I think that's a great questionnaire, but not for the intended purpose. Seeing that early in the interview speaks volumes and makes it so easy to just say nope and move on.
That questionnaire says two things. Either:
1) This is the hurdle you need to clear just for us to deign to speak to you in person, maybe. If you're lucky. You mean that little to us as a candidate.
2) We're completely oblivious of the lack of respect for you time that this shows. You mean that little to us as an colleague.
3) This is what "management / HR" says we have to do for new hires. You mean that little to us as an employee.
I'd love for that to be a false dichotomoy (trichotomy?), but I can't think of an option where this is interpreted as respectful to the candidate.
Anyone have any ideas?
You're going to be asked many of those questions anyway, at least in this format it's a no-time-pressure, no-public-performance way. That's the best silver lining I can find.
It's just plain too many questions though. Maybe they intend for you to only answer some of them, the ones you have interesting answers for? Or maybe they _should_ intend that if they don't.
I think a "written interview" for a remote position is actually a really good idea; it shows writing skills, and ability to communicate in a remote position.
I don't like the questions about high school, especially the personal questions. It's been 25 years (and longer for others), it wasn't particularly good period for me to the point of being traumatic, and I'm a completely different person then I was then. I don't see how it really matters for any aspect of the job either (technical, social, or cultural).
We could argue a bit about some of the other questions, but overall it should be entirely doable to complete this in 30 to 60 minutes, the time a regular video chat would take, and it's probably less stressful for quite a few people. I don't really see how this is an "Interview from Hell".
1. The questions on both high school and college should be meaningless for anyone 5+ years into their career. I am a different person than I was in high school.
2. It is unclear from the prompt how much detail to provide - many of these questions could have multi-page responses. Is that preferred, or penalized?
3. There are far too many questions (37!). "Choose 3 of the above, and write 10-20 sentences on them" would be a much better prompt if your goal was to evaluate writing skills and communication ability. Good writing takes time.
4. The asymmetric time spent between candidate and company. So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions. The company is wasting time of candidates that would not be a good fit for the role.
5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.
I think you can (and should) use your own judgement in how much detail you want to provide. It's the same with a normal interview question: on any question you have the choice to give a short concise answer or go in to great detail. For some of these questions I would provide a fairly short answer, on others a much more expansive one.
> So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions
I don't know who gets this assignment: maybe they're very selective about it, or they shotgun it to loads of people. The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned, but hard to be sure.
Most intro calls I've had were 100% a complete waste of time for both of the participants by the way, where they just read what's on the website and job posting ("I can read thank you"), and you just repeat what's on your CV ("surely you can read too?"), after which you're typically given some technical assignment or a second (actually useful) interview.
> 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.
English is the language in which Canonical communicates, and selecting for English proficiency makes sense, just as selecting for proficiency in $technology makes sense. Does this advantage native English speakers? Sure, but that can't really be helped I'm afraid. I've worked with non-native coworkers (as a non-native speaker myself, I should add) that were a pain to work with because half the time they wrote some documentation there were so many odd grammar mistakes that it was hard to read, and in some cases very unclear. So the bias is skill-based.
maybe too many prompts, but yes, what happens during a first interview is generally these sorts of discussions followed by the interviewer jotting down notes.
asking candidates to submit short essays where they can choose what to highlight and how seems like a fine idea.
just needs a "pick a few from each category" and "400-600 words please" designation.
probably also more suitable for people who work in product design / management or data science / business analyst / staff swe hybrid roles (roles where defining the work is part of the work) than people who are looking to complete predefined task assignments or solve issues with high velocity.
I agree that the idea is fine, but this is way way too many questions and would take me more than 60 minutes, especially given that there are no guidelines provided about length of response. I would find this agonizing to complete, personally. A conversation is much less pressure for me. The length and complexity is a red flag, and the questions about high school are just absurd. Who cares?
Overall it should be entirely doable to complete this in 30 to 60 minutes,
This is ludicrous of course. There no way you can sanely expect someone to answer 37 open-ended / largely interpretive questions of this sort in 30 minutes. Or even 90.
If you don't like it, don't apply, or ghost them. Who cares. If you want to work for Canonical so badly, there's ample room in the Linux ecosystem for an Ubuntu competitor: Fork Ubuntu and do it yourself. Show the world what a good hiring practice looks like. Run Canonical out of business by hiring the best engineers that won't jump through this Q&A email hoop. Don't just snarkily call it "from hell" and ragequit.
Too many questions for senior candidates. Can’t see anyone capable really doing this. I actually approve of the sentiment that doing well in Maths helps, etc. It’s just that no one is going to write up an essay who is worth it.
The problem with having pool X and then attempting to shrink it so your interview volume is tractable is that it is trivial to shrink it in a way that changes its distribution against your intentions. It’s just self sabotage.
Sucks for them. Canonical made Linux accessible to me (dial up so hard to get CDs) but they’re probably just hurting themselves.
