Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex | Hacker News Reader

Canonical’s recruitment process is long and complex

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432 pointsopensourcecat437 comments

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 months, and those that do will just say fuck it and look elsewhere.

In our case, the place was a revolving door. ALWAYS hiring, never knowing who they'd hire - and those working there would carry the perpetually understaffed workload.

I can understand a hiring process like this if we're talking about fighter pilots, astronauts, special forces operators, scientists going to antarctica, or whatever. But software engineering? C'mon. Delusions of grandeur.

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.

My current job was less than a week between my application and signing the final offer. Day 1: I send in an application. Day 2: My future manager writes back "Hey, do you have any work examples in obscure language I used for 10 minutes in my EE classes?". I respond "No, nobody has work examples in obscure language." Later that day, same manager emails me again, asking the same question, in slightly different words. I say no again. They respond asking to set a time for an interview. I reply I'm free tomorrow. Day 4, interview. Takes an hour and half. I receive a job offer about an hour later. I reply we need to have a conversation about salary. Weekend rolls through, negotiations are successful and I'm hired on Monday.

This is so unusual it borders on unbelievable

In my last job search I had like 1 case like this out of 30-40. Might be my numbers though

Is that a normal number of leads to have in play? I certainly spewed my fair share of resumes into the void out of school but I haven't done that since.

I don't think so because most of these leads came from frontend recruiters that could have made a lot of money landing me a job, and as a result most of them were great opportunities for the recruiters, not so great for me and the potential future employer.

Don't get discouraged. Work on a personal project if you want, so you have something to show. In my experience it's only hard to land the first job. Once you do, it becomes easier. Don't read other people's experiences and think something is wrong. Good luck <3

I've had interviews with startups that will use a quick interview turn around time as a selling feature to close candidates.

I've also interviewed at Two Sigma where I was flown in onsite and by the last interview they had already reviewed most of my feedback and told me that they were going to extend an offer. I got the sense that if I wasn't using a 3rd party recruiter with rules they might have handed me an offer before I left offsite. But it was great having the chance to talk to my would-be manager knowing I would likely have the offer to discuss my role while I was still onsite.

I had a similar, but inverse experience - was brought in for an all-day interview, and after half a day both they and I realized that I wasn't going to be a good fit, so they let me go.

No hard feelings on my end; I was out of my depth at the time, and knew it, and was glad I wasn't going to have to waste the rest of my day and theirs.

> was glad I wasn't going to have to waste the rest of my day and theirs

If, during an interview, it becomes obvious to you that you aren't a good fit at the place for whatever reason, you don't have to wait for them to end the process early.

Doing so yourself is not only acceptable, it's also a professional courtesy that they will appreciate.

Remember, with all interview processes, you're evaluating the potential employer just as much as they're evaluating you.

I was hired on the spot after a 15 minute interview at a huge international bank. If they really like your profile this can happen.

heard of it, but never happened to me. The closest "turn around" was 2 weeks after getting a response from a recruiter (which took 3 weeks, so let's just ignore that). But that was because stage 3-6 of the interview was compressed into a full work day of revolving teams to talk to.

Given how the other processes work, I sort of prefer to get it over with. But I understand that that's not viable for people searching while still working full time.

Not unusual, my current job was just a back and forth email semi-argument with the CEO in less than a week. This has been my longest job tenure in my over 11 years of dev experience.

Do you now have any 'work examplesin obscure language'?

Or was the manager just interested in trivia?

The job was part of rewrite from the obscure language to C#. So I guess some, but mostly I just need to be able to read it.

What is the obscure language?

> I can understand a hiring process like this if we're talking about fighter pilots, astronauts, special forces operators, scientists going to antarctica, or whatever. But software engineering? C'mon. Delusions of grandeur.

Well.. have you met their CEO?

The truth is once companies have a certain size and revenue, their software developers don't matter really that much. Yes it can be hell to work there, everyone is overworked, things are low quality, etc. As long as the checks keep coming in ( and they will ) there is really no critical problem to be addressed.

Now the funny part: once the alarm bells go off and they try to change course... not happens, the "ship" is unresponsive and in most cases it will sink. But depending on the size of the company that will take years and maybe even decades.

So the best skill everyone needs to have (I wish really technical introverted software developers had this more ) is: Develop "street smarts" and tell these people to go fuck themselves and shove their "hiring process" up their asses.

The only time it took me more than 2 months to get a job, that was also the time I wanted to move to another country. All in all it was nice for me to take the time to ponder on the pros and cons, triple check the kind of quality of life I would have in the expected range of salary, housing, schools, etc.

I am not sure I would stay motivated in another context.

Depends on the position. Took me about 2.5 months for current role between sending the first email and getting a formal offer. (I even got accidentally stood up when I was going to meet someone over breakfast :-)) But I was having conversations/interviews with senior people and it was just hard to get people in the office. (This was well pre-COVID so everything was in-person.)

It certainly doesn't help that many companies never inform you if you don't get a position, so if a candidate doesn't get a response quickly, they are likely to assume they were rejected.

I used to work at a medium sized firm (~2B revenue) and we had a policy where the candidate had an offer or a rejection (with reason) before they left the office.

It was hard turning folks down, and it pushed us to have very crisp reasons for saying no, but I think it made us better interviewers and more humane in the process.

The word humane is rarely used, most times in the context of "humane slaughter of farm animals" and now in "humane interview process."

This could also backfire with non-confrontational personalities. "Welp, I guess you're hired"

It was never decided by a single person. We always did a 5-15m debrief, consisting of about 4 people (hiring manager, 2 interviewers, hr to facilitate and maybe a shadow 2), between interviews on the day.

A lot can happen in three months.

My wife interviewed years ago for a UK govt research agency. They took three months to respond but did eventually set up an on-site interview. She went along anyway. HR met her at the gate and took her to the office of the person who owned the opportunity. When they arrived and there was no-one at his desk it turned out that he had died two months earlier and that the HR drone hadn't known. Needless to say the interview was cancelled.

Wowsa. That reads like a B movie noir comedy.

I would watch it!

> there was no-one at his desk

Sounds like a vacancy

Yeah. I thought the story would end with the HR person saying, “Oh. Turns out Bob died. I guess you’re hired. Have Bob’s office.”

That or the HR person sits the interviewee down and wanders off assuming the desk owner will come back soon with a fresh cuppa.

Cut to some time later, the interviewee's skeleton is sitting there still waiting. Maybe I've read too much Douglas Adams.

HRtiko

pins a name-tag to her shirt

“You are the Bob now”

That’s probably a good sign you don’t want that job.

Thats a free chair right there. See you on Monday!

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. 1-2 weeks for a phone screen

5. 1 week to confirm results

6. 1-2 weeks for another round if not moving to on-site directly

7. 2-3 weeks for scheduling an onsite

8. 1-2 weeks for results (more immediate if it’s an obvious reject)

9. Additional 1-2 weeks for finalizing an offer and signing it.

The shortest end to end I could manage to get was around 2 and a half months, which is crazy.

Did you interview at any startups? <= Series B?

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!')

> The vast, vast majority of jobs have godawful applications and hiring process

I don't think this claim holds outside of technical jobs at big tech and big-tech-aspirers.

I think you're trying to say that jobs with godawful applications/hiring processes acquire this disease for human reasons? If so, we agree. I'd sum it up as decadence.

SMBs, inclusive of the "earlier" stage startups that are a big source of employment for the people who frequent this site, can't afford the decadence.

I was curious about what pond they were fishing in, because that representation of an average experience is totally alien to me. As for which pond "most" people on this site should aspire to fish in (on which I made no claim), ymmv. Just collecting data.

I've got a mate trying to apply to jobs in the construction sector and it's still a godawful HR mess. A cousin struggling with architecture firm jobs. Even emergency services roles are like this. This isn't a problem of the tech sector, I think it's a problem of risk aversion and ass-covering being more important than delivery.

If you're understaffed and can't meet goals it's because you're understaffed and it's the business's fault. If you have enough people and can't meet goals it's because you're messing up and it's your fault. If you hire someone and don't get 'enough output' from them then you made a bad call and it's your fault. It's damn near incentivized to slow-roll hiring and agonize over the choices instead of getting people in the door and working on your tasks.

I did interview at startups but not <= Series B. After 2 back to back layoffs that just seemed too risky. (The second one was me getting cut literally two weeks into the job) But most startups also have similar timelines, except maybe a faster initial turnaround from application to first technical interview. Very few companies had things streamlined and quick.

> scientists going to antarctica

I know someone who applied for a technical job based in antarctica and the interview process was much less arduous than the one described here.

I applied to be an astronaut and that was only 5 or 6 rounds of interviews. Granted, you have a lot more invasive medical tests and being dunked upside down in swimming pools.

That doesn’t sound nearly as bad as implementing quicksort on a whiteboard :)

It actually sounds like fun in comparison to implementing anything on a whiteboard.

I'd rather all interview processes were like one of those funny Japanese game shows, rather than the dehumanisingly dull whiteboard interviee.

I could see a dystopian sci-fi short story or Black Mirror episode with the same theme.

It depends where you're going. Villas Las Estrellas requires an appendix removal.

I'm assuming this is a joke of some sort?

No he's not joking https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180810-villas-las-estre...

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....

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.

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.

I don't think anyone disagrees with that.

The issue is more that this process can't possibly be selecting for the best hires.

Which is fine, but the point here is that as you increase the onerousness of your interview process you don't just get diminishing returns, your ability to attract good people at all actually declines past some point. Qualified people have other options.

Unless you alienate most of them because of your hard head.

