If you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.
> The process described in that Reddit post reads like a parody of tenure-track searches in academia.
Tenure-track hiring is nothing like that. Is it rigorous? Yes. Do they take dumb formalized tests? No. Rather, they typically present their research to the faculty.
Well, I didn't call it an informed parody - my one brief brush with academia having sent me fleeing back to industry, very much for keeps. Granted it's not always a bed of roses, but it is much more rewarding, not to mention much less often so petty and so vile.
understandable, as each interviewing systems effectively selects people good at passing that system.
if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests.
if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology.
if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management and upper management are somewhat disconnected from the actual work that has to be performed.
Randomness in interviews is underrated because it offsets these over-selection effects.
I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.
I honestly don't think it's that bad. But if one or two (for a sanity check) qualified people look at resumes and have a 30 minute conversation/technical weeding out question with a candidate, you're probably getting into diminishing returns past that. (Though you probably also lean heavily on referrals and "pedigree" given that you're not really trying to get some non-obvious signal in the interview process.)
As an American in California, watching the extreme lengths people went to, to find specialists fitting some very exacting requirements and literally bringing people from around the world and then rejecting them in large numbers, I was told that in China in the dot-com boom time they formed companies with very skilled people but basically formed the teams with whoever showed up. It was a completely different method, and the difference is the virtue signalling and status cues for the founders and their inner circle. In Silicon Valley, it was anti-status to NOT search the world for particular resume contents, and that got weird sometimes. Secondly the "google style" interrogation of new candidates with "you just got out of computer science graduate school so you learn to present like this" whiteboard sessions, evolved in the hands of callous or worse managers, into a sort of repeated hazing of programmers, by non-programmers or the like.
A lot of the back of the envelope math points to new hire failure rates of around 50%, where failure is if the candidate is still there in 18 months.
Only about 19% would be considered "successful" hires.
Also only about 11% were not successful due to purely lacking technical skills. like I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or something, but in many cases that's not the issue.
>I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or something
Not knowing how to do that, or not knowing how to google how to do that?
I also joined some jobs as a noob when switching domains, where I was lacking skills that the more seasoned people would consider as being "basic", but I could also google what I was lacking most of the time and learn on the fly.
and oddly, even though I'm probably the best at going on and on about things that I find interesting, no one seems to want to want to hire me. I don't think this is the full picture.
I think the interview process is tricky for people that like to dig into technical details as a lot of companies just want to hear adulation from the candidate towards the company, under the guise of excitement for the company mission. or whatever.
OK, here's a possibly better picture from having hired many engineers over the years.
I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.
"Going on an on about things" one finds interesting is not the same as marketing oneself.
I don't know if this is what you're referring to by the phrase 'going on and on' but the phrase makes me think of my coworker who talks in circles about any topic, providing many words but little info. And the circles usually incorporate personal anecdotes. He hasn't realized people tune out immediately.
Does that also imply that you are not particularly good at your work but just an expert at gaming the system? Or are you somehow special and everyone else is an idiot?
I worked at a company that sounds similarly to this company culture about 3 years ago. I got laid off, moved onto a better company.
But just yesterday I ran into someone who works at my old company. We chatted for a little bit until I realized how drained I was getting just from talking to him
And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread:
Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc)
They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about
I have people on both sides of these spectrums.
On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on
On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them
Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences
Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity.
But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards.
It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way
While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side.
Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.
I am not against behavioral interview if it’s part of the loop, but these attempts to force candid to answer some standardized questions make no sense. Especially you can easily come up with many of the answers using GPT now a days anyways. I for one don’t even have access to these when I interview candidates and I am pretty sure HR doesn’t even look at them or even have a quantitative way to judge them or verify their authenticity.
If I did that, I wouldn't land the job with ~2 the compensation of what I'd have otherwise and the best job overall.
It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.
Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible.
This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.
Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field, you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-level analyst position. We're a hospital.
Yeah. It goes both ways. Interview processes may often be terrible. But it's also the case that, in a world where you don't even need to put a stamp on an envelope, a lot of people looking for a job/any job (or hoping to get a story written about their client, etc.) will just blast out email/applications to any valid or even invalid endpoint.
ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.
> Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers)
I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)
Hot damn this canonical dude is more full of shit than I ever possibly could have imagined lmao. I love Linux, I really do. I enjoy writing software for ig as a career choice. This has nothing to do with my love for Linux lol. But wow.