It's possible the HR person that composed the automated response maybe didn't do very well in high school. This raises the question of how they themselves were able to pass Canonical's essay admissions process though.
And one thing I've noticed at Canonical especially. They seem to love to keyword match and have the flexibility of a slate.
"Describe your experience with WSL". What kind of BS question is that? If the person has already answered about Windows and Linux, why do you have this as a question? Do you also think JS programmers can't do typescript?
"Describe your speaking experience at industry events" Loaded and exclusionary question.
To be fair: because it's not Linux and it's not Windows and you'll wish it was either.
The networking in particular is a monstrosity, there's interop which works okay sometimes then trips you up, there's no systemd, mounts like Google Drive Filestream disappear on you, it's kinda Hyper-V but kinda not...
so yes I can see why they'd want to shortcut the process of hoping someone survives the mental anguish if learning this, if they already know both Linux and Windows.
This looks like a list of great ideas of what to write in a motivational letter. They could have said: "these are types of things we are looking for in a motivational letter. we've listed them to make it easier for you, but you don't need to fill all of them in" and it would get a much better reception.
The whole idea of resumes makes little sense. Suppose all of the facts check out, so HR has to give up LeStrade-ing your background so they can gleefully pounce on something.
What do they know? Where you worked, what on, your title. No idea what you learned, or retained - how much was original. How long it took, how well it worked. How you grew or soured as a human being. What wonderful ideas you might bring with you.
The most valuable insights would come from a peer you sit down and chat with for an hour or two. But then they'd have to actually trust a trusted employee with a proven talent. Nope nope. You might conspire to form an 'actual talent' cabal. Remember Fairchild!
It sure says a lot about Canonical itself. Anybody who puts that much emphasis on your social behaviour at high school and university has never mentally left there, so you can expect a juvenile corporate culture full of cliques and lots of high school, child-like emotional abuse scenarios coming from management.
The time required to fill this out (in how much detail?) is bad enough but imagine the time required to read all those responses? The manager or even just the recruiter is simply going to skim them, if they read them at all.
I would bet money they're not gonna read it, probably run it through their sentiment analysis algorithm (or, more likely one from a SaaS that they pay for):
Then move those top 5 forward to the culture interview. Once you get to the very end, they might read some of your answers before they make an offer, but for the vast majority of candidates it was a complete waste of their personal time.
Oh this. I applied for an engineer position a few months ago and really spent a few days writing up a document to answer everything listed. Guess I should have moved on before submitting to this bullshit.
First hand experience: ICs and management have been complaining about this to higher ups for a while now. These interview requirements appear to be a choice from the very top.
What's even worse is that despite through all these hoops, it's been difficult to hang onto employees. Staff should be treated with (more) respect.
Read glassdoor reviews, they're not exaggerating things. Avoid this place.
I disclose this information not to because I want to disparage Canonical and the good work they do, but because I want it to improve. Mark, you need to work on making this a more enjoyable place to work.
I would much prefer some kind of written questionnaire or essay to an interview via a video call, although some of these questions are irrelevant at best and demeaning at worst.
I'd say it's the exact opposite, especially for dev jobs. People don't even want to submit a cover letter.
I would have withdrawn my application too. In my mind, a key aspect of the process is reciprocity. I don't mind interviewing, including coding, but I'm not doing anything major that is "free" for the hiring company in the sense that they don't have to invest anything but can make me do a bunch and then just ignore me if they want
That is exactly what is wrong with this format. They (Canonical) think their time is more valuable than the applicant's and don't want to waste it having a discussion, they just want to make him do all that work on his own and then decide if they want to engage. That is not a positive relationship to have with a potential employer
It is not. The closest I have personally encountered was a company(Illumina) that had as part of their screening process an automated video interview where they provide prompts, you have 60 seconds to formulate your answer, and then you are expected to give 2-5 minute answers.
I noped out on question 1, which was the usual fluffy question about "what makes you so excited to work at Illumina?" It's not worth wasting my time if they aren't going to even have a human speak to me.
This is exactly why I tell people the best time to search for a job is when you are gainfully employed. If I was unemployed and running low on funds, I might have followed through with that interview. Because I already had a decent job and was just looking for interesting work in an area I wanted to be in, it was very easy for me to have standards and say no.
In CA, I'm not sure all these questions would be legal. And it can't be to "eliminate bias." For example, I'm so old that there _was_ no computer program in my high school. California law allows me to sue them for simply discouraging me from applying, and you can make a good argument that this application does just that. I haven't been in high school for a long time.
Canonical's revenue per employee is only ~275k USD.
Which means there's a pretty hard cap on talent compensation. I suppose this kind of "interview" like you said is a pretty heavy-handed way of filtering out candidates who are aiming for the top ends of compensation that they could get at MAANG firms.
