I think OP was just pointing out the irony of complaining about high school English questions while making a high school-level English usage mistake (would of vs. would have)
English prescriptivists are even more ironic-er. If they'd of bothered to take even an undergraduate level course in linguistics, they'd understand how wasteful a pastime "grammar nazi" is.
Can you define a couple of hundred? Just to be clear I am a language descriptivist, and am looking for a timeline I can hang you on for being wrong. Also to preface, if you pick a timeline older then the phrase “the bees knees”I will think you are irrelevant, and if you can pick a younger phrase but I can show language evolution on top of that, I will also consider you irrelevant.
> I would be able to give "impressive" answers to those questions
I want to complain that they don't have a "won the state championship" answer for the math question. The allowed responses don't even capture my full, 30 years ago high school glory.
I agree. This is a great filter for companies you do not want to be a part of. Keep in mind that your future bosses will evaluate you based on useless and silly metrics like these.
There are a great many other places to work that DO value your actual accomplishments.
It's more likely that they had someone junior write these questions and no one senior ever looked it over. This reflects badly on the HR department at Canonical, it's probably not some conspiracy to find desperate people.
Unless this attracts the desperate who wouldn't apply without these filters, the compensation necessary to secure the winner will be unaffected or might even go up as the smaller pool of applicants will have Canonical over a barrel.
More likely they do this because they have so many applications coming in that having to pay more to a lesser worker is worth more than having to hire many more HR staff to process all the applications. The hope is that it will scare off most people, and if that fails a machine can filter on these values. It could be any arbitrary value – race, religion, random number – but courts have effectively ruled that any filtering mechanism that isn't directly related to the job or school could face severe legal consequences, so this keeps the lawyers happy.
Truly desperate or people with ulterior motives maybe, don't want to be paranoid but maybe only someone who is working undercover for some agency would want to go through that lengthy process of the interview. Maybe Canonical thinks this way it can detect this kind of people. idk
A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good people or not. This is where some official record like a GPA can be useful, or a live coding interview where you get the opportunity to at least prove you are not a total faker.
That is what background checks are for. They are irritating, but at least that would let the job candidate apply without having to fill in all the crap from the get go.
> A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest.
OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.
Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?
That would be a good argument if people were being hired solely on the basis of their responses to these questions. No one's doing that. These are simply filter questions used to decide who to do initial interviews with and need to be discussed in terms of their false positive/negative failures.
False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.
False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.
This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...
Having proven conclusively that no job at this company could possibly be worth the desperately painful application process, we now just need to eliminate 100mil more companies one by one...
Canonical makes infrastructure that I (and a significant slice of the world economy) depend on. If they want to significantly bias their application pool to people who are willing to tolerate that question, then I'm a bit concerned that I've invested years and years building on a decaying foundation, and now I have to investigate.
Small companies don't care because they want someone who can do the work.
Large companies' decision makers are much more risk averse. They're looking for a reason not to hire you. If you're a poor employee that makes no difference to the,, they are fine, if they take a risk by hiring you despite you once getting a B in high school spanish in 1837, they're the ones that will be embarrassed.
This is why small companies will take a CV, interview twice and hire you. But big companies have a dozen committees, a HR "portal" that takes a CV AND then asks for all the same details and more field by field and insists on giving you personality tests and a full horoscope. Those are not there to find good employees (or to weed out the old). They're just arse covering by middle management. And for that purpose they work.
So you can stand outside shouting that it's "not relevant" or you can apply elsewhere or you can jump through the hoops. No approach is right or wrong, they're just pragmatic decisions based on what you want.
Just an observation: what I said in my comment is falsifiable. I'm pretty certain you'd find, if you polled a bunch of job application sites for various-sized companies, that large companies are a lot more likely to separate out new grads and entry-level candidates into a separate funnel from more experienced professionals, with separate candidates and more "basic" questions.
Canonical's model is to copy Debian testing, change the branding and apply some set of patches to it, then ship it. Every six months or so they pick up the new Debian testing and repeat.
Debian is solid. Ubuntu's layer on top is a bit ymmv.
Question: Would I regret switching from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Debian Bullseye 11.X (and would I have to use Debian 10 to use an LTS version [0])? How many creature comforts does Ubuntu add onto the Debian base? Just based on the vibe I get from debian.org, I feel like my life would involve a lot more yak shaving (which I don't necessarily mind if it teaches me something that will negate future yak shaves).
Context: In 2019 I built a desktop (my personal workstation) and it was my first machine without a windows or Mac OS partition. That machine is still my personal daily driver (outside of work). Using it for ML/MLOps/misc engineering projects has taught me a ton about parts of how Linux works and is organized.