Insane. I don't change jobs often (last time was 15 years ago), but the last two both worked pretty much the same: application, weeding interview, serious interview, decision. I've also sat on the other side, and we ran it the same way.
I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually counterproductive, because talented people are not going to put up with it.
On paper Canonical is a company I'd rather enjoy working for. I love the product (despite its flaws) and have a lot of relevant experience.
I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such.
Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not.
But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time.
Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.
Last time this came up here, Shuttleworth popped up to tell us it was just what they needed so there you go. No need to apply. :shrug:
Yeah...I applied when I was job hunting at the beginning of the year and I hard stopped on the high school question. I've got over 30 years of relevant experience and if that's what they're asking, I'm obviously not the sort of person they're looking for.
Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.
I just trod water through my high school (read secondary school in the UK) years. Like you I am not the boy I used to be so hiring 'him' would not be a good fit.
Same exact thing happened to me. I'm not writing an essay about my high school life, that's ridiculous.
I don't do asymmetrical interviews. I'll consider a take in coding test in lieu of something else (or a very trivial one), but a written essay means I'm spending time and they are not. A phone or face to face interview requires an actual investment in their time, and doesn't treat my time as completely disposable.
If your job involves communication in some form, it's reasonable to want to see an example--though I'd generally be pretty open to seeing previously written or recorded examples rather than something created specifically for the interview process.
That seems like a really terrible way to start off with a new company. But then I feel like that way about most of the scuzzy things some percentage of people have no qualms about doing if they can get off with them (e.g. working two full-time jobs at the same time).
I had the same thought. People have rightly pointed out the age bias, but there's also an implicit bias toward embellishment. People who are comfortable doing that can post lots of positive and mostly unverifiable things there.
Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe overly positive unverifiable statements are actually negatives for them.
I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages.
As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with my business partner to try to raise money to build accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No investor would bite.
But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since high school.
Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed, as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my interview is now up as well)
That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process, signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company. The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do not believe this to be the case.
So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a materiel leadership change at the top.
> The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are
They know, and it's been discussed often.
They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans would rock the boat and demand too much money, and dip when it's clear the middle mgmt are clowns.
> I just went through this process. Got autorejected after the personality/IQ test thing. My essay was 13 pages.
Same! 30 years of experience. Technical and management. I applied to two roles and both auto rejected. I had contact with a human once to ask if I had a change at all since I don’t have a university degree and was told to not bother.
Because it strongly implies that they are looking for people for whom high school experience was recent enough to be relevant to who they are now. For a 20-something this is (debatably) plausible. For a fifty or sixty year old it is at best a tenuous indicator.
The very few jobs I've had in the decades since the first one post-grad school have been through some level of personal connection so I've never really gone through a standard interview process. The one person I know fairly well who worked for Canonical was there for about 6 months so there was obviously some disconnect.
The best tidbit of insight to hiring processes I've heard is that once your initial application/resume has cleared the first hurdle the company is basically looking for reasons to not hire you.
Generally getting qualified candidates is the hard part. Once you can program basic things like fizzbuzz the only question is are you so bad we don't want to work with you even though you can do the job.
I think that's true for more junior engineering roles, but I don't think that's as true for hiring senior engineers.
Why would you pay a senior engineer salary for someone who is just barely competent enough to bang out CRUD apps, when you could spend a little more time searching and find someone who's a force multiplier and can lead projects?
I applied at Canonical at one point and withdrew my application after it became a kafkaesque experience. They wanted me to do a “psychometric” evaluation at which point I had seen enough of their.. culture ?
Funnily the engineer who was responsible for the application also sent a very bureaucratic sounding email acknowledging my withdrawal.
I can’t imagine their process for interviews doesn’t reflect what working there would be like - if it doesn’t then they really need to fix their pipeline
This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording:
The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here, where here liked to the US government website.
"Brilliant. Tell me about things you've done in which you have truly excelled. I don't mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you've setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven't done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you'll fit in just fine"
Canonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand.
This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available.
Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth.
I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.
They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
> I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.
Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.
But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.
Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.
> NIH
If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.
Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take a less doctrinaire approach to including software that was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time) than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-box experience for casual users.
I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing.
Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
I think your metaphor is going in the wrong direction! Customers and investors have a choice. We pay the government or we get locked in a box we helped pay for (-:
Did you work for the Bush administration? If you did, you should probably accept the criticism. If not, well, how is 20 year old criticism of the government any skin off your back?
Depends on how you take it. I worked for the government during the Bush administration, but not in the administrative staff itself. It's just a shitty and unnecessary jab that rubs me entirely the wrong way.
Well, yes, it was a shitty and unnecessary jab. Sorry for that. But really, it was a jab at the GW Bush White House administration, not the civil service. I grew up a great fan of the US and Bush-Iraq felt like something important in the world had died. It felt like stupidity on a generational scale, that would have terrible consequences for the US. And that was before the torture.
Yeah I don't see working Canonical as an obvious target for the most ambitious, but there's nothing wrong with him having aspired to that at some point. The dig agaisnt the government is completely reasonable. Also somehow ironic because nobody has more hoops to jump through as an employer than the government.
Eh, a year ago I interviewed at a startup that has since died. I was on round 8 when I bailed. SaaS has imported the bureaucratic mindset of the universities that cranked out all these founders.
Over much of the 2000s, it's fair to say that Shuttleworth/Canonical had pretty grand ambitions. They're still around--which is a not inconsiderable achievement in its own right--but in an era where the cloud providers have their own Linux flavors and other distros have generally leveled the usability playing field, Ubuntu just never really broke out.
What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way
I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment.
We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process.
As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
In the early days it wasn't "polished" in any way other than the font or color choice. Which just about every distro was doing at the time (Fedora also had a clean and liked theme).
Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.
Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
> Both looked dated back then, but Fedora Core 3 more so.
That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity theme is much closer to what standard GNOME looked like back then. Which goes against the original point that they were especially polished.
> Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common these days? First of all, many distros eschewed "Free Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc; and they definitely did it better than the early versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same experience as the standard debian installer that early versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that didn't offer it.
But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.
Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a year and a half before the first version of Ubuntu (even with the fact that this person chose to manually partition their disks, it's pretty streamlined):
Yeah, you're right. They're much more difficult than Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").
In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too far when they started developing in their own bubble and refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their overly opinionated stances and for holding back advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty now to show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they start [and always lose] to do things "their way": systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland, GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.
Their reputation has always been that they use the Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved in the community.
> The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
There you go. This is why they were popular. In a time when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a millionaire cover the cost of sending it ...
I'm not completely convinced about the free discs argument.
I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of them) newsstand had at least two biweekly Linux magazines. They cost something like 5€ (or whatever currency we had at the time) and they always had either 2 linux installer cd or one installer and one cd with some cool software to try.
And they had serious quality articles too. I still remember one where they described in detail how they built a DIY magnetic tunneling microscope and used it to recover some data from an hard drive.
By the time Ubuntu free cds came out I already had a big collection of Linux installers, none of them downloaded on my own.
Agreed about the rest. They've always been poisonous towards upstreams and probably contributed to set back the famous year of the Linux Desktop by diluting the efforts in dead-end projects instead of working with upstream towards a common goal.
Oh, definitely. I should be clear that this is a very US-centric viewpoint. The European scene (especially France and Germany) was drastically different. Whereas Red Hat/Fedora had a massive slice of the pie in the US, SuSE reigned over Germany. Additionally, Europeans (especially the hacker/developer scene) globbed onto Free Software much more quickly.
So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc.
As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.
There was zero polishing appart from different background color and theme accent in their early releases. It was just a debian with package versions similar to SID with debian's experimental installer.
What they really did well and made them known very well is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other distros you either had to buy them from a store, download it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with cdrom install of a different distro every month.
That was a big deal when very few people had access to fast internet connections.
Goes to show that one thing is creating technology, and another thing is creating a product people can use.
That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical.
They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three.
As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
> That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono.
By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.
It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected.
It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)
As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation.
And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),
while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu.
Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs.
Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair.
I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me th...
>Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro
This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there.
Mandrake/Mandriva distribution was easy to use/install, but since it was from a French company, it never had any traction, if I remember were, it was created in late 90s.
> So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions).
> The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to.
Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc).
> Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
I think you shouldn't undersell the impact of Ubuntu shipping with binaries/installers for proprietary drivers, media codecs and things like adobe flash. These were easy enough to install on other distros, but for a noob user Ubuntu was more streamlined.
Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
No one's underselling this, you're overselling this. Jockey (their proprietary software installer) didn't become a thing in Ubuntu until their 6.10-7.04 releases. 2-2.5 years after the first version.
SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.
There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.
I was there. They shot to the most popular distros right away. Just go look at distrowatch for 2004-2006.
Regardless, let's pretend your point is accurate. The bigger point is they didn't do anything new or better than anyone. And, in fact, were a net negative for many communities/efforts.
It helps if you read the entire post, not your own little cherrypicked context.
It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
From a technical users' perspective, super easy...if you already knew what to do, or what to search for to figure out what to do.
The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.
> The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.
The point was, other popular distros were doing that 4+ years before Ubuntu was. Fedora and Debian were just about the only major Linux distros that didn't include them. Just like how other distros had better installers, better themes/user experiences, etc than Ubuntu:
Also, if you had the "technical skill" to even know to download Fedora, I find it baffling that you didn't have the skill to type "nvidia drivers fedora" into Google. People were doing the same thing for Windows for a decade+ at that time.
Sure, Ubuntu eventually became nice-looking and easy to install. But they didn't innovate those things in anyway. Instead, they became so off the backs of a bunch of other communities doing real hard work and contributing nothing themselves.
I did that my senior year. I was focused on my extra-curricular studies of music and philosophy, so I only took 2 AP courses instead of the 4 or 5 the school wanted me to take so that I'd have more free time.
I feel like in 2004 not everyone who was an asshole on the internet was aware they were assholes, and there wasn’t the same culture of enthusiastically informing them.
Not to excuse the behavior, but different times were different times.
I can't read this comments as anything other than virtue signalling. You can call Mark Shuttleworth an asshole and still use Ubuntu without being a hypocrite.
This Shuttleworth guy sounds like a smarmy jackass, and after reading that article on the hiring process, I wouldn't even wanna bother, especially considering I could literally apply at a MAGNAM company and get double the compensation.
They can have their "fanatical fan base employees" with my blessing.
But these factors were also in place for their distro ascendency too, so you probably can't blame the factors. If anything, long term success itself is more likely to explain eventual hubris, complacency then decline.
I still use Ubuntu at home, but it's probably just inertia at this point. I don't hate it, but I also don't really like it the way I used to.
That’s interesting because as soon as I read the phrase ‘virtue signaling’, I ignore the person who wrote it. It’s deeply rude because you’re implying that I have no virtue. You don’t know me and so that’s intellectually dishonest.
Ubuntu has been underwhelming as of late. It’s fine, just underwhelming. Sometimes software becomes underwhelming as it matures but in this case, the hiring process seems designed to ship underwhelming software.
Then there is the particular issue. That kind of thinking/communication style doesn’t make me feel comfortable with Ubuntu (or any project he would have a leadership role in).
And finally, I’m really tired of how our industry seems to glorify jerks.
So we have:
1.) Ubuntu is rather underwhelming.
2.) The hiring process is so fucked that underwhelming software is the most likely result.
3.) There is a lot of competition and I can find projects with vaguely professional/secure leaders.
Obama certainly could have done a better job at stopping them (and done better at many other things as well), but those drone strikes started under Bush2, along with the rest of the mostly disastrous "war on terror". Given we experienced our first non-peaceful transition of power, it's absurd to pretend anything else in US history compares.
I'm not sure why that is relevant. "Transition of power" describes the period of time when power transitions from one administration to the next. A non-peaceful end of presidency can be followed by a peaceful transition of power.
VPOTUS assuming the presidency absolutely is a new administration. Hard to see how anyone could claim otherwise.
Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.
> VPOTUS assuming the presidency absolutely is a new administration. Hard to see how anyone could claim otherwise.
I am not claiming otherwise. I'm saying: it doesn't matter if the last president dies.
> Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.
What violence occurred during the transition of power? Who tried to stop the political processes?
> What violence occurred during the transition of power? Who tried to stop the political processes?
There wasn't supposed to be a transition of power. A violent initiation to the transfer of power when transfer of power was not supposed to occur is a non-peaceful transfer of power.
They also buy email lists from ZoomInfo to spam people then don’t take GDPR requests seriously after you chase them for answers. So yeah, good riddance.