Thinking of cost like this is very shallow

The post is not doing any favours and it is not convincing anybody to apply to the position, quite the contrary

And guess what, your company is not the shining star that has to make absolute sure to never have a bad hire. Sure, take the low-hanging fruit as early in the process as possible, but up to a certain point, more interviews won't mean better results

There's a point you may be missing - they're seeking fanatical Canonical fans that share in a common vision.

Their lengthy process might mean they don't get your typical fast-flying FAANG engineer, but it does mean they get someone who's a die-hard Canonical fan.

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.

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.

i installed ubuntu or kubuntu on most of my new machines since it came out, but for my newest install i picked debian instead, especially since the softening of the debian social contract eliminated most of the install hassles

because i usually use xpdf for pdf files and ubuntu dropped it https://askubuntu.com/questions/1245518/how-to-install-xpdf-...

i was skeptical about ubuntu's business prospects when mark pitched me on it at the ceo conference in 02004 (he was attending, i wasn't) but i've always thought the distribution was pretty decent, and the company's behavior has also been excellent. a couple of my friends have worked there and had no complaints. i would have no hesitation about working there unless i had a better offer on the table

but i'm definitely not a die-hard ubuntu fan

If you were looking for a new job today, would you tolerate an 81 day process like the OP did? My guess is probably not, unless you were just in love with Canonical and their mission (ie. it was your dream job).

Most available top-tier talent can land a job in much less than 81 days with much less effort at much more prestigious places... and they won't wait around for an average offer like what will come from Canonical.

By dragging out their process, Canonical either intentionally or unintentionally limits themselves to people who really just love Canonical and it's mission (and/or people like Mark). Additionally, this lengthy process ensures the most desirable candidates self-eliminate from the pool due to accepting offers elsewhere in the meantime.

yeah, i would, unless i were desperate to get some income (as in fact i am right now, but almost never have been)

like, yeah, if i had just been laid off and i was trying to get two or three offers on the table at the same time so i could choose between them, getting me an offer in a couple of weeks instead of three months would be crucial

but usually when i've interviewed for a job, i've already had another job, or at least hourly contract work sufficient to pay the bills

Well, consider if you had a job, were looking for another job, and had put some time/effort into a couple places. If you received say 1-3 offers, and Canonical was still 2+ months away (and you had no idea if an offer would even be made) - would you wait (meaning decline your other offers)?

Probably not. Unless you really just wanted to work at Canonical (the dream job opportunity thing).

None of this is to say Canonical isn't a fantastic workspace. It's just a comment on their hiring process and possibly missed opportunities. If you're looking for top-tier talent, it would behoove you to move fast.

agreed, but they're probably hoping to hire people whose job search isn't very active, rather than people who are desperate to work there

> because i usually use xpdf for pdf files and ubuntu dropped it

FWIW, Ubuntu only didn't ship xpdf in 20.04. It's back in 22.04. Looking at the history of the package in Debian, it looks like it was on "life support" for a while in Debian by people I recognise as Ubuntu developers, but then also got removed from Debian testing for the same reason. However Debian didn't have a release at all in 2020, so it didn't miss a Debian release like it missed an Ubuntu release, and a new maintainer arrived to look after it again after that so it got fixed in time for Debian's 2021 release.

IOW, it was just a matter of timing of releases and the absence of a maintainer in both distributions for a while, rather than some weird Ubuntu decision.

Having said that, Ubuntu does tend to focus on evince, so that would explain why it didn't attract a replacement maintainer quickly from the Ubuntu end.

It seems a bit of a weird reason to change distribution over anyway, which is why I thought I'd explain the details :-)

i have 20.04 installed here (should i confess that publicly?) and the absence of xpdf has been a irritation literally every day for months

a more rational person would have compiled xpdf from source obviously

You could probably grab the next version that was published to Debian (3.04-14), throw it into a PPA to build against 20.04 and it would probably work. People have also published this kind of thing as an update in the official repositories in the past in this sort of case where the fix wasn't available at the time of release so it's missing from just one release.

I appreciate that this is all a non-trivial exercise for someone not familiar with the tooling though.

i don't really have that excuse

just this evening i compiled qemacs, pcc, and jove from source, in the last case from the debian source package

You might be right but gosh, what a terrible way to treat your most faithful supporters.

I was extremely passionate about Ubuntu some 15 years ago. I would receive live CD-roms and distribute them in my campus, and teach people to install Ubuntu. Would show up things like Beryl or whatever weird stuff you could do with Linux at the time. Organized free software meetups too.

Today? I couldn't care less about whatever Canonical is up to. I don't know if the tipping point was when they put ads in the frigging desktop or if it was just a slow but persistent decline in quality

It seems to me that Canonical doesn't care about desktop anymore (does anyone remember bug #1?) but is focused all in on servers. Which I suppose pays the bills, but resulted in Canonical burning an immense amount of goodwill the last decade+

Strike Ubuntu, insert "Linux", or "desktop Linux". Yeah, there will be a few who'd consider it quite awesome working on it full time and getting paid, and who wouldn't mind doing that Ubuntu-flavored. And it's not far off if they consider themselves attractive enough that they can skip everybody who's idle and looking for a seat to fill, and instead focus on those who are already employed but consider a change.

Too bad that common vision isn't a Desktop that isn't absolutely garbage.

Maybe they should spend more time hiring people that actually make competitive applications against Microsoft than die-hard nutjobs who think waiting a year to work for an open-source company is a good idea.

Microsoft might not have 70% of the desktop market if they'd done that.

Apple managed to claw back 15% of the desktop market to 20% with their BSD-clone OS, and it still has garbage software compared to what's available on Windows, but at least it's a start...

By hiring their biggest fans they're guaranteed to produce a product that their biggest fans will love. Everyone maybe not so much but their biggest fans will love it.

> $X is bad

> $X bad on purpose

> $X is made to appear bad for those who are not die-hard $X fans

You just invented a consipracy theory that has surprisingly huge explanative power in modern world

Lets not forget the 48 hour or less exploding offers they all received while you were waiting for them to reserve themselves for you for 3+ months with no promises on your part

So why do these companies insist on these incredibly long hiring processes? Clearly it must not be working if candidates are moving on before they're hired.

My assumption is that they do it to select for the types of employees that will put up with nonsense. I know that sounds like I'm being flip, but I'm not.

There are tons of companies that don't do this (at least in the US), though, so there's no real reason to put up with it.

They don't insist on it. It's just the way they operate.

Everything takes ages in the corporate world. Every hiring decision needs to be signed off by interviewers, managers, HR, and sometimes even executives. Someone in this chain is usually on vacation, but there's no clear replacement, so someone else needs to be brought up to speed. Meetings need to take place for everyone to touch base, and discuss the candidates. Coordinating this around everyone's availability is difficult, since they have other meetings to attend. It really takes some outside-the-box thinking to make it happen. :)

Also, depending on the size and popularity of the company, they might be evaluating dozens of candidates at the same time. This also clogs the pipeline considerably.

This applies to more than just hiring, too.

As a lowly engineer trying to get subcontractor invoices paid I've had some very Kafkaesque struggles.

> Everything takes ages in the corporate world

But not everywhere. I've been hired by a couple of major tech companies and didn't have to go through such an insane, lengthy process as this. I think a lot of it depends on the corporate culture.

Actually if you're slow enough, you can get them the next time around.

I've had it before where I got an offer when I was in a job search from a place I approached from the last time I was in a job search.

Recruitment aliasing!

Finally a good use case for gpt: filling out 41 paragraphs of q&a sent to you by people who disrespect you

devil's advocate: a bad software engineer is not only unproductive but drags down good software engineer's productivity. It doesn't make SWE's important, but it does sometimes mean that no hire isn't the worst choice.

In addition, Canonical is HQ'd in the UK, so it's not quite as easy to let someone go if red flags come up.

It's incredibly easy to fire people in the first six months or so.

It's only after that it's hard.

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://markshuttleworth.com/work.html

Around 2004 it said:

"Brilliant. Tell me about things you've done in which you have truly excelled. I don't mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you've setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven't done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you'll fit in just fine"

The very last "here" was a link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/

https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.marksh...

https://archive.is/o2rJa

Yeah this is not such a great signal once you're past a certain maturity level

But hopefully it stayed in the past

Mark ran into some issues with clueless US officials and was not allowed in the country for a while.

Maybe that's what it said what it said.

Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?

You're reading too much into this. It is just a casual joke from a long time ago and I find the rest of the copy is quite good.

Canonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand.

This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available.

Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth.

I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.

They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.

> I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.

Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.

But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.

Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html

Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.

> NIH

If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.

Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.

Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take a less doctrinaire approach to including software that was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time) than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-box experience for casual users.

At this point you might have been rolling your own video drivers and hoping your CRT didn't explode, so it was a bit of a step up.

Canonical, being incorporated on Isle of Man, could make moves, that distributions rooted in US could not. MP3 is the prime example.

> Huge red flag

What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?

I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing.

Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.

I wouldn't call that joke antagonizing particularly, though? Or do you mean something separate?

It's certainly antagonizing to me, but maybe that's just because I work for the government and like to think that I do extraordinary work.

Hey, don't worry. Everyone who pays taxes works for the government :-)

More like investors... or subscription customers. But not employees.

I think your metaphor is going in the wrong direction! Customers and investors have a choice. We pay the government or we get locked in a box we helped pay for (-:

Analogy still holds. Democracy ostensibly allows choice. If you have no choice, it’s no different than a monopoly.

Did you work for the Bush administration? If you did, you should probably accept the criticism. If not, well, how is 20 year old criticism of the government any skin off your back?