That's revenue though, not profit. Subtract office rent or home office expenses, laptops and other hardware, server running costs, overhead like this hiring process / HR / legal / sales / ..., employee-specific overhead costs like health insurance (if I get $50k/y then a few % is subtracted for health insurance, but half of that % I never see and the employer has to add on top of the agreed-upon salary)... and maybe you want to keep a buffer for unforeseen events (having to do without your Ukrainian employees for a while, sick leave, new covid wave where anyone with a child is at like 50% capacity, etc.). I'm no businessman but this is just what I can think of that my employer has to take care of from a developer-level position myself.
Even if in most countries the rate is less than half the USA's, without doing the actual math this sounds like quite a tight margin to be honest.
Well OPs point is that these essays save you time because you filter out applicants that aren’t serious.
Anyone who has interviewed recently will know the amount of time wasted by organising interviews people don’t even turn up for, or show up and are completely winging it. This is designed to weed these people out, because it’s a way of demonstrating that the person applying actually wants the job and haven’t just sent their CV out to everyone who is hiring.
I don't disagree, but it's a band pass filter, rather than a low end filter.
You are also weeding out the good engineers who recognize that you're asking them for a huge investment without any showing of good faith. I would honestly be shocked if the interviewers even read half of the answers they're asking.
Anonymous because I work there. I applied for a senior software engineer role and the interview process was similar. I got the job offer at the end of the process and they sneakily changed the role to "Software Engineer 2" from the "Senior software engineer" role mentioned so prominently in the job postings and the interview invites. No one bothered mentioning this in any of the many face-to-face and email conversations that I had with people/managers/director/HR from Canonical. I wouldn't have applied for the job if they had not lied that it was for a senior software engineer role.
Due to my bad luck and my excitement about the job, I missed catching this till my first week at Canonical. This was a big mistake and I should have done better. When I found out about this and spoke to my manager about this, I got some ambiguous answer about how they mention "senior" in the job description to weed out junior folks from applying and that "software engineer 2" would be the appropriate role according to their internal engineering career path. He and his successor both agreed to pass on the feedback to the upper management but I am not sure if they did and if the feedback made any difference.
I ended up continuing since the team and the work was good. But this is unprofessional and unacceptable.
...so if you put "senior software engineer" on your resume for future positions, there's a clear case that SDE 2 aligns with "senior software engineer", just like SDE3 must align with "principal" or "staff" engineer.
We know this because roles they advertise as senior software engineer are assigned an SDE2 title.
Sde-2 in Amazon and Microsoft is the role below Sr-SDE.
There's no standard for that though, what might be called a director in a startup might match sr in a fang. This doesn't matter as much as the responsibilities and cash you put in front of it.
I am fine with the so-called career path and leveling. What rubbed me the wrong way is that no one bothered mentioning it even though sneaked it into the offer letter. It is my mistake that I didn't catch it until it was too late. :(
Some random advice – job titles mean absolutely nothing in the industry at large. Your years of experience isn't changing. Your salary (presumably) isn't changing. Call yourself "architect" or "code monkey" or whatever else you want, absolutely no one will care.
That is what I am doing - calling myself a 'Senior Software Engineer' in my current job. As someone who has been a "Senior software engineer" in the past couple of jobs, it would definitely look odd to say that I am a "Software Engineer - 2" in my current job as that would look like a stepdown in level.
I don't see a huge issue - the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases. These absolutely exist, and in interviews, where we talking about first impressions of many people, I would say they are endemic even given the best intentioned interviewer.
Taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable.
This is a 35+ question essay exam that simultaneously asks whether candidates are industry thought leaders and "strong architects" and includes not one but four questions about high school achievements. It's among the top 5 worst hiring processes I've ever seen.
Not sure what the big deal about asking for high school achievements is. To me that seems to be done to be inclusive of people who didn't graduate college, which seems entirely reasonable to me.
"What sort of high school student were you? Outside of required work, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for, if we asked them?"
Given how many people I know in the tech industry who had a horrible time at high school (nerds got bullied in the 80s and 90s, is that still true today?), this question carries a whole lot of baggage.
I reckon these questions started as "in college", then someone in meeting #8533 rightly said "but what about people who did not go to college?" and so it was turned into high-school.
I suspect what this tells us about Canonical is that they have too many HR folks running riot.
"Mostly they'd remember me getting wasted on super-strength cider, but people who knew me a bit better might also remember me playing Warhammer 40,000."
People in high school are children. I don’t expect an employer to ask me my favorite flavor of ice cream either, because I’m an adult. This is an absurd waste of time for any serious professional.
I don't have an engineering degree and let me tell you, if you asked me to answer these questions about my high school experience at this point in my now 23 year long career, I would not take you seriously.
Never mind people who didn't graduate high school or got a GED, at which point you've just excluded a different class of people for an even more irrelevant-to-their-work set of questions.
I've seen the application, and there are questions about maths and grades. I know a lot of people with great grades and this doesn't translate into programming or innate understanding of CS in general. Similarly I've seen people with mediocre grades and great academic careers.
Also, writing down all the questions will generate a sizeable document. That should be done orally, and even if it's done orally, there is some strong emphasis on the wrong points.