Unless, of course, you work for that government. Kind of the same one that put people on the Moon, made the atomic bomb, invented the internet, and other things less extraordinary than repackaging Debian ;-)
I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.
The Bush Administration did not do any of those things. Reading his comments as a dismissal of those things, rather than the guy running the White House when he wrote it, seems uncharitable.
Words like “Bush” or “current administration” do not occur in the article. Rather, it was just a link. You don’t have any particular reason to be this charitable.
He linked to the White House website. The occupant of the White House at the time was George W. Bush. I am not even trying to be charitable, that's just the most likely reading to me. Basically every talk show host made similar jokes all the time because Bush was widely considered to be an incompetent nepo baby, so I'd need a reason to read it any other way, and I don't really see one here.
They also interned Japanese-Americans, caused the Arab Spring/Syrian Civil War, made the atomic bomb (oh, you mentioned that one!), ran numerous undisclosed human experimentation projects, imposed multiple central banking systems on the United States, caused the mortgage crisis, and gave China most favoured nation status.
Except most of the things I mentioned hurt Americans first and foremost. You didn't catch that? Gulf War syndrome, Tuskegee, MK Ultra, Fannie Mae/Freddy Mac/Lehman Brothers, destroying Detroit, enriching an adversary totalitarian nuclear state with Mao Zedong on its money, confiscating gold, devaluing the dollar... literally putting American citizens in camps.
The US government serves the US government's interests.
It is controlled by the people elected. The only solution is to elect better representatives who need to push for stricter regulations on government behavior so that worse representatives have fewer opportunities for making a mess.
it's nominally controlled by the elected. until someone accuses the elected of threatening the independence of such and such agency and then the intelligence community (permanent Washington) has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. stories are planted in all CIA/State Department-aligned i.e. major newspapers. classified information is selectively leaked by the heads of the agencies to their friends in academia. lawsuits fly. the ACLU finds a couch surfer to testify that bees are fish. and it's over before it started.
How is it noise to imply that people who work in government are overwhelmingly blood-sucking bureaucrats who could never hack it in the software world? Who does that drive away that would be useful? Tech lobbyists?
This is precisely how bullies act. It’s anti intellectual, disrespectful and flat out cancerous. This culture where people can be as rude as they want, make demands and then flippantly say shit like ‘whoa. triggered’ is a complete disgrace.
Either please develop something interesting. Whether it’s a personality, ideas or expertise doesn’t matter. Just please cut out the bullying shit and become interesting. This is garbage and deserves to be called out.
Your immaturity and disrespect ruined what could have been an interesting thread. I’m very tired of this online wannabe troll shit. It’s immature and fucking boring.
Don't be such a negative Nancy; the internet is supposed to be fun and you're being an uncommonly wet blanket. As such I can tell you work for the government. The fact is, some guy in 2003 said you aren't brilliant and the shockwaves are still hitting you.
Not OP but...Remember earlier in another comment thread where you said "It’s deeply rude because you’re implying that I have no virtue"
Judging by how defensive you're getting even at slightest criticism, and keep putting words in other people's mouths, ...well, But it's ok. Maybe you're just having a bad day.
>become interesting
Follow your own advice, maybe go for a walk, touch grass. Take an anger management class or some such. It'd help :)
For a man who asks so much of someone, as is typical of this kind of person, he himself is unremarkable. Founding Thawte isn't a particularly impressive technical feat. Then he became a VC which is even less impressive.
There is no respected engineering leader who would look at this moron as inspiration for anything other than jumping out of a building. I can't believe someone who has no actual technical chops, no listed formal education, etc can be such a chode. Especially one infamous for the Ubuntu Unity scandal.
He's like a less important Elon Musk. Musk is a moron, but this guy takes the entire cake.
Yes, nobody at the White House has ever accomplished something notable. Not a single inhabitant of that building has any form of fame or notoriety. It's really a niche, little-known building on the outskirts of a relatively quiet city.
Actually, nonsense interview is another red flag to watch out for when applying a job.
Some companies uses long and pointless interviews to discover and collect legally sound reasons to reject candidates without revealing the true reason of rejections (could be based on race, gender, age, disability, religion etc).
But, you probably don't want to work for a bad company anyway, so I guess just be happy for the fact that now you don't have to.