Depends on how you take it. I worked for the government during the Bush administration, but not in the administrative staff itself. It's just a shitty and unnecessary jab that rubs me entirely the wrong way.

Well, yes, it was a shitty and unnecessary jab. Sorry for that. But really, it was a jab at the GW Bush White House administration, not the civil service. I grew up a great fan of the US and Bush-Iraq felt like something important in the world had died. It felt like stupidity on a generational scale, that would have terrible consequences for the US. And that was before the torture.

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.

Over much of the 2000s, it's fair to say that Shuttleworth/Canonical had pretty grand ambitions. They're still around--which is a not inconsiderable achievement in its own right--but in an era where the cloud providers have their own Linux flavors and other distros have generally leveled the usability playing field, Ubuntu just never really broke out.

It's also not true and gp corrected themselves

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 as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. 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. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment.

We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.

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 questionable.

That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.

And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.

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.

But the desktop was not plain GNOME.

It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that plain GNOME didn't.

That is valid even today; just the choice of default font is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in the same league.

In the early days it wasn't "polished" in any way other than the font or color choice. Which just about every distro was doing at the time (Fedora also had a clean and liked theme).

But sure, here's the comparison.

Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_histo...

Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_C...

Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.

Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.

The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.

All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.

> Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.

That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity theme is much closer to what standard GNOME looked like back then. Which goes against the original point that they were especially polished.

> Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.

What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common these days? First of all, many distros eschewed "Free Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc; and they definitely did it better than the early versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same experience as the standard debian installer that early versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that didn't offer it.

But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.

Here's the Ubuntu 4.10 install:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLX3vJgLdrw

Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a year and a half before the first version of Ubuntu (even with the fact that this person chose to manually partition their disks, it's pretty streamlined):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6c3prrIhzI

If you honestly believe the Ubuntu install is easier or more friendly than the Fedora one, you're delusional.

And for further comparison:

Mandrake 10.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTnKhruF9kc

Linspire 5.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lL4HE5a0o

Yeah, you're right. They're much more difficult than Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").

In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too far when they started developing in their own bubble and refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their overly opinionated stances and for holding back advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty now to show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they start [and always lose] to do things "their way": systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland, GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.

Their reputation has always been that they use the Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved in the community.

> The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.

There you go. This is why they were popular. In a time when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a millionaire cover the cost of sending it to you was a big deal. Ubuntu 4.10-6.10 didn't get popular for being pretty, or easy to use, or having a great out-of-the-box experience; they did despite those things because it was super easy to get 5 discs and hand them out to your friends who knew nothing about Linux. They then worked on making the out-of-box experience better for themselves (and only themselves) while leeching off the established distros who did work with the community. Red Hat/Fedora is the big one, but Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, etc were also big contributors. Hell, it was common for Microsoft to contribute more to the Linux upstream than Canonical did.

> All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.

The one action. Making discs easy to get and distribute to people unaware.

I'm not completely convinced about the free discs argument.

I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of them) newsstand had at least two biweekly Linux magazines. They cost something like 5€ (or whatever currency we had at the time) and they always had either 2 linux installer cd or one installer and one cd with some cool software to try.

And they had serious quality articles too. I still remember one where they described in detail how they built a DIY magnetic tunneling microscope and used it to recover some data from an hard drive.

By the time Ubuntu free cds came out I already had a big collection of Linux installers, none of them downloaded on my own.

Agreed about the rest. They've always been poisonous towards upstreams and probably contributed to set back the famous year of the Linux Desktop by diluting the efforts in dead-end projects instead of working with upstream towards a common goal.

Oh, definitely. I should be clear that this is a very US-centric viewpoint. The European scene (especially France and Germany) was drastically different. Whereas Red Hat/Fedora had a massive slice of the pie in the US, SuSE reigned over Germany. Additionally, Europeans (especially the hacker/developer scene) globbed onto Free Software much more quickly.

So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc.

As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.

There was zero polishing appart from different background color and theme accent in their early releases. It was just a debian with package versions similar to SID with debian's experimental installer.

What they really did well and made them known very well is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other distros you either had to buy them from a store, download it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with cdrom install of a different distro every month.

That was a big deal when very few people had access to fast internet connections.

Goes to show that one thing is creating technology, and another thing is creating a product people can use.

That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical.

They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three.

As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.

> That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.

Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono.

By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.

It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected.

It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)

As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation.

And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),

while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu.

Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs.

Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair.

I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me the experience I seek in a desktop these days : no fuss, the OS has all the packages I need, if I need something more recent I can use a pet container or flatpak, the polish is good enough (and, unfortunately, other distros don't really improve enough there to justify their existence), I don't have to /think/ about my system for the duration of the stable release, only when the time comes for the next full-upgrade, the modern installer sets up a sane desktop out of the box and now they even include firmware by default. It's the zen I need.

>Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro

This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there.

Arch ain't it.

Mandrake/Mandriva distribution was easy to use/install, but since it was from a French company, it never had any traction, if I remember were, it was created in late 90s.

> 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.

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.

I don't think Ubuntu was particularly relevant for the first few releases. Ubuntu became a trendy sensation when they started doing these things.

I was there. They shot to the most popular distros right away. Just go look at distrowatch for 2004-2006.

Regardless, let's pretend your point is accurate. The bigger point is they didn't do anything new or better than anyone. And, in fact, were a net negative for many communities/efforts.

It helps if you read the entire post, not your own little cherrypicked context.

It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.

From a technical users' perspective, super easy...if you already knew what to do, or what to search for to figure out what to do.

The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.

> The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.

The point was, other popular distros were doing that 4+ years before Ubuntu was. Fedora and Debian were just about the only major Linux distros that didn't include them. Just like how other distros had better installers, better themes/user experiences, etc than Ubuntu:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068058

Also, if you had the "technical skill" to even know to download Fedora, I find it baffling that you didn't have the skill to type "nvidia drivers fedora" into Google. People were doing the same thing for Windows for a decade+ at that time.

Sure, Ubuntu eventually became nice-looking and easy to install. But they didn't innovate those things in anyway. Instead, they became so off the backs of a bunch of other communities doing real hard work and contributing nothing themselves.

> What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way?

Credited for creating the most painful interview process.

With fear of creating another Putnam moment on HN what exactly did you do that is so much greater than Ubuntu?

So they should compare their accomplishments to something that has had hundreds of full-time employees working on since 2004?

Well, apparently parent doesn't think that is an accomplishment, so yes.

He didn't say he did do something incredible. Mark Shuttleworth did.

Heh. Curious, how old are you? When did you start using linux?

I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.

Ubuntu is now the "Windows" of the Linux world. It's pretty successful if you ask me.

> 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.

It’s time for me to leave Ubuntu behind for good. I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole.

I feel like in 2004 not everyone who was an asshole on the internet was aware they were assholes, and there wasn’t the same culture of enthusiastically informing them.

Not to excuse the behavior, but different times were different times.

I can't read this comments as anything other than virtue signalling. You can call Mark Shuttleworth an asshole and still use Ubuntu without being a hypocrite.

Ive been feeling like Ubuntu has been failing technically for years and this thread is really helping explain why.

Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing.

This Shuttleworth guy sounds like a smarmy jackass, and after reading that article on the hiring process, I wouldn't even wanna bother, especially considering I could literally apply at a MAGNAM company and get double the compensation.

They can have their "fanatical fan base employees" with my blessing.

Would you mind explaining why you say Ubuntu has been failing technically? I’ve found it underwhelming but I’m curious to read more negative opinions.

But these factors were also in place for their distro ascendency too, so you probably can't blame the factors. If anything, long term success itself is more likely to explain eventual hubris, complacency then decline.

I still use Ubuntu at home, but it's probably just inertia at this point. I don't hate it, but I also don't really like it the way I used to.

That’s interesting because as soon as I read the phrase ‘virtue signaling’, I ignore the person who wrote it. It’s deeply rude because you’re implying that I have no virtue. You don’t know me and so that’s intellectually dishonest.

from what you've written so far it seems pretty accurate.

Honest question why?

It’s based upon a few things.

Ubuntu has been underwhelming as of late. It’s fine, just underwhelming. Sometimes software becomes underwhelming as it matures but in this case, the hiring process seems designed to ship underwhelming software.

Then there is the particular issue. That kind of thinking/communication style doesn’t make me feel comfortable with Ubuntu (or any project he would have a leadership role in).

And finally, I’m really tired of how our industry seems to glorify jerks.

So we have:

1.) Ubuntu is rather underwhelming.

2.) The hiring process is so fucked that underwhelming software is the most likely result.

3.) There is a lot of competition and I can find projects with vaguely professional/secure leaders.

4.) I run more than enough jerk driven software.

Why is filtering applicants for people who accomplished at least something in any area of life (not even specifically software) being a jerk ?

I mean, if Mark wrote that in 2004, he was dunking on an administration that was widely believed to be the worst ever.

(Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)

> (Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)

Yeah, those drone strikes from the Obama administration were pretty bad.

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.

> our first non-peaceful transition of power

I know what you mean, but the phrasing seems odd given that the US has gone through multiple transfers of power because POTUS was murdered.

I'm not sure why that is relevant. "Transition of power" describes the period of time when power transitions from one administration to the next. A non-peaceful end of presidency can be followed by a peaceful transition of power.

If anything, this fact makes things much worse.

VPOTUS assuming the presidency absolutely is a new administration. Hard to see how anyone could claim otherwise.

Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.

> VPOTUS assuming the presidency absolutely is a new administration. Hard to see how anyone could claim otherwise.