And exclusive of people who dropped out of (or barely made it through) high school -- which as a category includes some of the most responsible and accomplished people I know.
If they ask about "industry leadership experience" and "high school achievements" in the same form there is a lot wrong.
This is not a form for a junior hire as I understand.
Industry leadership experience should not be in the form aimed at junior staff and high school achievements should not be on the form for hiring "industry leaders".
Unless you really are hiring whizz kids it is total waste of time to ask both questions on the same form.
If someone has industry leadership experience you compare candidates based on that and if one of them had some high school achievements it might be a plus, but it would not have much weight on comparison. Because if two candidates would have industry leadership experience if one is better than the other it would show there.
It is absolutely not inclusive of people who didn't graduate college: those questions are followed with --- I swear I'm not making this up --- a question about which college you chose to attend and why you chose it.
You can just go read it it see what a nightmare it is; it's not that long (unlike the response it demands).
I applied for a Canonical job and was turned off by this. I was smart in high school but I wasn't an overachiever. In fact, I was into computers above and beyond what my high school was able to offer, and I was bored of the place as a result! But more importantly, that happened a lifetime ago; I'm an adult with 20 years of professional experience, focus on my high school is completely inappropriate and I don't think it's a stretch to call it ageist.
But the hiring manager told me that they actually hire people from the community -- in other words, folks who have done a free internship. So in truth, I'm not sure why I even jumped through their hoops (including the personality and intelligence tests). What a lark.
Notice the number of commentors defending it, even praising it. This is why no one really treats software engineers with respect or has sane hiring practices. They love to be subservient and jump through hoops for any sort of praise.
How do you even know where you ranked in your classes in high school?
I can't even remember what grades I got.
Fuck, even university was long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot of academic details of what exact courses I did.
What would my peers have said about me? In high school, no idea. I expect most are dead, in prison or full time alcoholics or drug addicts.
I only keep in touch with two people from university too. I've had a whole professional life in twenty plus years since then, who gives a fuck what I did extra curricular twenty plus years ago!
The only part of this that is geared at eliminating bias is the anonymous queue comment at the very end. Additionally, while I'm a huge advocate for removing biases in hiring and recruiting, this approach hoists all of the actual work for doing it onto the candidate, having them submit what is ostensibly an essay explaining why they deserve this job. If you want to remove biases in your hiring, it should be done internally via training and understanding, not by relying on anonymization. Without that training, the "human" piece of bias being understood, your anonymous reviewers are still going to implicitly bias against ESL candidates, and those biases are going to appear anyway at the in-person stage of the process.
Funnily enough, half of the questions are biased towards a specific type of candidate, one who was passionate about maths, science, and technology by the time they were 16. Why are there so many questions about high school? The version of me in high school is so far removed from the adult version who would apply for this job that it might as well be an entirely different person.
Even if it eliminates in-person bias during the step in which it's used, (a) it's effectively still part of the prescreening, so the bias, if present, will still get introduced during the actual interview process and (b) it creates the potential for a whole new set of biases based on how the person writes and how they choose to interpret the questions (if you give short terse answers, is that seen as efficient or not taking it seriously, if you give long, detailed answers, do they even get read? What if someone doesn't like how you structure your thoughts, your writing style, diction, etc, especially when it's not clear whether these actually relate to the job.
The more I think about it, the more confused I am about how they use this instrument internally to advance the hiring process. It it a writing test, are there right or wrong answers, are they really trying to get to know the candidate (in which case they've chosen an extremely inefficient way). It's their choice, but I wouldn't expect them to find highly qualified candidates lining up to do this for them.
Some of these questions are reasonable (if asked in a more targeted way),but IMO there's some red flags. Asking grown adults about their high school classes seems like it would actually be a really effective way to introduce new biases without explicitly taking into account an applicant's race/national origin/socioeconomic status.
Many of us have wasted a few years working on what could/should have been a good project but was hobbled by poor leadership, and aren’t eager to do more of that.
To me, this lead doesn’t know how and/or care enough to identify and focus on key issues and definitely doesn’t mind wasting people’s time with a flood of busywork in lieu of paring this down to some thoughtful incisive questions.
I would expect this to weed out a significant fraction of the good candidates.
> the stated purpose is to eliminate social/in-person biases.
Except it doesn't eliminate bias at all! In fact, it has the potential to further increase bias.
For example, the question "what university did you choose and why" assumes the candidate even had a choice (or went to university at all), and you can't consider a question about extra-curricular activities without also considering the candidate's situation (because candidates from under-privileged backgrounds are afforded fewer extra-curricular opportunities).
I had similar thoughts on Amazons hiring process. They can shove their "leadership principles". I know they're going to churn through all potential applicants someday and have to start acting like real people.
I recently did their final round of coding interviews plus leadership principles. It's not a bad idea in theory, but the way they go about it makes it very clear that you're just supplying input to an algorithm where the output is hire or no-hire, and the person asking the question only cares about taking the answer and fitting it in to a nice text box on their screen to send to HR.
