriptivist, and am looking for a timeline I can hang you on for being wrong. Also to preface, if you pick a timeline older then the phrase “the bees knees”I will think you are irrelevant, and if you can pick a younger phrase but I can show language evolution on top of that, I will also consider you irrelevant.

Just to be safe, make it an even millennium.

> I would be able to give "impressive" answers to those questions

I want to complain that they don't have a "won the state championship" answer for the math question. The allowed responses don't even capture my full, 30 years ago high school glory.

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