I am not claiming otherwise. I'm saying: it doesn't matter if the last president dies.

> Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.

What violence occurred during the transition of power? Who tried to stop the political processes?

> What violence occurred during the transition of power? Who tried to stop the political processes?

There wasn't supposed to be a transition of power. A violent initiation to the transfer of power when transfer of power was not supposed to occur is a non-peaceful transfer of power.

Exactly :) It was still a brat comment though. I'd forgotten about that. Thank goodness we grow out of some things.

They also buy email lists from ZoomInfo to spam people then don’t take GDPR requests seriously after you chase them for answers. So yeah, good riddance.

C'mon, it was a casual joke and no harm done. Also punching someone weaker is a simple act, but taking on someone stronger requires courage.

Does it fit the somewhat quirky (but by far not unusual) interview process? Yes

Is it a sign of a moral flaw? No

Unless, of course, you work for that government. Kind of the same one that put people on the Moon, made the atomic bomb, invented the internet, and other things less extraordinary than repackaging Debian ;-)

I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.

The Bush Administration did not do any of those things. Reading his comments as a dismissal of those things, rather than the guy running the White House when he wrote it, seems uncharitable.

Words like “Bush” or “current administration” do not occur in the article. Rather, it was just a link. You don’t have any particular reason to be this charitable.

He linked to the White House website. The occupant of the White House at the time was George W. Bush. I am not even trying to be charitable, that's just the most likely reading to me. Basically every talk show host made similar jokes all the time because Bush was widely considered to be an incompetent nepo baby, so I'd need a reason to read it any other way, and I don't really see one here.

They also interned Japanese-Americans, caused the Arab Spring/Syrian Civil War, made the atomic bomb (oh, you mentioned that one!), ran numerous undisclosed human experimentation projects, imposed multiple central banking systems on the United States, caused the mortgage crisis, and gave China most favoured nation status.

You still can't really say the US government doesn't do things that are deeply impactful, many times very negatively impactful.

The US government serves the US's interests. I have no illusions as to how well it behaves towards other countries.

Except most of the things I mentioned hurt Americans first and foremost. You didn't catch that? Gulf War syndrome, Tuskegee, MK Ultra, Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac/Lehman Brothers, destroying Detroit, enriching an adversary totalitarian nuclear state with Mao Zedong on its money, confiscating gold, devaluing the dollar... literally putting American citizens in camps.

The US government serves the US government's interests.

It is controlled by the people elected. The only solution is to elect better representatives who need to push for stricter regulations on government behavior so that worse representatives have fewer opportunities for making a mess.

it's nominally controlled by the elected. until someone accuses the elected of threatening the independence of such and such agency and then the intelligence community (permanent Washington) has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. stories are planted in all CIA/State Department-aligned i.e. major newspapers. classified information is selectively leaked by the heads of the agencies to their friends in academia. lawsuits fly. the ACLU finds a couch surfer to testify that bees are fish. and it's over before it started.

Every famous computer scientist is a complete asshole.

he's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary people and made fun of george bush?

Twisting the signal/noise knob this way may not attract all or even the right kind of extraordinary people you think you will.

The classic Madeleine Albright-Aaron Swartz dichotomy. Gee, that's a tough call LOL

More word salad.

How is it noise to imply that people who work in government are overwhelmingly blood-sucking bureaucrats who could never hack it in the software world? Who does that drive away that would be useful? Tech lobbyists?

Read his words.

"I can’t support anyone who is this much of an asshole."

And so I ask again: He's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary people and made fun of george W bush?

see, I added the W. now answer.

Now answer? Are you fucking kidding me? You think I’m going to follow your orders? Are you really stupid or do you just have poor social skills?

What is a good alternative to migrate from Ubuntu to?

Wait till you hear how much of an asshole RMS and Linus (to degree) are. What's next on your trip, go full time on Microsoft?

There's multiple different ways people can be assholes, some are fine and others not.

Why are you this obsessed with defending this particular dude??

Where precisely was I 'defending' anyone, nonetheless 'obsessing' over it? hm? care to provide some citations? This isn't reddit.

I wrote one line of facetious comment. Definition of "obsessed" and "defending" are clear cut. Words have meaning.

For a man who asks so much of someone, as is typical of this kind of person, he himself is unremarkable. Founding Thawte isn't a particularly impressive technical feat. Then he became a VC which is even less impressive.

There is no respected engineering leader who would look at this moron as inspiration for anything other than jumping out of a building. I can't believe someone who has no actual technical chops, no listed formal education, etc can be such a chode. Especially one infamous for the Ubuntu Unity scandal.

He's like a less important Elon Musk. Musk is a moron, but this guy takes the entire cake.

The irony of almost anyone on Earth, let alone some no-name person on HN, calling Musk a moron, is rich.

Yes, nobody at the White House has ever accomplished something notable. Not a single inhabitant of that building has any form of fame or notoriety. It's really a niche, little-known building on the outskirts of a relatively quiet city.

A few years back, I actually made it all the way through to Mark, who interviewed me while having dinner (on his end).

My essay focused on Ubuntu on ARM and how critical it would be for hyperscalers, which at the time wasn't really a thing at all (that should date me).

I ended up declining their offer mostly because nowhere during any step of the process but the very end they pointed out they could only contract, not take me on as a full-time employee.

I don't regret giving it a go, but it was one of the weirdest hiring processes I've ever gone through (including FAANG, MBB and think tanks).

Pardon my ignorance, but what’s MBB?

Apparently it's the big three of management consulting.

I suppose it should not surprise me as much as it does that there are people out there who are in the union set of people who have interviewed at FAANG (i.e. all of them or enough not to refer to them individually) and also interviewed at MBB (ditto). No Jane Street, though? No PEGS? No GSIBs?

For those of us who started in the last 10 years, Jane Street falls within that union set as well. MBBs, FAANG, and top HFTs tend to recruit at the same handful of top public and private schools.

The GSIBs (by which I assume you mean large banks) pay shit outside of their IB practices. That said, if you were good enough to get a FAANG APM interview and an MBB Analyst interview at a program like Cal or Mich or Harvard you'd probably get an IB Associate interview at UBS or JPMC as well.

> union ... and

Unions are (by and large) 'inclusive or's, for an 'and' you're thinking of intersections.

You are correct!

People might prefer not to single out the company even if they only interviewed at one.

Just a guess, though.

More than one in each set. But no, singling out isn’t a thing I do, unless there are memorable bits in the process—-and you always learn something by it.

Borrowing a quote from a recent movie, I have a very particular set of skills :)

McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Bain& Company.

> interviewed me while having dinner (on his end)

Wtf? Couldn’t he have done that at a more convenient time?

Doesn't seem that odd? I imagine he has a pretty busy schedule.

This would be a deal breaker for me. 0 respect.

Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone at a company took someone out to a meal? The latter seems perfectly normal and I've been in that situation a number of times. Obviously you ought to have the opportunity to eat but having especially a more casual conversation over a meal just doesn't seem odd to me.

Shuttleworth is a very hands-on manager, which is both a blessing, if you like his style, or a curse, if you don't.

That sounds like a euphemism for "micromanager".

Not really. A micromanager is more consistent in their interventions. With him it was much more distributed and somewhat random.

> Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone at a company took someone out to a meal?

It sounds more like situation where he was eating on zoom with mic on, while the second person just talked.

In that case, it's entirely possible I misunderstood the situation.

It doesn't sound like they had a shared meal, but that he ate his dinner during a pre-allocated meeting time via zoom/google meet/etc.

In my dream world we would normalize things like eating on a zoom call. People gotta eat, it’s no big deal. Maybe if they’re audibly slurping soup that’s a problem in terms of noise, but that would also be a problem during a boardroom meeting.

(I once got in a lot of trouble for having a bowl of cereal while I was a silent participant in a call with a client at a fintech company, so I understand that attitudes like yours are common.)

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.

It’s okay, we’re all grownups here. You can say shit without censoring yourself.

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).

Meals are an excellent venue for conversation. People are fully capable of eating, listening and responding. Being remote doesn't change that.

Conversations on the can are less universally accepted. But do you ever see people go off-camera for a minute or ten? Some fraction of them must be listening from the loo.

It's one thing, on a team meeting, to somewhat embarrasingly say "I'm going to go off-video because I haven't had breakfast yet" and it's quite another thing to be eating when on a call with a client.

Yes, in retrospect I obviously should have waited as a matter of norms (that I didn’t know). I’m saying that I would like for that norm to be relaxed.

I don't disagree, but on the other hand: Lloyd's used to be a London pub where merchants would hang out all day, carrying out their business as they ate. Business deals at the highest level are still routinely done over breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

I think the problem, as usual, is the power imbalance: they are eating and you are not, in addition to the fact that they have the money and you don't - so it becomes a bit too humiliating.

I gather the situation here was that he was multi-tasking over Zoom. But, yes, in-person meetings/conversations over a meal are not necessarily ideal but they're very commonplace in a business context and range from the very casual to more formal. (If you're at an event for business partners/customers/media/etc. they're pretty much inevitable.)

Apart from it being over Zoom, the main differentiator is that only one party eats. That’s a clear show of power. What you are talking about is that that both meet over food, which is very different.

I recently turned down a job where the CEO of a startup came into an interview unexpectedly, and started texting or checking his emails or something halfway through. It wasn’t the only thing that put me off but it certainly was a big part.

I've learned over many years that someone who eats during an interview or meeting (while you're not the one eating), doesn't give a shit about you and perhaps has already made up their mind.

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.