I realized pretty quickly with their followup questions that there was no point in answering truthfully with your real reasoning and thought process. I think you're much better off making up a story that perfectly covers the principle they're asking about, so they can take it and just put it down directly on their form. It felt like they had leetcodified non-coding interview questions.
It was quite memorable in a bad way, it felt very unwelcoming and mechanical. I even wondered during the interview if I was actually talking to a human being or to a very elaborate AI + deep fake.
Nonetheless, their leadership principles are bookmarked for later reuse. They're very good general purpose guidance.
> I was actually talking to a human being or to a very elaborate AI + deep fake
I've also had similar experiences talking to people at Amazon. I can associate most of the big tech companies with various negative traits (and some positive ones too), but Amazon is the only one where a significant number of the people seemed to be inhabitants of the uncanny valley. One ex-amazonian I know gradually seemed to 'de-program' over about 3 years after he left.
Not being terribly familiar with the internal culture, I'm not sure what causes it, but perhaps it's what naturally happens if you're the kind of person to succeed at a company that wishes that humans were as predictable as automated processes.
I feel like they probably came from either a big brainstorming session, adding to some standard template, or trying fewer questions and then adding more when candidates failed to intuit the right kind of responses.
That said, it feels like it’s on-the-margin good for companies to be experimenting with different hiring processes in general and trying to reduce bias in the process is a noble goal so I’m not massively sad about this. I think oxide also do some kind of written submission based hiring process for example (and they do it with the very reasonable claim that they think written communication is important so they want to hire for it).
If you’re good at passing ‘standard’ interview processes then it’s probably fine to skip this one and maybe you’d wish they’d go for the same process as everyone else. If you suck at the standard ‘algorithms’ questions, maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists (though maybe there are still algorithms questions later) and keen to give it a try. That could end up biasing canonical’s candidates towards people who are undervalued by the market which could make it cheaper for them to hire (by spending less effort trying to close on candidates with lots of competing offers)
> If you’re good at passing ‘standard’ interview processes then it’s probably fine to skip this one and maybe you’d wish they’d go for the same process as everyone else. If you suck at the standard ‘algorithms’ questions, maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists
This is a good point I didn't consider. (I made two other posts in this thread criticizing the process)
If someone is going to spend hours revising for another kind of in-person interview due to their discomfort with the prospect, and would rather invest the same time in providing written answers, they may view this as a better alternative, and that's fair.
I don't know enough about the overall process to understand if putting good work into the written part gives them a break on other parts where they may otherwise not perform well. And I still think that making everybody do this is asymmetrical. They could ask everyone to do it and assess them algorithmically for example, wasting huge amounts of peoples time.
Maybe if it's given as a choice vs a "get to know you" interview by a recruiter, and it's explained how both are equivalent?
I agree, I think the idea of a "written" interview is interesting and might be a good idea.
The problem I have with this is that there's not enough Canonical skin in the game. They have you do this before they invest any of their time in you. That means that if it takes you 20 hours to respond to all of these in writing, it's nothing from them to trash can your application. They aren't incentivized to make sure they're balancing the value they get with the time it takes to do it.
They're basically that person who orders the Lobster and several rounds of imported beer because somebody else is paying the tab. If it was on their dime they'd be a lot more reasonable.
At least, at a minimum, do this toward the end. Do the culture fit interview and the aptitude test first so a lot fewer candidates waste their time writing the book you asked for.
> maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists
That’s the thing though, this is only the beginning of their larger interview process which still includes all the usual suspects:
> The stages for this application are:
- Review of resume (done)
- Written interview (this step)
- Standardised aptitude and personality assessment
- Culture, HR, peer interviews and tech assessments
- Hiring manager and senior lead interviews
Yeah and that “personality assessment” is another term for building in bias at most companies. “We were impressed with you, but you weren’t a ‘personality fit, so we’re going to pass.’”
> trying to reduce bias in the process is a noble goal
I feel like this does the opposite. The first half is about how well you performed in high school (WTF? High school was 30 years ago for me. How is that relevant?), how well you did in college, and how well you did compared to your peers in those situations. What if I didn’t graduate high school or college? What if I come from someplace where schooling is done differently? What if I did poorly in one of those but my peers were geniuses? What if I did well but my peers were idiots? How does this give them any signal at all?
Yeah I deliberately didn’t claim that it actually reduced bias. (Though I think I’d be more worried about class signifiers in the language/content/choice of the answers). It also feels somewhat questionable to me whether working hard to reduce bias is worth it for the company. Obviously there are legal obligations to avoid discrimination but being fair to everyone can mean more work per hire making the process more expensive. The best argument in favour of trying to be fair is that it increases your chance of finding a hire with outlier performance, though I think it is pretty easy to drop such people at other steps.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadThat questionnaire says two things. Either:
1) This is the hurdle you need to clear just for us to deign to speak to you in person, maybe. If you're lucky. You mean that little to us as a candidate.