Debian testing will feel very like an Ubuntu install that doesn't crash on you. One package manager instead of N. Occasionally third party repos only package for Ubuntu, though they're likely to work about as well on Debian as they do on Ubuntu anyway.
For a long time Debian refused to bundle closed source firmware with the installer but they've relented on that now.
The holdout I know of is Ubuntu have zfs in the kernel and Debian as a package. That seems to make no difference in practice.
If a company were to ask about my star sign, then I know that their idea of what is relevant is not grounded in reality and will avoid employment with them.
Someone asking me about my strengths in high school, which was decades ago, then that tells me they are looking for young people. (And from the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 you can see they don't care about my grad school experience, which was much more formative to my career path.)
In the US, age discrimination for employment for people 40 years or older is illegal. As the author of the linked-to essay correctly points out, these questions comes across like trying to discriminate on the basis of age without outright saying it.
Which trespasses on a special form of government monopoly that it can enforce.
Good grief, that's definitely the bigger WTF. Each of those engineering questions could be its own essay. What's even left to talk about if you answer all of those?
A Canonical dev in the replies offhandedly mentions that they read every one thoroughly whether its "3 or 30 pages" which is certainly an ask when you have people submitting an autobiographical novella as the first step in your interview process.
Based on the process, Canonical is the choosiest beggar I've bothered to apply to in the tech world.
It was quite obvious to me I would be rejected, as the form is much more focused on "things that look good on paper" rather than "what this person can do", e.g. asking for your GPA.
This presumably reflects the internal culture which leads to a history of user-hostile decisions: snap, Unity, that Amazon fiasco. They probably looked good on paper.
I'm only salty because I think people with atypical profiles like mine could truly make their software better and more adapted to today's FLOSS world. Oh well, guess I'll just keep working on maximizing someone's profits.
They're inherently related. The medium dictates the context of both the questions and responses. Trying to communicate things on a form that are not accurately communicated on a form is a fools errand. Interviews, code tests, etc exist to communicate things that aren't well communicated in that format.
I wonder if the real test is to get a candidate who will do something like "I took a look at the interview questions and determined that most of them aren't a productive use of time for either of us, here's why. Now, here's a short description of why you should hire me and what I'll bring to the company." Like looking for someone who can cut through the bureaucracy.
The first sentence of the questionnaire says it's to work on Ubuntu WSL.
It's funny to imagine that the barrage of questions from Ubuntu is merely a tactic to suppress the obvious question from the candidate: why is the company seeming to fall for that move by MS.
So work for a place that gives out equity? Maybe I'm getting a totally different view of offers to engineers (at non-Canonical companies) than you are, but most of mine have contained passion-inducing amounts of equity - if you believe in the 409A. Which you can't, until you can.
Maybe you want that, but some people like working beside people who give a shit. Some of those places give equity, some give good paychecks, and some give a good work-life balance. Not everyone is motivated the same way you are.
There are 8 billion people on the planet and remote work & automation is changing the game.
If you won't crawl through broken glass, cool, there are 5000+ people in India who might, and a couple hundred jr IT support types a lot closer who are being replaced with an IAM system.
Two World Wars killed the main working segments of entire generations -- young men -- and allowed the West to take the lead for a while. The tech booms prolonged that a little further. But now them halcyon days are over homie. Hustle, or I'm replacing you with a math whiz from Delhi.
Go ahead. That math whiz can't deliver solutions fit for the real-world. I've seen it time and time again. But hey, I'm hoping you throw your money at that math whiz because you wasting your time and money is how I'm going to beat you!
The great thing about being FI is the lack of worry over this garbage. I would have truthfully answered that I was a terrible student, that I could only focus on subjects that truly interested me, and that one of those subjects fortunately happened to be coding.
They want to toss my resume for my struggles 20 years ago? So be it. It's as good of a filter for me not wanting to work for them as it is vice versa.
I'm pretty sure I'd have great answers for those questions, but that was also 30 years ago and the fact that those questions are being asked tells me I don't want to work there.
I've hired lots of software engineers in my life, and even for ones right out of university, I'm not sure I could recall what university they attended.
They use the same format for Accounts Payable Clerk as they do for Director of Devops. Slightly lazy, sure, but not really blog post worthy. If you're an experienced hire just put do not recall and move on with your life.
Could be auto-culled based on those types of answers, and that may be completely ok with any number of us but the vast majority of folks probably just answer as they normally would.
Asking about High School assumes everyone graduated from it. With dual enrollment it's quite possible for someone to get a college degree without ever getting a high school diploma (or even taking high school classes).