If I remember correctly, the candidate was interested in a product management role for our cloud offerings, which is something that I care a great deal about. Hi, Rui ;) And yes, I'm on calls through lunch and dinner, so I sometimes get to have lunch or dinner with candidates.

Hi Mark! Yep. I didn’t think our chat was weird, mind. Just anecdotal, in the sense of something that stuck with me.

Why would you do that? This sounds literally insane.

This explains a lot about Canonical. They are delusional if they think bright people will go through that much to work a job which doesn't even pay that much. I have interviewed some really bright people and usually if you don't respond to them within 2 weeks, they have already found a job somewhere else.

(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 similar cost place, so I rejected the offer, obviously.

In the final call, the HR person implied more than once that I was a time-waster for going through the whole process just to get the offer and then say "no" to it, that I wasn't "committed" as I said...

Did you not try to negotiate up?

Sure, they bumped it a bit to try convincing me, but still less. I guess they wanted me some proof I wasn't moving _because_ of the money, or some other BS companies try to tell themselves...

If I didn't want to work for money there are plenty of charitable causes I believe in that need help, why would I work for you?

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.

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'm in Colorado, so they're legally obligated to provide a salary range) about a job that required a very specialized skillset at a senior level that I happen to have (although it's nothing to do with what I do /now/), and the top of the salary range was $20k/yr less than what I was making doing that same work in 2014, almost a decade ago and more than $100k/yr less than I make now. There's a HUGE disconnect between management at most companies, especially in HR roles, and the actual market for specialized technical labor. At least in the US, I attribute this to HR roles treating Department of Labor stats like the gospel, when job categories in DoL aren't modernized and therefore cover such a broad range of subjobs that they are diluted and meaningless, while at the same time average salary is heavily skewed by the fact that largest employer in the US across almost all job categories is the federal government, which has a notoriously low payscale for skilled labor (which attracts exactly the sort of toads on a log you'd expect).

I am not currently in the market for a new job, but I switched roles at the beginning of 2022 and I made it a point of starting my conversations with recruiters by telling them rather directly "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?" The company I eventually accepted a position at had to go through a lot of internal bureaucracy to make my offer, but only put me through one round of interviewing before they did the legwork to make sure they could make it worth my while before running me through their entire process. I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).

> 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).

> I think it's especially rich that HR people think you're wasting /their/ time when they make you an insultingly low offer after extensive interviewing, especially considering there's a massive skills gap between tech workers and HR folks (who are a dime a dozen).

I agree with everything up until this portion. I think HR can be a very difficult job, in a way that's quite similar to say security positions. If an HR person excels at their job-- you will never see them, you will never interact with them outside of paperwork, and you will never need to ask them anything. So it can be very easy to assume HR is doing nothing. In reality good HR manages multiple complex, competing organizational systems (office politics, board concerns, retention, legal, recruiting) and is expected to manage them in such a way that none of the competing organizational systems are even aware of the friction, while having none of the power to actually change anything by themselves.

My comment wasn't saying that HR wasn't important or that their job was easy, it's saying that it doesn't require skills which are hard to acquire in the labor market. If we use credentials as a corollary for skills (which, ironically, is understating my case), then there are a vastly higher number of available persons in the labor market with the necessary credentials/skills to be in an HR role than to be in a technical knowledge worker role like software development, operations, or even product management.

The pay differential between these roles is mainly a factor of supply and demand, not necessarily due to the relative difficulty of actually doing the jobs. Most jobs which are "social" rather than "technical" are actually harder in some way, but they have as massively lower barrier of entry from a credentials/skills perspective so tend to be significantly lower paid than "technical" jobs.

Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office, yet ditch diggers who aren't credentialed machine operators get paid significantly less than software developers because the only qualification barrier to be a ditch digger is to not be physically disabled or unalive, if you can fog a mirror and walk from the truck to the hole to be dug and operate a hand shovel, you can dig a ditch.

Supply/demand doesn't care how difficult your job is, it only cares how many people are capable of doing it compared to the number of people needed to perform it. In a very dollars and cents sort of way, the time of a technically skilled person is more valuable than the time of an HR person, which is why it's very rich that they think you're wasting /their/ time, rather than the other way around in these situations. The candidate's time is actually more valuable in demand dollars than the HR person's time, especially recruiters which are one of the lowest barrier roles you can have in HR.

> Digging ditches is a lot harder than writing code all day in an air-conditioned office

Not it isn't. I haven't dug ditches, but I've done other physical labor. At the end of the day your body is exhausted, but your mind is still sharp and ready for more. By contrast when programming all day your mind is exhausted, but your body is ready for more. Different types of hard, but both are very hard in their own way.

Actually most ditch digging these days is done with a machine. I don't know how hard that is, but I assume it moves more to the repetitive mental work side.

I have dug ditches, I've also written software. Digging ditches is harder. I also explicitly was referring to doing it manually, not with a machine. There's some philosophical conversation to be had here with the satisfaction of work with tangible outcomes vs intangible outcomes, but that wasn't the point of my comment, it was about supply/demand. You can get unskilled day laborers to dig ditches, you cannot get unskilled day laborers to write software.

I see your point, but it's worth being clear about the meaning of "hard" here.

There's hard as in effortful, which certainly you could make the argument that many jobs eclipse software or other technical positions.

And there's hard as in difficult, or technical, or complicated, etc. This is more difficult to describe since what's complex or impossible to one person is trivial for another.

The second bucket is how most technical jobs play out. It's easy to write off the "get skilled" requirement of these jobs, but that's usually a difficult endeavour itself, usually involving a few years of higher education (in the normal case)

> I don't fully understand the reasons

It has nothing to do with difficulty. There is simply more demand for software engineers than hardware engineers and supply & demand takes care of the rest.

> 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.

I switched from being a Windows admin to a Solaris admin in the 90s and got a pay bump of something like 60%

In many ways, I found Solaris to be easier. Windows was wildly unstable in the 90s.

> 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.

This is heavily reflected in hardware security. Very few devices are not tire fires, even before IoT took off. My best guess as to why is that many hardware engineers are next to the hardware in Shenzhen and their wages act as an anchor for the rest of the industry. Either that or I've listened to too many bunnie talks and played too much Shenzhen I/O.

> 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.

My theory is it comes down to the margins on software vs hardware products. If you look at software, in a certain sense, your unit margins are infinite - your variable costs are nothing(well, besides the literal bandwidth) to copy a piece of code and sell it to a second customer. With hardware, for every unit of your product, you have raw material cost, mfg, transport, etc. At scale, there's less $ to go around.

Hasn't been my experience. I switched from software (C++ compiler & profiler development) to silicon verification and got a decent pay rise (in the UK).

I love your HR comment. It's HR's literal job to interview / hire people. It's not the job of the candidate to interview for a position. Deluded, self-important lunatics.

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.)

Did you agree to 8 rounds of interview, without knowing if there is a match between your salary expectation and their salary range?

That’s a common mistake, I agree.

In my case, they knew my current salary and expected salary from the first call.

They didn’t commit to anything beforehand, and maybe that’s my mistake. OTOH it is quite a bet to spend a lot of someones (mine, in this case) betting they’re going to accept a smaller salary just for the privilege of working for you.

Should have told them you were committed but they were obviously not serious about hiring you with that offer.

I won't even interview without a salary range being provided and then acknowledging my minimum. Otherwise it's a waste of everyones time. Any company that has an issue with this is going to be difficult to work for and treat you like you are lucky to be there.

The hiring game is really varied across their teams fwiw. I get the impression the technical lead of some group has total discretion over how to arrive at the yes/no call.

This was my experience with canonical. I made it through the interview process to the offer stage and the offer was far from competitive for my country (the Netherlands).

Was bit bummed about this, I would love to work for canonical as they do great stuff and their embedded Linux offering is a great product. Just doesn't really make sense sadly.

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.

I can't imagine how it would be otherwise! The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia.

> The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia.

Tenure-track hiring is nothing like that. Is it rigorous? Yes. Do they take dumb formalized tests? No. Rather, they typically present their research to the faculty.

Well, I didn't call it an informed parody - my one brief brush with academia having sent me fleeing back to industry, very much for keeps. Granted it's not always a bed of roses, but it is much more rewarding, not to mention much less often so petty and so vile.

understandable, as each interviewing systems effectively selects people good at passing that system.

if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests.

if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology.

if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management and upper management are somewhat disconnected from the actual work that has to be performed.

Randomness in interviews is underrated because it offsets these over-selection effects.

I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.

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.

I honestly don't think it's that bad. But if one or two (for a sanity check) qualified people look at resumes and have a 30 minute conversation/technical weeding out question with a candidate, you're probably getting into diminishing returns past that. (Though you probably also lean heavily on referrals and "pedigree" given that you're not really trying to get some non-obvious signal in the interview process.)

Sure I agree. I was abit hyberbolic, but not much, if you account for all the bad processes.

As an American in California, watching the extreme lengths people went to, to find specialists fitting some very exacting requirements and literally bringing people from around the world and then rejecting them in large numbers, I was told that in China in the dot-com boom time they formed companies with very skilled people but basically formed the teams with whoever showed up. It was a completely different method, and the difference is the virtue signalling and status cues for the founders and their inner circle. In Silicon Valley, it was anti-status to NOT search the world for particular resume contents, and that got weird sometimes. Secondly the "google style" interrogation of new candidates with "you just got out of computer science graduate school so you learn to present like this" whiteboard sessions, evolved in the hands of callous or worse managers, into a sort of repeated hazing of programmers, by non-programmers or the like.

