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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I did try applying to them a year or so ago and got a lot of those questions too. The really weird thing to me (and what confuses me) is why exactly they want these questions? How exactly is someone supposed to share their "rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above" when the "grades" for maths/native language is decided by the institution/teacher doing the grading and not by the student? And, even better: why exactly does Canonical need this information at all? I'm pretty sure that it's well-understood that your grades in high school (let alone college) say absolutely nothing about you today. And there are many, many, many reasons why someone in HS or college might perform poorly but in actuality they're brilliant and very capable.

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I think regardless of the school and instructor's difficulty, there's a group of people who basically make perfect grades in STEM topics (or all topics) regardless of those variables. And for some people it's easy to know what their grades were 20-30 years ago because their experience was "I made effectively perfect grades at everything my entire school career" and will vividly remember the couple exceptions. I didn't pride myself on my grades and it wasn't encouraged at all by my parents or peer group, but I was one of those students, and have the experience of remembering exactly the one class I got a B in (photo journalism, the teacher hated me). I don't say this to brag, this account isn't tied to my name, but more just explaining what Canonical is perhaps looking for.

I do think there is a large connection between grade performance/SAT scores and general aptitude and success later in life. But as you said there are plenty of circumstances that would lead to poor grades that aren't related to ability - but I would also say those circumstances are also possible indicators of how good of an employee you will be. For example having behavioral problems as a kid could lead to bad grades despite otherwise capable of good grades, and I would suspect there's connection between childhood behavioral problems and conduct as an adult.

I can't really agree with this. Even if we consider only college grades and not HS ones, the wider the gap between your university days and you today is, the less representative those grades are. I think this is especially relevant for the high school scenario though: even if your the perfect student, your HS days might be 10-12 years behind you and your probably a completely different person today factoring in life experiences and all that. Like I just struggle to see how grades (or, really, any academic performance information in general) says anything about the you who is applying for a job unless your like a year fresh out of college and applying to an internship or something.

nothing about the things higher education or employers look at is a perfect signal of what they want from employees. you have to try to use available data as best you can, and it's hard to find something more reliable than past results, regardless of how old those results are. obviously more recent results should be weighed more. but old results don't mean nothing.

Shuttleworth is rich and Ubuntu/Canonical is his personal feudal holding. They basically can do whatever dumb thing they want and none of it actually matters because they don't really need to respond to market forces.

I've worked for one of these businesses before - basically staffing a daycare running a very compelling roleplay scenario so a millionaire/billionaire has an excuse to get away from their family for 10 hours a day. It works best if you're a fresh grad college kid who doesn't realize any of that for a few years and is just glad to have gotten a job.

So, the actual intent of all of their hiring circus is to ensure they don't accidentally hire someone who realizes what's going on.

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