I'd argue this is essentially evidence that their hiring process worked in this case. I mean, a company that so vehemently believes that your HS story is so fundamental to how you'll perform as an employee manage to successfully put in enough of that in the hiring pipeline to prevent you (sane person) from going through with it and therefore not wasting either of your times!
I interviewed at Canonical, doing all of the written stuff, and got an offer. But in the end I turned them down because their compensation wasn't competitive.
I can only imagine that the amount of money you have to spend on IT for a myriad of different devices + the security implications + the hurdle to get non-technical people to manage their own devices is just not worth it. Let's say amazon has 100k white-collar workers. If they all the 1k USD devices on avg that's 100mio dollars. That's < 0.1% of their !quarterly! revenue.
Is it also a fully-remote company or do they have offices? My experience with Canonical has been pretty good from a customer perspective but I did have one sales guy call me with the most ridiculous levels of background noise.
Whatever other faults the Canonical process has, BYOD sort of makes sense to me from a dogfooding perspective with a company carrying a major desktop Linux offering.
Would look for a budget or have it reflected in their offer analysis though.
You are supposed to bring your device. If you don’t have one you can get a loan to buy one and pay it off by paycheque deductions.
Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years.
The cost of a well-specced business laptop would be between 1% and 5% total pre-tax yearly compensation for engineers (variable depending on skills, location, seniority and the fact that I need to fudge the data a bit to avoid disclosing actual salaries which I obviously cannot do ;) ).
At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the work-controlled laptop.
I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense. Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to work.
I do understand why each job had their way of doing things though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the laptop any more.
Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.
That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20 years all work I've done has been using my own devices except for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-supplied laptop to be unusual.
Isn't that a problem with the company policies? Any company with heavily locked down laptops probably won't be happy to let you BYOD. I have a work supplied laptop but I run my own OS on it.
The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
It's weird but I think there could be a significant benefit for a company that makes an operating system that users are installing themselves. This policy means their staff will use a diverse set of hardware, some brand new, some old, some home-built. That leads to natural dogfooding and might result in a better product.
The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made some sense:
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
Having people source random laptops to help increase compatibility doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but the company definitely should reimburse you for the purchase. I certainly can't blame them for dogfooding their own OS either.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy whatever laptop you want with.
Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).
Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...
They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.
Job searches take your location into account and sometimes won’t show remote-only positions if you do something like scoping your search to your area. Posting remote listings in specific locations allows those to show up in search results more frequently. And it works - it’s kind of gaming job search boards but it did result in Canonical getting an absolute deluge of applications for each position.
Canonical also re posts every month or so to also benefit from higher placement for more recent listings.
I understand that, but if I’m looking for a remote job in particular, I’ll just search for the country I’m working in. If I look for remote firmware/kernel/driver jobs in Canada, I’ll see the same Canonical posting in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Waterloo, Halifax, Calgary… I end up just filtering them out.
Second this experience absolutely! A couple of years ago I had a similar experience. I was so annoyed having burnt a ton of time going through a number of rounds, submitted an essay, and then giving an extensive presentation only to get a cold, bland, automated rejection email. Terrible interview experience and enough for me to put peers off applying to the company if they asked me. Ironically they are still advertising to fill that same job two years later.
Their focus on high-school looks like a thinly-veiled strategy for weeding out anyone who is old enough that they no longer remember the details of their high school education.
Where I'm from the only companies that give a shit about HS grades are the elite finance and consulting firms - pretty unheard of otherwise.
Why they care? I've heard a couple of explanations:
- Like with the standardized test (cough IQ test cough) obsession, they kind of subscribe to the racehorse theory, namely that some individuals are just born smart and have excelled all their lives. They don't just want hard working individuals, they want hard working and smart individuals.
- It shows a constant progression. They want people that have excelled all their lives, and not those with random spurs of excellence
I don't know whether it's a deliberate strategy but this definitely happened to me during my interview with Canonical this year.
From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.
In my experience it's university access that's very heavily shaped by privilege, not high school.
High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".
We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?
To be clear, while I believe focusing on high school has a negative impact on diversity, I don't think this is intentional on Canonical's part.
Also I should say the overall recruitment process works, I was not the right candidate for the job, and the job wasn't right for me. But I think there were much stronger signals pointing to that during the process than what I did during high school.
I hate these things. This is at least from an outsider perspective, but when what I really want to know is WHY they do each step and what makes them work better.