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 many cases that's not the issue.

https://sowelo.eu/unsuccessful-recruitment/

>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.

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.

I think the interview process is tricky for people that like to dig into technical details as a lot of companies just want to hear adulation from the candidate towards the company, under the guise of excitement for the company mission. or whatever.

HR might be somewhat interested in that. Most managers won't give a rat's ass.

OK, here's a possibly better picture from having hired many engineers over the years.

I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.

"Going on an on about things" one finds interesting is not the same as marketing oneself.

I don't know if this is what you're referring to by the phrase 'going on and on' but the phrase makes me think of my coworker who talks in circles about any topic, providing many words but little info. And the circles usually incorporate personal anecdotes. He hasn't realized people tune out immediately.

If that was true I'd be CEO at this point. I can ramble for hours about my cat, my hobbies, and my side projects.

(I don't think it's true)

Does that also imply that you are not particularly good at your work but just an expert at gaming the system? Or are you somehow special and everyone else is an idiot?

I worked at a company that sounds similarly to this company culture about 3 years ago. I got laid off, moved onto a better company. But just yesterday I ran into someone who works at my old company. We chatted for a little bit until I realized how drained I was getting just from talking to him

And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread:

Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc)

They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about

I have people on both sides of these spectrums.

On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on

On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them

Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences

Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity. But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards.

It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way

Insane. 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 counterproductive, because talented people are not going to put up with it.

On paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience.

I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such.

Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not.

But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time.

Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.

Last time this came up here, Shuttleworth popped up to tell us it was just what they needed so there you go. No need to apply. :shrug:

Yeah...I applied when I was job hunting at the beginning of the year and I hard stopped on the high school question. I've got over 30 years of relevant experience and if that's what they're asking, I'm obviously not the sort of person they're looking for.

Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.

I just trod water through my high school (read secondary school in the UK) years. Like you I am not the boy I used to be so hiring 'him' would not be a good fit.

Same exact thing happened to me. I'm not writing an essay about my high school life, that's ridiculous.

I don't do asymmetrical interviews. I'll consider a take in coding test in lieu of something else (or a very trivial one), but a written essay means I'm spending time and they are not. A phone or face to face interview requires an actual investment in their time, and doesn't treat my time as completely disposable.

If your job involves communication in some form, it's reasonable to want to see an example--though I'd generally be pretty open to seeing previously written or recorded examples rather than something created specifically for the interview process.

> The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time.

> Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.

i wonder what is preventing you from just lying. like, how are they going to confirm or deny what you're saying ?

Frankly it seems like a way to have something they can use to reject you with something that's hard to debate against.

> i wonder what is preventing you from just lying...

Integrity? Also the self-interest of not wanting to work with liars and yes-men.

Basically the same reason I don't lie during the rest of an interview process.

That seems like a really terrible way to start off with a new company. But then I feel like that way about most of the scuzzy things some percentage of people have no qualms about doing if they can get off with them (e.g. working two full-time jobs at the same time).

I had the same thought. People have rightly pointed out the age bias, but there's also an implicit bias toward embellishment. People who are comfortable doing that can post lots of positive and mostly unverifiable things there.

Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe overly positive unverifiable statements are actually negatives for them.

I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages.

As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with my business partner to try to raise money to build accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No investor would bite.

But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since high school.

Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed, as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my interview is now up as well)

That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process, signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company. The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do not believe this to be the case.

So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a materiel leadership change at the top.

> The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are

They know, and it's been discussed often.

They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans would rock the boat and demand too much money, and dip when it's clear the middle mgmt are clowns.

Ugh ... that's depressing.

You bootstrapped a company without external investment?

You're the one I want to get advice from on hackernews...

> I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages.

Same! 30 years of experience. Technical and management. I applied to two roles and both auto rejected. I had contact with a human once to ask if I had a change at all since I don’t have a university degree and was told to not bother.

Their loss.

Asking about high school is ridiculous, but how is it age-ist? They had high schools back in the old days, too.

Because it strongly implies that they are looking for people for whom high school experience was recent enough to be relevant to who they are now. For a 20-something this is (debatably) plausible. For a fifty or sixty year old it is at best a tenuous indicator.

The very few jobs I've had in the decades since the first one post-grad school have been through some level of personal connection so I've never really gone through a standard interview process. The one person I know fairly well who worked for Canonical was there for about 6 months so there was obviously some disconnect.

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.

I think that's true for more junior engineering roles, but I don't think that's as true for hiring senior engineers.

Why would you pay a senior engineer salary for someone who is just barely competent enough to bang out CRUD apps, when you could spend a little more time searching and find someone who's a force multiplier and can lead projects?

How do you know that senior engineer has ten years of experience? The other option is 6 months experience repeated 20 times.

I applied at Canonical at one point and withdrew my application after it became a kafkaesque experience. They wanted me to do a “psychometric” evaluation at which point I had seen enough of their.. culture ?

Funnily the engineer who was responsible for the application also sent a very bureaucratic sounding email acknowledging my withdrawal.

I can’t imagine their process for interviews doesn’t reflect what working there would be like - if it doesn’t then they really need to fix their pipeline

Second this experience absolutely! A couple of years ago I had a similar experience. I was so annoyed having burnt a ton of time going through a number of rounds, submitted an essay, and then giving an extensive presentation only to get a cold, bland, automated rejection email. Terrible interview experience and enough for me to put peers off applying to the company if they asked me. Ironically they are still advertising to fill that same job two years later.

This is not the worst process I’ve seen, but likely the funniest stats bleeder scam I've seen in years.

“How would you change the company?”

Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side.

Also, Canonical is still not Evil enough for the tech industry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGLveebwjo

Can you elaborate on what a "stats bleeder scam" is?

The antithesis of moral intellectualism, and an amalgamation of several cognitive biases.

Perhaps you wanted a more pleasing answer... but Deconstructionism is rarely productive.

Best regards =)

I interviewed at Canonical, doing all of the written stuff, and got an offer. But in the end I turned them down because their compensation wasn't competitive.

Same here. And they’re a BYOD shop too, which I found strange.

BYOD ?

Bring Your Own Device i.e. laptop / dev machine

They’re saving money on not buying equipment for their employees.

I'm surprised Amazon didn't come up with that idea a long time ago.

I can only imagine that the amount of money you have to spend on IT for a myriad of different devices + the security implications + the hurdle to get non-technical people to manage their own devices is just not worth it. Let's say amazon has 100k white-collar workers. If they all the 1k USD devices on avg that's 100mio dollars. That's < 0.1% of their !quarterly! revenue.

They don't provide a laptop, AND your work computer must run Ubuntu.

Is it also a fully-remote company or do they have offices? My experience with Canonical has been pretty good from a customer perspective but I did have one sales guy call me with the most ridiculous levels of background noise.

And you’ll probably need a NUC out of pocket.

It is unusual although I use my own devices (running whatever I want to) even though I could get a standard-issue laptop.

They should give people devices just for wasting enough of their time with a lengthy interview process.

Like, sorry you didn't make it past the final stage, but here's a nice Framework laptop with Ubuntu.

Considering the underpowered equipment that often gets issued as standard hardware by IT departments, I wouldn't be that unhappy about BYOD.

Whatever other faults the Canonical process has, BYOD sort of makes sense to me from a dogfooding perspective with a company carrying a major desktop Linux offering.

Would look for a budget or have it reflected in their offer analysis though.

They do pay for a laptop upgrade every three (iirc) years however.

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 Canonical has.

What I learned is that large tech companies invented modern technical recruiting as a way of choosing between good engineers. Many other companies that don't have this problem then started a recruiting cargo cult of similar practices thinking this is how you found the best people. I don't think a lot of companies have thought critically about their recruiting experience.

1: http://braythwayt.com/posterous/2014/10/04/i-dont-hire-unluc...

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.

I got a similar mail when I applied to Canonical.

My mail contained 43 separate questions.

43. I am not joking, I just went and counted them. Each of which probably wanted a sentence to paragraph answer. Some could be more.

As Blaise Pascal said: If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Write a shorter letter Canonical. You told me so much about you in one step. You can't write a short letter, or you don't care.

Their focus on high-school looks like a thinly-veiled strategy for weeding out anyone who is old enough that they no longer remember the details of their high school education.

Ooh yes how clever

Where I'm from the only companies that give a shit about HS grades are the elite finance and consulting firms - pretty unheard of otherwise.

Why they care? I've heard a couple of explanations:

- Like with the standardized test (cough IQ test cough) obsession, they kind of subscribe to the racehorse theory, namely that some individuals are just born smart and have excelled all their lives. They don't just want hard working individuals, they want hard working and smart individuals.

- It shows a constant progression. They want people that have excelled all their lives, and not those with random spurs of excellence

And of course, just another weeding function.

I don't know whether it's a deliberate strategy but this definitely happened to me during my interview with Canonical this year.

From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.

I ran into somebody recruiting for Canonical who mentioned, regretfully, that it would matter.

It's sad because they were otherwise very convincing. It was too big of a red flag though.

In my experience it's university access that's very heavily shaped by privilege, not high school.

High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".

We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?

To be clear, while I believe focusing on high school has a negative impact on diversity, I don't think this is intentional on Canonical's part.

Also I should say the overall recruitment process works, I was not the right candidate for the job, and the job wasn't right for me. But I think there were much stronger signals pointing to that during the process than what I did during high school.

I 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 for my long term mental health, given how unprepared they were for that position, but it was a clear sign of an organization without a super clear direction.