Really wish I'd taken a route like that. First couple years of college ended up being way easier and far lower-time-commitment than last couple of high school. I could have been less-stressed and earned an associate degree, ready to transfer to a bunch of universities toward a bachelor's degree, while also working more hours at a job that was giving me direct tech industry experience. All in the same couple years I spent absolutely miserable and gradually getting more and more mentally ill in high school (it's like school hours, lack of winter outdoor daytime activity in higher grades, and school building design are all intended to induce SAD).
No job I have had since the first one has asked about college in the interview process. Nor do I ask anyone except new grads about their college experience. No, it's not relevant.
What if you recall, but your math, physics, or computer science studies took place at home (e.g. the COVID cohort)? It only accepts answers for results at high school.
I've literally never been asked my college GPA, let alone high school. My first job out of school wanted to know that I had a degree, which I did, and asked me practical questions. Every job since has asked me about previous jobs and then asked me practical questions.
I've never seen this outside investment banking or management consulting, and even then, it was a very local thing (Scandinavia)
edit: Because they wanted "full picture" of the candidates. Meaning that they don't put too much weight on your HS grades, but that having been a consistent performer throughout your life, is a positive trait for them.
I met a former HR person from a company that had these kinds of questions, such as your SAT scores. She told me the point was hiring people who are competitive enough to care about that stuff.
I worked at a hedge fund that asked for SAT scores as part of the hiring process. They used it as a general indicator of intelligence I think. There were definitely a lot of really smart, bright people there and some definitely came from schools that weren't at all impressive. I think this was their way of recognizing bright people who didn't have the opportunity for impressive schools for whatever reason. Working there was pretty toxic, though, so maybe I'm being too charitable.
A common situation in my country is that quite a few high school math teachers are psychotic sadists -- maybe a few of the hardest-working students will clear the bar for the equivalent of an A or B. Sometimes the students with "the most potential" will have average (or worse) grades because the teacher prepares special, harder exams to push them harder. High school is usually an unrepresentative mess, I'd to love learn about the background of the person that decided this question is valuable.
I had one like that for 10th grade algebra. Basically failed the class , and the teacher was always mad at me. After I got he highest score in my county on some standardized math test and was given some award, the principal looked at my grades and saw I had a C- and had a conference with the teacher and myself where I found out he was giving me a different test than everyone else.
I feel like the teacher could be either the hero or the villain in this story—pushing you to excel, or tearing down a gifted student. What was the outcome of that meeting?
Definitely tearing down. However talented I was, my sister went through 3 years earlier and was a math prodigy on the national level, and I think this teacher viewed himself as partially responsible for her success. So I came in later, not nearly as good, but still locally great, and I think my lack of desire to push myself to excel like my sister did ticked him off and he wanted to punish me for it.
End result was I got an A in the course, but had to do extra credit assignments.
My high school math teacher went crazy on me when I withdrew from the math olympiad prep class due to scheduling conflicts with assembler language class in my first year and then did everything possible for me to fail over the next 4 years. Not sure how would that teacher bear hearing I made it to top schools despite their best efforts...
"In highschool I did well enough at Z80 assembly code in Junior year that I was selected as a teacher's assistant for the Pascal class in Senior year...Kiddo."
More generally, I don't care for how education and social-status assessment is conflated. School shouldn't be a competition. Education is compromised by the assessment aspect.
I did terrible in high school and ended up going to university 6 years later and did very well. High school is barely a faint memory of my past and being judged on that would definitely irk me.
Same. I barely graduated high school (I only did thanks to a guidance counselor that basically made things up for my transcript) but I graduated from uni within 4 years with a 3.9.
While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.
Considering he also wrote a blog post criticizing this question, I feel comfortable saying that he already passed on this job. So saying you'd pass on him has "you can't quit, you're fired!" energy to it. Also, I don't agree that this demonstrates insubordination. There can't be insubordination without a subordinate-supervisor relationship.
I also don't think this is a "smartass" answer:
> This is an irrelevant question unless you're focusing on recent grads with no job history.
That is a straightforward statement of his opinion. He's perfectly within his rights not to answer any question, and explaining why he chooses not to is hardly an unreasonable thing to do.
His goal seems to be to effect change. My understanding is that before reaching these questions, he _was_ interested in the job. Explaining to a potential employer that they lost a candidate's interest because of their application questions seems like something they would want to know.
I think a lot of questions that are of the more generic- or incompetent-seeming-HR sort only exist to test for compliance and for bullshit tolerance. Plus for the kind of socialization that means you understand you're supposed to both pretend to take them seriously and use acceptable corporation-friendly answers to everything (even if they're lies).