2) We're completely oblivious of the lack of respect for you time that this shows. You mean that little to us as an colleague.
3) This is what "management / HR" says we have to do for new hires. You mean that little to us as an employee.
I'd love for that to be a false dichotomoy (trichotomy?), but I can't think of an option where this is interpreted as respectful to the candidate. Anyone have any ideas?
It's just plain too many questions though. Maybe they intend for you to only answer some of them, the ones you have interesting answers for? Or maybe they _should_ intend that if they don't.
The problem is that Canonical has no skin in the game.
I don't like the questions about high school, especially the personal questions. It's been 25 years (and longer for others), it wasn't particularly good period for me to the point of being traumatic, and I'm a completely different person then I was then. I don't see how it really matters for any aspect of the job either (technical, social, or cultural).
We could argue a bit about some of the other questions, but overall it should be entirely doable to complete this in 30 to 60 minutes, the time a regular video chat would take, and it's probably less stressful for quite a few people. I don't really see how this is an "Interview from Hell".
2. It is unclear from the prompt how much detail to provide - many of these questions could have multi-page responses. Is that preferred, or penalized?
3. There are far too many questions (37!). "Choose 3 of the above, and write 10-20 sentences on them" would be a much better prompt if your goal was to evaluate writing skills and communication ability. Good writing takes time.
4. The asymmetric time spent between candidate and company. So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions. The company is wasting time of candidates that would not be a good fit for the role.
5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.
> So far Canonical has only done the "6 second resume test", and then asks the candidate to spend an unbounded amount of time answering these questions
I don't know who gets this assignment: maybe they're very selective about it, or they shotgun it to loads of people. The intro text leads me to believe that it's not shotgunned, but hard to be sure.
Most intro calls I've had were 100% a complete waste of time for both of the participants by the way, where they just read what's on the website and job posting ("I can read thank you"), and you just repeat what's on your CV ("surely you can read too?"), after which you're typically given some technical assignment or a second (actually useful) interview.
> 5. Heavily biased toward native English speakers. I have worked with people who can clearly communicate their thoughts but make English grammar mistakes. The worst part is they bill this as an attempt at avoiding bias.
English is the language in which Canonical communicates, and selecting for English proficiency makes sense, just as selecting for proficiency in $technology makes sense. Does this advantage native English speakers? Sure, but that can't really be helped I'm afraid. I've worked with non-native coworkers (as a non-native speaker myself, I should add) that were a pain to work with because half the time they wrote some documentation there were so many odd grammar mistakes that it was hard to read, and in some cases very unclear. So the bias is skill-based.
Given that they asked questions about high school, and also questions about being an 'industry thought leader', I disagree.
asking candidates to submit short essays where they can choose what to highlight and how seems like a fine idea.
just needs a "pick a few from each category" and "400-600 words please" designation.
probably also more suitable for people who work in product design / management or data science / business analyst / staff swe hybrid roles (roles where defining the work is part of the work) than people who are looking to complete predefined task assignments or solve issues with high velocity.
This is ludicrous of course. There no way you can sanely expect someone to answer 37 open-ended / largely interpretive questions of this sort in 30 minutes. Or even 90.
As a home assignment it’s a sign of mental illness
The problem with having pool X and then attempting to shrink it so your interview volume is tractable is that it is trivial to shrink it in a way that changes its distribution against your intentions. It’s just self sabotage.
Sucks for them. Canonical made Linux accessible to me (dial up so hard to get CDs) but they’re probably just hurting themselves.
Typo in the first sentence of the application.
And one thing I've noticed at Canonical especially. They seem to love to keyword match and have the flexibility of a slate.
"Describe your experience with WSL". What kind of BS question is that? If the person has already answered about Windows and Linux, why do you have this as a question? Do you also think JS programmers can't do typescript?
"Describe your speaking experience at industry events" Loaded and exclusionary question.
The networking in particular is a monstrosity, there's interop which works okay sometimes then trips you up, there's no systemd, mounts like Google Drive Filestream disappear on you, it's kinda Hyper-V but kinda not...
so yes I can see why they'd want to shortcut the process of hoping someone survives the mental anguish if learning this, if they already know both Linux and Windows.
1) It's so hard to find qualified developer.
2) Our hiring candidate-wall is not high enough. There are too many applications.
Are non-conflicting in HRs heads.
What do they know? Where you worked, what on, your title. No idea what you learned, or retained - how much was original. How long it took, how well it worked. How you grew or soured as a human being. What wonderful ideas you might bring with you.
The most valuable insights would come from a peer you sit down and chat with for an hour or two. But then they'd have to actually trust a trusted employee with a proven talent. Nope nope. You might conspire to form an 'actual talent' cabal. Remember Fairchild!
Massive red flag for me.
Strong red flag.
What's even worse is that despite through all these hoops, it's been difficult to hang onto employees. Staff should be treated with (more) respect.