Combining that whole thing with the recent decisions around Snaps vs Flatpak, their interaction with LXD, and their general user hostility, I'm glad that I am not tied to their products in a meaningful way, and I've gone back to Fedora for my home systems. Really sad that they can't capitalize on the IBM murder of open source stable distros, but I've really never had major complaints with Fedora and I can always go back to OpenSUSE if I need to, given their recent renaissance.

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_.

While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side.

Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.

At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.

I am not against behavioral interview if it’s part of the loop, but these attempts to force candid to answer some standardized questions make no sense. Especially you can easily come up with many of the answers using GPT now a days anyways. I for one don’t even have access to these when I interview candidates and I am pretty sure HR doesn’t even look at them or even have a quantitative way to judge them or verify their authenticity.

In this case, the company seemed to be very hung up on irrelevant bullsh*t. Huge red flag.

If I did that, I wouldn't land the job with ~2 the compensation of what I'd have otherwise and the best job overall.

It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.

Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible.

This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.

Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field, you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-level analyst position. We're a hospital.

Yeah. It goes both ways. Interview processes may often be terrible. But it's also the case that, in a world where you don't even need to put a stamp on an envelope, a lot of people looking for a job/any job (or hoping to get a story written about their client, etc.) will just blast out email/applications to any valid or even invalid endpoint.

ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.

> Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers)

I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)

... Now I'm trying to imagine a train made out of Al2O3:Cr .

When I applied for a government job many years ago, I had to take a number of standardized tests of various kinds.

Direct link to Mark Shuttleworth's response in that thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...

[actually submitted in the usual manner, but marked as a dupe]

> I did enjoy your post. It has just the right amount of snark, but plenty of substance too, so well played, it's a good read.

> And yes, we make mistakes occasionally, none of us are perfect.

> To be successful and get an offer, you will need to be both outstanding, and a little bit lucky. That's life.

haha. it comes across kind of salty to me.

never going to use ubuntu again.

I 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 majority were under qualified spam applicants, who assumed that eventually someone will give them the time of day.

>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.”

Just seem like Canonical in a nut shell. Burning energy on nonsense going nowhere.

Actually, nonsense interview is another red flag to watch out for when applying a job.

Some companies uses long and pointless interviews to discover and collect legally sound reasons to reject candidates without revealing the true reason of rejections (could be based on race, gender, age, disability, religion etc).

But, you probably don't want to work for a bad company anyway, so I guess just be happy for the fact that now you don't have to.

I'd argue this is essentially evidence that their hiring process worked in this case. I mean, a company that so vehemently believes that your HS story is so fundamental to how you'll perform as an employee manage to successfully put in enough of that in the hiring pipeline to prevent you (sane person) from going through with it and therefore not wasting either of your times!

This process isn't accidentally awful; it's deliberately targeted to exclude anyone who isn't a young true believer.

I got a whiff from the gaming industry off of it, so I second that sentiment.

Gaming engineering interviews are generally much better than general tech? Shorter, more applicable to day-to-day work, etc.

My main problem is the uncompetitive pay

Matches my experience, for the first step I was given a lengthy questionare and told it would be about 12 pages of answers. Nope'd out immediately.

It's a shame because the product and my Hiring Manager seemed great, I'm curious what candidates make it through.

> I'm curious what candidates make it through.

compliant ones I would expect, which seems to be the aim of the process.

I wonder if it's a reaction to some horror story they experienced.

When they first started, they didn't have all that stuff. In fact, I remember them running around and hiring basically anyone with any role in the Linux/Debian space. For a period, I had quite a few conversations at LUGs where I was told "Oh, that guy you met last week? He's the <insert Debian package here>, Canonical just hired him...".

I wonder if that original hiring spree (which was fishing heavily from academia, and seemed very informal) burned them so badly that they sat down and devised a process that is the exact opposite.

An interview process like that should make you wonder what the ongoing employee appraisal process is like.

From outside it looks very much like HR is out of control.

In case it helps anyone, here's a recent blog article written by Daniele Procida (a director of engineering at Canonical, responsible for documentation) that helps explain the motivation for our written interview: https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews - "Not just an annoying list of questions"

Disclaimer: I work for Canonical and help with recruiting.

I'd love it if our hiring process was shorter or tighter, but the written interview part (the part people seem to protest the most) I actually think is helpful. We're a fully remote company, and written communication is very important, so I think it's important that we evaluate how well someone can relate their experience and get technical ideas across. I personally review several written submissions per day, I read them in full, write notes of my thoughts, and evaluate them carefully. So your effort isn't wasted!

From your page:

> Imagine if – as a job applicant – you could put yourself right in front of the hiring lead, and tell them, in your own words, in your own time, without interruption or distraction or pressure, why you think you’d be an excellent person for the role. What kind of applicant would benefit the most?

A liar

I applied for a job there, got to the personality test thing, said to myself "this is really stupid" and stopped replying to their emails. Just not worth it

Same. Would’ve loved to work for a Linux company but the level of bureaucratic absurdity was way too high

What a winnowing process! The only people that make it through really aren't the people you'd want to make it through. No one with a lick of other opportunities would take a job there. If hiring is a market-like process, then these guys have priced themselves right out of it.

I’m just annoyed at how much they spam LinkedIn by posting the same remote job listing in 500 different cities.

Job searches take your location into account and sometimes won’t show remote-only positions if you do something like scoping your search to your area. Posting remote listings in specific locations allows those to show up in search results more frequently. And it works - it’s kind of gaming job search boards but it did result in Canonical getting an absolute deluge of applications for each position.

Canonical also re posts every month or so to also benefit from higher placement for more recent listings.

I understand that, but if I’m looking for a remote job in particular, I’ll just search for the country I’m working in. If I look for remote firmware/kernel/driver jobs in Canada, I’ll see the same Canonical posting in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, Halifax, Calgary… I end up just filtering them out.

Did 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?

You are supposed to bring your device. If you don’t have one you can get a loan to buy one and pay it off by paycheque deductions.

Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years.

Source: former Canonical employee.

Speechless tbh ...

Do they at least pay really really well so the laptop is just a tiny percentage of your annual compensation?

The cost of a well-specced business laptop would be between 1% and 5% total pre-tax yearly compensation for engineers (variable depending on skills, location, seniority and the fact that I need to fudge the data a bit to avoid disclosing actual salaries which I obviously cannot do ;) ).

It doesn’t feel tiny-tiny to me.

It is a bit weird although honestly not really a big deal. I have a work laptop but I use my own computers 99% of the time.

I don't think it's weird.

At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the work-controlled laptop.

I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense. Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to work.

I do understand why each job had their way of doing things though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the laptop any more.

Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.

That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20 years all work I've done has been using my own devices except for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-supplied laptop to be unusual.

Isn't that a problem with the company policies? Any company with heavily locked down laptops probably won't be happy to let you BYOD. I have a work supplied laptop but I run my own OS on it.

The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.

It's weird but I think there could be a significant benefit for a company that makes an operating system that users are installing themselves. This policy means their staff will use a diverse set of hardware, some brand new, some old, some home-built. That leads to natural dogfooding and might result in a better product.

* autocorrect manualfixes

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 the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).

One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.

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.

Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy whatever laptop you want with.

Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).

Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...

They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.

I hear they make people share hotel rooms with other employees. Is that true?

I looked at applying recently and with the overwhelmingly negative Glassdoor reviews and convoluted interview process… I decided not to even bother applying.

I just got a referral from someone I used to know for a company, and my technical interview was mostly chatting through what I’d built in the past. Then they asked me to go over in about 5 minutes how I’d build a link shortener. That was it. Why would I bother going through multiple rounds of interviews including quizzing my life story?

I hate these things. This is at least from an outsider perspective, but when what I really want to know is WHY they do each step and what makes them work better.

Most companies have no reason to believe their process is better than taking a random resume (which selects for people who want to work for you enough to send a resume) and making an offer. Sure they have elaborate processes around interviews, tests, and the like. However are they helpful or just processes for the sake of process.

I know there is research on how to interview people. However I don't know where to find it, and most processes seem to have been created without looking at it.

Is not an hiring process, is squid game

> How do you remain calm in a high-stress, fast-paced environment?

Canonical, isn't the Ubuntu company? I don't know much about it, but I can't imagine it's high-stress and fast-paced.

I picture them running in circles

https://ubuntu.com/blog/written-interviews

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.

> Day 81: Automated rejection

says it all really. just about done with this silly industry.

To have the honor and privilege of using Launchpad to Change the World.

Unless something has changed, but when I worked there, the big customer problems they were trying to solve were being solved by talented people in a NIH culture with all the friction that introduces. MAAS, Juju; good ideas hindered by the execution pipe, but that’s just my opinion.

I once applied to Canonical... and forgot. Then half a year after I started another job, I received an email from them about how I'm a bad match.

Then half a year later they've sent me an email asking how my experience with their hiring process was. I'm still holding off the reply.

This is basically my experience too. For me it was demeaning, exhausting and a complete waste of time.

If your recruitment process takes long, you're a bad company and you should feel bad. If someone's between jobs, and they are a good fit for what you need, hire them instead of going "we'll get back to you in half a year".

Isn't this also very costly for them? I wouldn't even imagine what would be the process for a technical role, maybe half a year? I haven't read all the post but it seems that this was taken well beyond insanity.

Making harder interviewing processes is frequently an attempt to select exactly the kind of people you want. In the end, you only get those who are desperate enough to do the thing. I like to keep things short and punchy.

They didn't even reply to my application over a waiting period of several months, for a position I was too good a fit for not to at least do a screening. Still slightly miffed.

Don't forget to read Mark Shuttleworth's answers in the comments. That's the first time he's used his reddit account in 7 years.