I think canonical gets a bunch of applications so they make the barriers to entry sufficiently annoying so only those who are truly interested will complete the application.
FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.
I'm 50. High School was a long time ago. I love Ubuntu, and I love Java (they were looking for people for Enterprise Java tooling), but the inane high school questions were, for me, a strong indicator that "oldies need not apply."
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.
It used to be that tech companies and startups were for the young, but now that every company is a tech company (bringing along all the societal baggage) we’ll see more of the same systemic incompetence, but mostly from companies that still think they can move fast and break things. It’s a new ballgame and regulatory agencies are paying attention.
I worry about grade inflation as well - a 1990s 1st means you are in the top 10% of students but a 2023 1st just means you are in the top 40%. Very different hurdles to clear.
I'm in my 30s (and, fair warning, worked with Greg for a short while, he's a smart chap) and recently applied for a spot at Canonical. On these sorts of questions I just answered "N/A" or "not measured".
A recruiter reached out to me and wanted me to take what I can only but describe as the equivalent of Phrenology and personality quiz through a coding quiz. I reached out to the recruiter and informed him that such things are likely illegal in the US and on top of that, I'd stated on my resume that I do not participate in Leetcode, etc.
What shocked me was the response: "Thank you for your withdrawal of interest in working at Canonical."
I've been a sometimes-active member of the Ubuntu community, contributing to various parts of their wiki until that became less usable, as well as providing help on their IRC channels, occasionally stepping in to help a package maintainer here and there, etc. For the position that they were hiring for (developer relations advocate), you'd think I'm the kind of person they beg for, but it really shows that they wouldn't hire the people who volunteer their time.
The inferred subtext of "we only hire yes men" put me off as much as anything. Who wants to work with a company full of them? Life's too short for that.
Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?
Seriously. Here is how to do it.
I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:
1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in.
(if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?
3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?
Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.
Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.
They aren't engineers. Even engineers rarely solve problems anywhere near the optimal way, due to a million reasons, ranging from political to technical. How do we expect HR and recruiters to optimally solve hiring, a immensely complex problem?
You literally just have a conversation about the tech. People's true skills shake themselves out in an in-depth conversation about a technology that the interviewer is familiar with.
The problem is, this initial funnels are just recruiters. They're technologically clueless. They're just putting words on paper and finding people that say those words with the right number of experience attached.
> Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?
Firstly because that's not their job, and secondly because recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers and they aren't going to be subject matter experts enough to judge between good answers to questions like that and bullshit.
> recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers
Most companies I've interviewed at over the years (basically all but the smallest startups) have had dedicated recruiters for developers; different people hired sales or marketing or other roles. This doesn't mean that they should be expected to be technical experts, but I do think it's interesting that the box-checking type of interviews rather than just having a genuine conversation also seem to be more common the larger the company is. It's probably not surprising, since the need for standardizing interviews is higher when you have a larger number of people performing the interviews, but it's a little ironic that the most boilerplate interviews I've had were all with recruiters who specifically only interview developers.
Then again, I also tend to get bounced around to different recruiters far more frequently with the larger companies. There have been times I've been passed around to half a dozen recruiters within the span of a month or so; one makes the initial contact, then another talks to me on the phone, then another coordinates my technical interview schedule, and then another actually gives me the offer, who then refers me to one final other recruiter to actually respond yes or no (and maybe negotiate if possible). I know some of these are probably a more entry-level position that I've seen referred to as "recruiting coordinators" rather than full-fledged recruiters (meaning that they often handle the logistics like scheduling but don't perform interviews themselves), but it still feels absurd to have to talk to so many different people for basically the same thing. My impression is that it's somewhat intentionally trying to put me at a disadvantage by making it impossible for me to carry over any expectations from one step to the next (e.g. one recruiter might say something about compensation or benefits and then the next one conveniently doesn't know what I'm talking about and can claim that no one would have told me that).
The recruiting industrial complex seems to thrive on creating original obstacles with no consequences for how arbitrary they are. I suspect they benefit from the more work they create.
> 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.
Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.
As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.
When hosting technical interviews, I deliberately lead with this type of question before we get into high-effort questions. Many candidates will immediately reveal knowledge gaps which set the tone for the whole interview.
Frequently experienced candidates with interview practice will simply ramble for many minutes - listing extensive contributions in excessive detail. Unfortunately when this happens it’s usually pretty awkward for everyone.
The ideal candidate will answer this question very gracefully and enable us to proceed directly into problem solving questions.
Gotta agree with your point about good/bad interviewers. I want to add that good interviewers/interviewees know how to manage the “risk” of such open-ended questions leading to a pointless interview.