Read glassdoor reviews, they're not exaggerating things. Avoid this place.
I disclose this information not to because I want to disparage Canonical and the good work they do, but because I want it to improve. Mark, you need to work on making this a more enjoyable place to work.
I would have withdrawn my application too. In my mind, a key aspect of the process is reciprocity. I don't mind interviewing, including coding, but I'm not doing anything major that is "free" for the hiring company in the sense that they don't have to invest anything but can make me do a bunch and then just ignore me if they want
That is exactly what is wrong with this format. They (Canonical) think their time is more valuable than the applicant's and don't want to waste it having a discussion, they just want to make him do all that work on his own and then decide if they want to engage. That is not a positive relationship to have with a potential employer
I noped out on question 1, which was the usual fluffy question about "what makes you so excited to work at Illumina?" It's not worth wasting my time if they aren't going to even have a human speak to me.
This is exactly why I tell people the best time to search for a job is when you are gainfully employed. If I was unemployed and running low on funds, I might have followed through with that interview. Because I already had a decent job and was just looking for interesting work in an area I wanted to be in, it was very easy for me to have standards and say no.
This is a step for the applicant to signal “not much” way before salary gets discussed.
Which is why this type of screening is great for keeping down wages, but really not great for getting talent.
Which means there's a pretty hard cap on talent compensation. I suppose this kind of "interview" like you said is a pretty heavy-handed way of filtering out candidates who are aiming for the top ends of compensation that they could get at MAANG firms.
Even if in most countries the rate is less than half the USA's, without doing the actual math this sounds like quite a tight margin to be honest.
Anyone who has interviewed recently will know the amount of time wasted by organising interviews people don’t even turn up for, or show up and are completely winging it. This is designed to weed these people out, because it’s a way of demonstrating that the person applying actually wants the job and haven’t just sent their CV out to everyone who is hiring.
You are also weeding out the good engineers who recognize that you're asking them for a huge investment without any showing of good faith. I would honestly be shocked if the interviewers even read half of the answers they're asking.
Due to my bad luck and my excitement about the job, I missed catching this till my first week at Canonical. This was a big mistake and I should have done better. When I found out about this and spoke to my manager about this, I got some ambiguous answer about how they mention "senior" in the job description to weed out junior folks from applying and that "software engineer 2" would be the appropriate role according to their internal engineering career path. He and his successor both agreed to pass on the feedback to the upper management but I am not sure if they did and if the feedback made any difference.
I ended up continuing since the team and the work was good. But this is unprofessional and unacceptable.
We know this because roles they advertise as senior software engineer are assigned an SDE2 title.
There's no standard for that though, what might be called a director in a startup might match sr in a fang. This doesn't matter as much as the responsibilities and cash you put in front of it.
See https://levels.fyi
Taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable.
Given how many people I know in the tech industry who had a horrible time at high school (nerds got bullied in the 80s and 90s, is that still true today?), this question carries a whole lot of baggage.
I suspect what this tells us about Canonical is that they have too many HR folks running riot.
A competent HR department exists, in fact, precisely for the purpose of preventing the adoption of inane practices like these.
I'd withdraw my application too.
Never mind people who didn't graduate high school or got a GED, at which point you've just excluded a different class of people for an even more irrelevant-to-their-work set of questions.
Also, writing down all the questions will generate a sizeable document. That should be done orally, and even if it's done orally, there is some strong emphasis on the wrong points.
This is not a form for a junior hire as I understand.
Industry leadership experience should not be in the form aimed at junior staff and high school achievements should not be on the form for hiring "industry leaders".
Unless you really are hiring whizz kids it is total waste of time to ask both questions on the same form.
If someone has industry leadership experience you compare candidates based on that and if one of them had some high school achievements it might be a plus, but it would not have much weight on comparison. Because if two candidates would have industry leadership experience if one is better than the other it would show there.
You can just go read it it see what a nightmare it is; it's not that long (unlike the response it demands).
But the hiring manager told me that they actually hire people from the community -- in other words, folks who have done a free internship. So in truth, I'm not sure why I even jumped through their hoops (including the personality and intelligence tests). What a lark.
I can't even remember what grades I got.
Fuck, even university was long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot of academic details of what exact courses I did.
What would my peers have said about me? In high school, no idea. I expect most are dead, in prison or full time alcoholics or drug addicts.
I only keep in touch with two people from university too. I've had a whole professional life in twenty plus years since then, who gives a fuck what I did extra curricular twenty plus years ago!
Funnily enough, half of the questions are biased towards a specific type of candidate, one who was passionate about maths, science, and technology by the time they were 16. Why are there so many questions about high school? The version of me in high school is so far removed from the adult version who would apply for this job that it might as well be an entirely different person.
... which is then completely invalidated by this question:
"Do you have a public platform were you communicate about the industry? Medium, Twitter, YouTube, a personal blog? Please provide links."