Now that I’m on the other side I’ll say this: hiring is hard, you get super busy so it’s even harder. This kind of story is definitely a lose-lose situation and candidates should obviously not go through with difficult companies. Companies should be naturally incentivized by the market to improve their hiring process to both remove friction and measure for the right metrics.

To be honest, that interview process is not unusual in either it's length or details. In the UK (where this appears to be), recruitment for most public sector, academic, and even entry-level graduate corporate jobs, takes at least as long as described, and often longer.

This was me this week:

Thank you for applying for a position as a Cloud Field Engineer - Americas (Remote) at Canonical!

I am the hiring lead for it and will steer you through the process. I have reviewed your resume and moved you forward.

The hiring process has several stages:

initial resume screening (done) written submission (this stage) standardised aptitude and personality tests Face-to-face Meet & Greet interview Online 15min Linux/Networking quiz Online 2hr Python Coding test Live 1hr Linux Troubleshooting interview Talent Interview (HR team) Hiring Manager interview, Hiring Lead interview If we think you are a fantastic fit for Canonical then we will find you the best role for you at the company. We are committed to run a smooth and fast hiring process, ideally reaching an offer in 2 weeks time.

The current stage is your written submission.

Consider this to be a written interview, and a prepared statement for interviewers to read in advance of your meeting to cover your interests, priorities, experience and ambition. Please answer the following in a PDF document:

Education

How would you describe your high school interests in mathematics, physical sciences and computing? In these subjects, which were your strengths and what were your most enjoyable activities? How did you rank, competitively, in these subjects? What did you do after high school? Why did you choose that? Which course and university did you choose, and why? Which university courses did you enjoy the most, and which ones did you perform best at? How did you rank in your degree? Outside of degree requirements, what were your interests and where did you spend most of your time? During your time at high school and university, what did you achieve that you consider to be exceptional? Experience

What kinds of software projects have you worked on before? Which development environments, languages, databases? How extensive is your experience of Python software engineering? How do you test Python applications? Outline the applications that you have led in Python, and your takeaways from that experience. How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of Linux is, from the kernel up? How have you gained this knowledge? How comprehensive would you say your knowledge of networking is? How have you gained this knowledge? Describe your experience with private and/or public cloud technologies (Openstack, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.). What is the next technology you want to learn about, and why ? How do you plan on learning it ? Do you have experience with customer-facing roles ? Outline your software documentation experience. Context

Outline your thoughts on the mission of Canonical. What is it about the company's purpose and goals which is most appealing to you? What is it that you think is risky or unappealing? Who do you see as competitors to Canonical, and in what ways do you think Canonical needs to change in order to be a more effective competitor to them? What do you see as the current dynamics in the cloud software industry that are favourable to Canonical? Which are unfavourable? Why do you most want to work for Canonical? Which sorts of Canonical products and services would you most like to work on? Please take the opportunity to re-read your submission and make sure you have put your best case of exceptional ability forward.

Please make your submission as a PDF at the URL given below. I have set the system to hide your name and details from me, please do not put identifying details in the submission itself.

Thank you! I look forward to reading your answers, and perhaps meeting later in the process.

Camille

My reply: I got a rejection letter from greenhouse within about an hour.

This is ridiculous. Why do I care who your competitors are? Hint: it’s not my job to care. What dynamics in the cloud computing industry are favorable to Canonical and unfavorable? Don’t you pay your marketing department for these answers?

I was laid off, I am looking for a fulfilling career. I need a job and I bring to the table a skillset spanning my entire adult life. One that fits the criteria of what you posted about.

I want to pay my bills and enjoy what I do for work. A simple transaction. I bring to the table something to help push the company’s agenda forward that you need (and are posting about for a job). You, in turn, help me keep my family fed and my bills paid. My past is my past outside of the relevant work experience and credentials necessary to do the job you are posting about. The rest is simply put, none of your business. I’m sure my 11th grade chemistry teacher would agree.

I don’t need to write a college admission application essay on why I want to work here.

High school was 25 years ago and irrelevant. Do you actually think you’re going to pick me on whether or not I participated in the science bowl or what my score was in an AP Biology class?

I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, supporting Software as a service on linux-based servers for almost that long. I’ve worked at ISPs hosting e-mail and web servers, to supporting a geographically low-latent software application supporting Fortune 500 companies so they can figure out how many of their website visitors are actually buying things and in turn adding millions of dollars to their bottom line. I’ve moved data centers and been on teams where I was directly responsible for portions of the effort to migrate them to the cloud. All of this is demonstrable and verifiable.

If you are interested in the relevant experience and credentials I posses that qualifies me for the job, OK. But I won’t be answering any of the rest of below that is irrelevant to the application process.

That 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...

Bill Gates can sleep happy knowing Ubuntu will never be a challenge to windows

Interesting to see this. I'm going through this process ATM. Some of the written interview questions were different for me

Really appreciate posts like these. I think this post specificaly might have saved me from embarking on a colossal time-sink application process.

I can't help but wonder how many highly talented people Canonical lost out on through this ridiculously long and inconsiderate vetting process.

This is just a creative take on the utterly broken interview process from software companies, that we all are probably too familiar with.

Just wait until AI bots are the things doing the interview process to insure the company doesn't get sued for unfairness.

And AI bots doing the application process for you

yeah, they do get a ton of applications for their size too. a friend went through the process and they shared that they get 60k applications on average and they have around 2k people.

i guess its because people are passionate about the product

I knew a great guy who worked at Canonical, Adam Conrad. He died two years ago from cancer, way too young. I'm still upset about it. (Not implying this says anything negative about Canonical.) If he was representative of the kind of person who works at Canonical I'd say it's a place worth looking at.

I'd never get the job given how much of a loser I was in high school.

Hot damn this canonical dude is more full of shit than I ever possibly could have imagined lmao. I love Linux, I really do. I enjoy writing software for ig as a career choice. This has nothing to do with my love for Linux lol. But wow.

Jesus fucking Christ

> exactly how unbiased is it when every person I interviewed with was exactly my demographic? (White, female, American/western European)

Please could someone explain how is this, claiming that someone's race and ethnicity defines their bias, not in itself racist?

A generation has been successfully raised to believe that we are our most superficial traits, that we live as stereotypes and view the world that way.

I have a follow-up question: what kind of race is "western European"? Is skin tone not enough?

I don't have a gene test on hand to confirm, but I'm pretty sure my heritage is all over the place.

She said demographics -- the person who you are responding to said 'race'.

You don't know that. "White" can mean either, but it didn't matter because both interpretations are equally bad. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people

Replace race with skin color in the GP comment, the point still stands

You are bringing up race specifically and you are making the value judgements and then attributing it to the author. Everything you have been doing has been to prove a (bad) point in bad faith in order to fuel some culture war issue.

Now you are just lying and calling names. I'll try one more time before I give up.

The original author wrote the word "white", not me. There are many ways to segment a population - that's demographics. Having "white" as the segmentation criteria and claiming that it affects whether the demographic is biased for an interview sounds very racist to me.

Your opinion that this argument is in bad faith or in order to fuel something is not supported by any facts and is therefore irrelevant.

You broke the site guidelines in several places in this thread, but here you crossed the line very badly. We ban accounts that attack others like this, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN or use the site for ideological battle. We've had to ask you this before. Also, please don't break the site guidelines regardless of what another commenter has been doing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah. I was going to make the same point. It seems like this person has some kind of issue with peoples skin colour or something.

Hmmm, thinking back over it maybe she's internalised the US diversity thing and is judging everything through that lens?

A bias just means looking at things in a skewed way because of experience or mental conditioning.

The fact is that demographics have a lot to do with bias because people from the same demographics have similar life experiences. Having someone else with a different set of experiences can help to mitigate bias by giving their perspective in the group. It is a simplistic way to determine 'tendency towards bias' by focusing on demographics, but it is also a pretty good indicator that when you are in a group of all the same demographic then there is going to be some bias that will go unnoticed.

To answer your question -- the race part is incidental. A 30 year old college educated white male from an urban/suburban US upbringing is more than just 'white'. This is why it is not racist -- because race is one aspect of a demographic.

Hope this helps.

She didn't complain about the panel members being exclusively educated people (which does affect how you think). But she did complain that they are all white (which doesn't). So yeah, go ahead, dig in.

She mentioned demographics and one aspect of that was skin color. You are the one focused on race.

Please explain how skin color is relevant in the interview context and why it was specifically mentioned in the original post. Please explain how skin color is different from race for the purpose of this discussion.

The specific term was 'demographic', your quote did not include the word race.

EDIT: Upon re-reading... are you really asking me to explain why skin color is part of a demographic? I guess I glossed over that because it doesn't make sense unless youwant to imply that mentioning 'white' in the context of other demographic variables like age and location is racist...in which case, census forms are racist.

> are you really asking me to explain why skin color is part of a demographic

No, I didn't ask that.

That irked me too. Expecting the company to not be roughly 82% white British.. in the UK. Pretty racist

Can you please not take HN threads on generic tangents or into flamewar? The site guidelines contain several rules designed to prevent this kind of thing - for example:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

You started a flamewar with here and perpetuated it downthread. We're trying to avoid these things on HN as they are tedious, repetitive, and predictably turn nasty. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

You are correct if you read this as a claim about the people ("the people must be biased because they all have ethnicity x"). But it was probably meant as a claim about biased institutions/processes („processes/institutions which put only people in important positions which are all alike must be biased“) I think the the claim is not that ethnicity defined the bias but that some bias must be present to produce the homogeneity.

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