There are people who are good at tech, but not good at casual conversation about tech. They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts, and they may be afraid to ask for clarification on your terminology. And rightly so, as I've heard people act like I am a moron for asking "What exactly do you mean by TECH_BUZZWORD?"
Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
>Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
> They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts
Would that not imply they aren't a good fit for the OP's workplace? And presumably, a lot of larger tech companies, since communication must be a large part of your job.
I am admittedly not good at talking on the fly if I haven't prepped for it. I try to make up for it by trying to focus on writing well.
The notion of looking for a "React" developer is rather silly to begin with so any employer doing that can expect poor results. Competent hiring managers like look for more general skills plus the ability to quickly learn new technologies as needed. Tomorrow the industry will move on to something else and React will become obsolete.
If you need specific technical skills in React for an urgent project then retain a contractor or consultant, don't hire an employee.
Competent hiring managers look for folks with 10 years experience with React, C#, Java, DevOps, Embedded C++ Development, Mobile cross platform dev and ofc Rust for good measure, each.
We have long forgotten about doing one thing and doing it right.
I've heard reports that recruiters might spend all of 15 to 30 seconds per resume during a screening exercise. Never mind not having technical expertise to ask technical probing questions, sifting through the top of the funnel is more of an exercise in coping w/ high volumes of resumes than it is about validating depth of expertise at the bottom of the interview funnel.
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school. I don't know if any of them would work at Canonical (which has exhausted most of its growth potential by now), though.
Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does.
For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amount of time you want to spend on interviews per unit time, an amount of time you're willing to spend per unit hire, and just optimize those metrics. If you're hitting those targets, there's no harm in all sorts of arbitrary selection criteria that don't hit protected categories. They do two things: help you hit the time budgets, and transmit your priorities to candidates.
Personally, I find it hard to be upset about someone else's selection criteria. That's their honest expression of what they care about. It's like people complaining about interview feedback. Why ask if you're going to fight about the answer? It's like that.
Or any for that matter...the majority of schools educate for the lowest common denominator. Most talented individuals I know did supplemental education on their own outside of school systems.
Right, it's exactly as you say. They educate to and test to the simplest form. Failing at even that means you fail at something the lowest common denominator, as you put it, passes at. That's a pretty strong indicator of something.
There are those who refuse to play the game because they don't see a poor schooling experience as useful and you're saying those people are the same as those who can't do basic math. Or at least you're not distinguishing the difference.
> Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school.
To me this simply shows a lack of life experience. One of the best engineers I know left school before graduating. Has ADHD, was a bit messed up with drugs wrong crowd etc at that time.
He’s also a genius, had his life together for over 20 years and a very senior person at my current company. Why should some bad decisions over 20 years ago have any relevance to the value he’d provide now? Why should anything you did over 20 years ago have any relevance, good or bad?
This is unquestionably yet another example of ageism in an industry that is riddled with it.
Shopify has an initial round with recruiter called "Life Story interview". You basically start from the beginning, talking about your high school experience, what did you like there and what did you study, your childhood hobbies ...
I think the part that most "worker" people reading this are missing, is that with mature markets you get someone that is vaguely, a little bit, experienced and on your side, to give feedback over time.
The last "team" you want setting every question, and expectation, and results.. is the adversarial side that is trying to get the most out of all candidates with the least trouble to themselves..
"My high school career was defined by the discovery in my early teens that I had been raised in an obscure Jesus People offshoot cult, followed by a several year process of distancing and extricating myself from this environment without excessively antagonizing my family.
Coding was as much a stimulating intellectual challenge as it was a pretext for gradually increasing the time I spent away from both home and my customary social obligations, down at the library's computer lab."
> This seems strange for a middle aged candidate, what are they looking for here? Communication skills?
Culture fit, probably looking for a few keywords or experiences that match a profile.
Seems fraught with peril from a legal perspective, IMO. Lotta hooks or opportunities for discrimination.
OTOH I could also see the appeal, e.g. you're not the ideal-on-paper candidate, but you did a bunch of X and Y, had experience w/ Z, tell me about the other stuff, sell me a little. I'm not an MIT hyper-literati type but give me the chance to show why that doesn't matter, etc. etc.
A few years ago I worked at a place that wanted to implement "Life Story Interviews." I had the experience of several candidates responding, basically, WTF?? and hanging up.
I went to High School in the 1980s. I think I did okay in those classes, but I fail to see how something that happened more than 30 years ago would be relevant for hiring purposes in the 2020s.