The more I think about it, the more confused I am about how they use this instrument internally to advance the hiring process. It it a writing test, are there right or wrong answers, are they really trying to get to know the candidate (in which case they've chosen an extremely inefficient way). It's their choice, but I wouldn't expect them to find highly qualified candidates lining up to do this for them.
To me, this lead doesn’t know how and/or care enough to identify and focus on key issues and definitely doesn’t mind wasting people’s time with a flood of busywork in lieu of paring this down to some thoughtful incisive questions.
I would expect this to weed out a significant fraction of the good candidates.
Except it doesn't eliminate bias at all! In fact, it has the potential to further increase bias.
For example, the question "what university did you choose and why" assumes the candidate even had a choice (or went to university at all), and you can't consider a question about extra-curricular activities without also considering the candidate's situation (because candidates from under-privileged backgrounds are afforded fewer extra-curricular opportunities).
how on earth does any of this do that
> taking this process at face value, it seems quite reasonable
wow, just wow
What's weird is making interview candidates memorize these and come up with a canned performative story for each one.
I realized pretty quickly with their followup questions that there was no point in answering truthfully with your real reasoning and thought process. I think you're much better off making up a story that perfectly covers the principle they're asking about, so they can take it and just put it down directly on their form. It felt like they had leetcodified non-coding interview questions.
But simply your willingness to memorize and recite them.
And lie (ie: come up with fake stories to highlight how you followed the principles in the past). A great trait to look for in a future teammate.
It was quite memorable in a bad way, it felt very unwelcoming and mechanical. I even wondered during the interview if I was actually talking to a human being or to a very elaborate AI + deep fake.
Nonetheless, their leadership principles are bookmarked for later reuse. They're very good general purpose guidance.
I've also had similar experiences talking to people at Amazon. I can associate most of the big tech companies with various negative traits (and some positive ones too), but Amazon is the only one where a significant number of the people seemed to be inhabitants of the uncanny valley. One ex-amazonian I know gradually seemed to 'de-program' over about 3 years after he left.
Not being terribly familiar with the internal culture, I'm not sure what causes it, but perhaps it's what naturally happens if you're the kind of person to succeed at a company that wishes that humans were as predictable as automated processes.
- too many questions
- unfocused questions
- poor guidance on how much to write
- Or maybe canonical don’t hire much?
I feel like they probably came from either a big brainstorming session, adding to some standard template, or trying fewer questions and then adding more when candidates failed to intuit the right kind of responses.
That said, it feels like it’s on-the-margin good for companies to be experimenting with different hiring processes in general and trying to reduce bias in the process is a noble goal so I’m not massively sad about this. I think oxide also do some kind of written submission based hiring process for example (and they do it with the very reasonable claim that they think written communication is important so they want to hire for it).
If you’re good at passing ‘standard’ interview processes then it’s probably fine to skip this one and maybe you’d wish they’d go for the same process as everyone else. If you suck at the standard ‘algorithms’ questions, maybe you’d be thankful that something else exists (though maybe there are still algorithms questions later) and keen to give it a try. That could end up biasing canonical’s candidates towards people who are undervalued by the market which could make it cheaper for them to hire (by spending less effort trying to close on candidates with lots of competing offers)
This is a good point I didn't consider. (I made two other posts in this thread criticizing the process)
If someone is going to spend hours revising for another kind of in-person interview due to their discomfort with the prospect, and would rather invest the same time in providing written answers, they may view this as a better alternative, and that's fair.
I don't know enough about the overall process to understand if putting good work into the written part gives them a break on other parts where they may otherwise not perform well. And I still think that making everybody do this is asymmetrical. They could ask everyone to do it and assess them algorithmically for example, wasting huge amounts of peoples time.
Maybe if it's given as a choice vs a "get to know you" interview by a recruiter, and it's explained how both are equivalent?
The problem I have with this is that there's not enough Canonical skin in the game. They have you do this before they invest any of their time in you. That means that if it takes you 20 hours to respond to all of these in writing, it's nothing from them to trash can your application. They aren't incentivized to make sure they're balancing the value they get with the time it takes to do it.
They're basically that person who orders the Lobster and several rounds of imported beer because somebody else is paying the tab. If it was on their dime they'd be a lot more reasonable.
At least, at a minimum, do this toward the end. Do the culture fit interview and the aptitude test first so a lot fewer candidates waste their time writing the book you asked for.
That’s the thing though, this is only the beginning of their larger interview process which still includes all the usual suspects:
> The stages for this application are: - Review of resume (done) - Written interview (this step) - Standardised aptitude and personality assessment - Culture, HR, peer interviews and tech assessments - Hiring manager and senior lead interviews
I feel like this does the opposite. The first half is about how well you performed in high school (WTF? High school was 30 years ago for me. How is that relevant?), how well you did in college, and how well you did compared to your peers in those situations. What if I didn’t graduate high school or college? What if I come from someplace where schooling is done differently? What if I did poorly in one of those but my peers were geniuses? What if I did well but my peers were idiots? How does this give them any signal at all?