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Comment by akdor1154 | Hacker News Reader

> Canonical gives off some weird vibes and those in the know will understand what I'm talking about.

You're probably trying to write fairly and without throwing shade, but the result is this gives off vibes of FUD. Can you be a bit more specific about your issues with Canonical?

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You're right and I apologize for that and don't want to discourage anybody from doing business with or working with or for Canonical.

All I'll say is that the recruitment process alone, if it's still as bad as it used to be, is a major red flag and deal breaker w.r.t what it says about the overall culture.

Maybe things have changed and so people should really take my opinions about them with a grain of salt.

If you're referring to the recruitment asking questions about your high school performance and how you ranked locally and regionally in high school in various subjects, that's still a thing. Even for positions where that shouldn't matter.

There are no positions where it should matter. Even if there were a genuine reason to care about high school grades (there isn't), asking about relative ranking doesn't make any sense unless you have detailed knowledge of the specific school they went to. It's like asking a candidate to rank their programming ability compared to their current colleagues. What possible information could you derive from this?

Example application: https://canonical.com/careers/4676649/application

> How did you perform in mathematics at high school?

Predefined answers are "Top 0.01% in the region", "Top 5% at school", "Top 10% at school", etc.

> Please share your rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above. Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings, or recognition awards, or to competitive or selective college entrance results such as SAT or ACT scores, JAMB, matriculation results, IB results etc. We recognise every system is different but we will ask you to justify your selections above.

These are required questions. Even if I were literally in high school, I'm not sure how I would be able to answer these. "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US? If they do I've never heard of them.

> "Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings" - do these exist in the US?

They name a couple, SAT and ACT are still the main ones. Some states like New York have the Regents Exam which would be a statewide score. Demanding those scores is still just about the dumbest fucking thing I've seen a tech company do.

I'm willing to put up with a lot during an application process, but not Canonical's circus. If applying for a job at a company tells you anything about the company's culture then I don't think I would ever want to work there.

I find it insane that it's even a topic that people would know the answer to.

I cannot possibly tell you how my UK school ranked in the 90s, how I ranked in any subject at the school, and especially how I would have ranked regionally.

This seems like such an insane thing to even know, let alone ask.

I also had a poor experience with Canonical hiring process.

I applied for an EM role in May 2020, crickets for NINE months, then they invited me to begin the process in Feb 2021. Of course I had signed up elsewhere long before that.

Yep, hiring is hard, but how you treat applicants says everything about your culture.

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