Fodder for discrimination lawsuits. The more information they have like this, the more they have to work with when defending a suit. School-based discrimination has been deemed legally acceptable, thus "Our records indicate the plaintiff did not meet our high school expectations. She was not hired for that reason."
Not that I agree with it, but maybe they ask those kinds of questions because they want people who will just answer the damn questions, rather than argue with them over it.
> High School: I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school.
...is this evidence that the filter is bad, or evidence that the filter is working?
That stood out to me too. This could be very valuable information, in the employer's opinion, to make their choice.
The author's counterpoint might be that there are a lot of similar behavioral/subordination/personal-history questions that they could have asked, but didn't, because, as TFA discusses, a lot of stuff you did when you were barely starting to be an adult doesn't matter after a few years.
The problem with the hiring process is that there's no one correct way to do it.
What consistently confuses me is why any highly marketable professional would be frustrated about an organization filtering in a way that they disagree with. If you can tell that an organization is not for you in the application form, that's literally the best time to find out. I don't know why anyone would want to go into business with people who they disagree with on how to run a business.
Is this evidence that the applicant is bad, or good?
This story is real, but I understand if you don't believe it: The year I finished school, all but one of my school's English Lit students failed the state exam (TEE). The only one that passed was the guy coming bottom of the class.
Depends on what kind of applicant they're looking for. In some roles you may want someone who is not afraid to challenge rules and conventions, in some roles, rules and conventions exist for very important reasons. The preferred balance varies per organization/team/role etc, just as it does for any other attribute of someone's style of work.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadI would of closed the tab pretty quickly.
Perhaps the question about language indicates that they're only looking for people who wouldn't have closed their tabs.
The next worst thing they could have asked was my Myers-Briggs personality category.
I see what you did there. And you’re right, but “would have” is not there yet, it’s just a common mistake like swapping your/you’re.
I want to complain that they don't have a "won the state championship" answer for the math question. The allowed responses don't even capture my full, 30 years ago high school glory.
There are a great many other places to work that DO value your actual accomplishments.
More likely they do this because they have so many applications coming in that having to pay more to a lesser worker is worth more than having to hire many more HR staff to process all the applications. The hope is that it will scare off most people, and if that fails a machine can filter on these values. It could be any arbitrary value – race, religion, random number – but courts have effectively ruled that any filtering mechanism that isn't directly related to the job or school could face severe legal consequences, so this keeps the lawyers happy.
OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.
Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?
False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.
False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.
Why would you ask this except for cargo culting?
Small companies don't care because they want someone who can do the work.
Large companies' decision makers are much more risk averse. They're looking for a reason not to hire you. If you're a poor employee that makes no difference to the,, they are fine, if they take a risk by hiring you despite you once getting a B in high school spanish in 1837, they're the ones that will be embarrassed.
This is why small companies will take a CV, interview twice and hire you. But big companies have a dozen committees, a HR "portal" that takes a CV AND then asks for all the same details and more field by field and insists on giving you personality tests and a full horoscope. Those are not there to find good employees (or to weed out the old). They're just arse covering by middle management. And for that purpose they work.
So you can stand outside shouting that it's "not relevant" or you can apply elsewhere or you can jump through the hoops. No approach is right or wrong, they're just pragmatic decisions based on what you want.
Good companies don't ask about high school unless they are getting interns (and even then they usually ask about college)
Debian is solid. Ubuntu's layer on top is a bit ymmv.
Context: In 2019 I built a desktop (my personal workstation) and it was my first machine without a windows or Mac OS partition. That machine is still my personal daily driver (outside of work). Using it for ML/MLOps/misc engineering projects has taught me a ton about parts of how Linux works and is organized.
[0] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
For a long time Debian refused to bundle closed source firmware with the installer but they've relented on that now.
The holdout I know of is Ubuntu have zfs in the kernel and Debian as a package. That seems to make no difference in practice.
With your logic we should never question anything or anyone because positing our own truth is irrelevant.
Someone asking me about my strengths in high school, which was decades ago, then that tells me they are looking for young people. (And from the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 you can see they don't care about my grad school experience, which was much more formative to my career path.)
In the US, age discrimination for employment for people 40 years or older is illegal. As the author of the linked-to essay correctly points out, these questions comes across like trying to discriminate on the basis of age without outright saying it.
Which trespasses on a special form of government monopoly that it can enforce.
It was quite obvious to me I would be rejected, as the form is much more focused on "things that look good on paper" rather than "what this person can do", e.g. asking for your GPA.
This presumably reflects the internal culture which leads to a history of user-hostile decisions: snap, Unity, that Amazon fiasco. They probably looked good on paper.
I'm only salty because I think people with atypical profiles like mine could truly make their software better and more adapted to today's FLOSS world. Oh well, guess I'll just keep working on maximizing someone's profits.
What more could you ask for from a form?
Hahaha. I miss Unity though.
But then everyone except Duke Power has ignored Griggs v. Duke Power.
It's funny to imagine that the barrage of questions from Ubuntu is merely a tactic to suppress the obvious question from the candidate: why is the company seeming to fall for that move by MS.
The whole tech industry is insane. Can we please go back to: I give you work, you give me money. And if you want passion then I want equity.
If you won't crawl through broken glass, cool, there are 5000+ people in India who might, and a couple hundred jr IT support types a lot closer who are being replaced with an IAM system.
Two World Wars killed the main working segments of entire generations -- young men -- and allowed the West to take the lead for a while. The tech booms prolonged that a little further. But now them halcyon days are over homie. Hustle, or I'm replacing you with a math whiz from Delhi.
They want to toss my resume for my struggles 20 years ago? So be it. It's as good of a filter for me not wanting to work for them as it is vice versa.
I've hired lots of software engineers in my life, and even for ones right out of university, I'm not sure I could recall what university they attended.
Good for them. The nerds who have dared to live, the misfits, and just about anyone else who finds that whole spiel atrocious will go somewhere else.
Fuck that noise!
This was discussed not too long ago
Incredibly lazy, and likely not useful
edit: Because they wanted "full picture" of the candidates. Meaning that they don't put too much weight on your HS grades, but that having been a consistent performer throughout your life, is a positive trait for them.
> Solid 83% man my whole life, and I'll give you a solid 83 for all 4 years I'm there!
End result was I got an A in the course, but had to do extra credit assignments.
I have more respect for someone who credibly says "this specific question isn't worth my time" than someone who meekly does whatever is asked.
oh, and the blogger gave a smarta* answer to a free-form text question?
Yep, insubordination is still there. I'd pass on this candidate too.
I also don't think this is a "smartass" answer:
> This is an irrelevant question unless you're focusing on recent grads with no job history.
That is a straightforward statement of his opinion. He's perfectly within his rights not to answer any question, and explaining why he chooses not to is hardly an unreasonable thing to do.
If he doesnt want the job, why waste eveyones time with this childishness? If he does want the job, why not play ball?
But allow me to give you some advice: good managers don't have subordinates, they have a team.
FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.
A recruiter reached out to me and wanted me to take what I can only but describe as the equivalent of Phrenology and personality quiz through a coding quiz. I reached out to the recruiter and informed him that such things are likely illegal in the US and on top of that, I'd stated on my resume that I do not participate in Leetcode, etc.
What shocked me was the response: "Thank you for your withdrawal of interest in working at Canonical."
I've been a sometimes-active member of the Ubuntu community, contributing to various parts of their wiki until that became less usable, as well as providing help on their IRC channels, occasionally stepping in to help a package maintainer here and there, etc. For the position that they were hiring for (developer relations advocate), you'd think I'm the kind of person they beg for, but it really shows that they wouldn't hire the people who volunteer their time.
Also foreigners that studied in systems that do not have easy analogue to the American GPA. Also autodidacts. Also people not suffering fools gladly.
Seriously. Here is how to do it.
I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:
1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?
3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?
Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.
Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.
Too many counter examples irl who had shit grades but were geniuses at actual work to discount.
The problem is, this initial funnels are just recruiters. They're technologically clueless. They're just putting words on paper and finding people that say those words with the right number of experience attached.
Firstly because that's not their job, and secondly because recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers and they aren't going to be subject matter experts enough to judge between good answers to questions like that and bullshit.
Most companies I've interviewed at over the years (basically all but the smallest startups) have had dedicated recruiters for developers; different people hired sales or marketing or other roles. This doesn't mean that they should be expected to be technical experts, but I do think it's interesting that the box-checking type of interviews rather than just having a genuine conversation also seem to be more common the larger the company is. It's probably not surprising, since the need for standardizing interviews is higher when you have a larger number of people performing the interviews, but it's a little ironic that the most boilerplate interviews I've had were all with recruiters who specifically only interview developers.
Then again, I also tend to get bounced around to different recruiters far more frequently with the larger companies. There have been times I've been passed around to half a dozen recruiters within the span of a month or so; one makes the initial contact, then another talks to me on the phone, then another coordinates my technical interview schedule, and then another actually gives me the offer, who then refers me to one final other recruiter to actually respond yes or no (and maybe negotiate if possible). I know some of these are probably a more entry-level position that I've seen referred to as "recruiting coordinators" rather than full-fledged recruiters (meaning that they often handle the logistics like scheduling but don't perform interviews themselves), but it still feels absurd to have to talk to so many different people for basically the same thing. My impression is that it's somewhat intentionally trying to put me at a disadvantage by making it impossible for me to carry over any expectations from one step to the next (e.g. one recruiter might say something about compensation or benefits and then the next one conveniently doesn't know what I'm talking about and can claim that no one would have told me that).
YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.
Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.
As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.
The process is less important, I think.
Frequently experienced candidates with interview practice will simply ramble for many minutes - listing extensive contributions in excessive detail. Unfortunately when this happens it’s usually pretty awkward for everyone.
The ideal candidate will answer this question very gracefully and enable us to proceed directly into problem solving questions.
Gotta agree with your point about good/bad interviewers. I want to add that good interviewers/interviewees know how to manage the “risk” of such open-ended questions leading to a pointless interview.
Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
Effective communication skills are also important.
What types of interviewing styles rank well?
And conversely, there are people who are not good at tech, but good at casual conversation about tech. Those people tend to become your boss :)
Would that not imply they aren't a good fit for the OP's workplace? And presumably, a lot of larger tech companies, since communication must be a large part of your job.
I am admittedly not good at talking on the fly if I haven't prepped for it. I try to make up for it by trying to focus on writing well.
If you need specific technical skills in React for an urgent project then retain a contractor or consultant, don't hire an employee.
Competent hiring managers look for folks with 10 years experience with React, C#, Java, DevOps, Embedded C++ Development, Mobile cross platform dev and ofc Rust for good measure, each.
We have long forgotten about doing one thing and doing it right.
The real question is: Why don't the courts? Everything else is just to cover asses when the discrimination lawsuits appear.
A recruiter without technical background will not be able to judge the answers other than „was able to form sentences“ or „couldn’t phrase anything“
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
I could have been valedictorian, but it doesn't mean anything if I can't work with a team.
Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does.
For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amount of time you want to spend on interviews per unit time, an amount of time you're willing to spend per unit hire, and just optimize those metrics. If you're hitting those targets, there's no harm in all sorts of arbitrary selection criteria that don't hit protected categories. They do two things: help you hit the time budgets, and transmit your priorities to candidates.
Personally, I find it hard to be upset about someone else's selection criteria. That's their honest expression of what they care about. It's like people complaining about interview feedback. Why ask if you're going to fight about the answer? It's like that.
This makes me think you don't know many awesome engineers.
To me this simply shows a lack of life experience. One of the best engineers I know left school before graduating. Has ADHD, was a bit messed up with drugs wrong crowd etc at that time.
He’s also a genius, had his life together for over 20 years and a very senior person at my current company. Why should some bad decisions over 20 years ago have any relevance to the value he’d provide now? Why should anything you did over 20 years ago have any relevance, good or bad?
This is unquestionably yet another example of ageism in an industry that is riddled with it.
The last "team" you want setting every question, and expectation, and results.. is the adversarial side that is trying to get the most out of all candidates with the least trouble to themselves..
I wanna believe most people would pass unless they said their childhood hobbies are torturing animals and setting fires. But I have no idea.
Coding was as much a stimulating intellectual challenge as it was a pretext for gradually increasing the time I spent away from both home and my customary social obligations, down at the library's computer lab."
your move, interviewer.
Culture fit, probably looking for a few keywords or experiences that match a profile.
Seems fraught with peril from a legal perspective, IMO. Lotta hooks or opportunities for discrimination.
OTOH I could also see the appeal, e.g. you're not the ideal-on-paper candidate, but you did a bunch of X and Y, had experience w/ Z, tell me about the other stuff, sell me a little. I'm not an MIT hyper-literati type but give me the chance to show why that doesn't matter, etc. etc.
Can you give me a link to the decision?
Unless you graduated from HS by 1982, you can't say you've been out of high school for 40 years
> High School: I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school.
...is this evidence that the filter is bad, or evidence that the filter is working?
The author's counterpoint might be that there are a lot of similar behavioral/subordination/personal-history questions that they could have asked, but didn't, because, as TFA discusses, a lot of stuff you did when you were barely starting to be an adult doesn't matter after a few years.
What consistently confuses me is why any highly marketable professional would be frustrated about an organization filtering in a way that they disagree with. If you can tell that an organization is not for you in the application form, that's literally the best time to find out. I don't know why anyone would want to go into business with people who they disagree with on how to run a business.
This story is real, but I understand if you don't believe it: The year I finished school, all but one of my school's English Lit students failed the state exam (TEE). The only one that passed was the guy coming bottom of the class.