Most companies have no reason to believe their process is better than taking a random resume (which selects for people who want to work for you enough to send a resume) and making an offer. Sure they have elaborate processes around interviews, tests, and the like. However are they helpful or just processes for the sake of process.
I know there is research on how to interview people. However I don't know where to find it, and most processes seem to have been created without looking at it.
This is not the worst process I’ve seen, but likely the funniest stats bleeder scam I've seen in years.
“How would you change the company?”
Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side.
Also, Canonical is still not Evil enough for the tech industry:
What a winnowing process! The only people that make it through really aren't the people you'd want to make it through. No one with a lick of other opportunities would take a job there. If hiring is a market-like process, then these guys have priced themselves right out of it.
You are bringing up race specifically and you are making the value judgements and then attributing it to the author. Everything you have been doing has been to prove a (bad) point in bad faith in order to fuel some culture war issue.
Now you are just lying and calling names. I'll try one more time before I give up.
The original author wrote the word "white", not me. There are many ways to segment a population - that's demographics. Having "white" as the segmentation criteria and claiming that it affects whether the demographic is biased for an interview sounds very racist to me.
Your opinion that this argument is in bad faith or in order to fuel something is not supported by any facts and is therefore irrelevant.
You broke the site guidelines in several places in this thread, but here you crossed the line very badly. We ban accounts that attack others like this, so please don't do it again.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN or use the site for ideological battle. We've had to ask you this before. Also, please don't break the site guidelines regardless of what another commenter has been doing.
A bias just means looking at things in a skewed way because of experience or mental conditioning.
The fact is that demographics have a lot to do with bias because people from the same demographics have similar life experiences. Having someone else with a different set of experiences can help to mitigate bias by giving their perspective in the group. It is a simplistic way to determine 'tendency towards bias' by focusing on demographics, but it is also a pretty good indicator that when you are in a group of all the same demographic then there is going to be some bias that will go unnoticed.
To answer your question -- the race part is incidental. A 30 year old college educated white male from an urban/suburban US upbringing is more than just 'white'. This is why it is not racist -- because race is one aspect of a demographic.
She didn't complain about the panel members being exclusively educated people (which does affect how you think). But she did complain that they are all white (which doesn't). So yeah, go ahead, dig in.
Please explain how skin color is relevant in the interview context and why it was specifically mentioned in the original post. Please explain how skin color is different from race for the purpose of this discussion.
The specific term was 'demographic', your quote did not include the word race.
EDIT: Upon re-reading... are you really asking me to explain why skin color is part of a demographic? I guess I glossed over that because it doesn't make sense unless youwant to imply that mentioning 'white' in the context of other demographic variables like age and location is racist...in which case, census forms are racist.
Can you please not take HN threads on generic tangents or into flamewar? The site guidelines contain several rules designed to prevent this kind of thing - for example:
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
You started a flamewar with here and perpetuated it downthread. We're trying to avoid these things on HN as they are tedious, repetitive, and predictably turn nasty. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You are correct if you read this as a claim about the people ("the people must be biased because they all have ethnicity x"). But it was probably meant as a claim about biased institutions/processes („processes/institutions which put only people in important positions which are all alike must be biased“) I think the the claim is not that ethnicity defined the bias but that some bias must be present to produce the homogeneity.
I applied for a job there, got to the personality test thing, said to myself "this is really stupid" and stopped replying to their emails. Just not worth it
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadIf you somehow land a job at these companies, you will notice that recent hires (your new colleague) are not particularly good at their work but they are experts in gaming the system.
Tenure-track hiring is nothing like that. Is it rigorous? Yes. Do they take dumb formalized tests? No. Rather, they typically present their research to the faculty.
if your interviewing system is heavy on personality tests, you'll get people that are strong at gaming personality tests.
if your interviewing system is heavy on technology, you'll get people that are strong at gaming technology.
if what you get is not what you want then most likely this means that middle management and upper management are somewhat disconnected from the actual work that has to be performed.
I'd love to see the results for a company where every applicant that passed basic screening tests was given a 1% chance of an offer; with additional probability weight awarded for performance in interviews.
Roll a dice, pick someone, fact check the resume for scammers, done.
Only about 19% would be considered "successful" hires.
Also only about 11% were not successful due to purely lacking technical skills. like I'm sure we all have stories about a noob that doesn't know how to do something basic like ssh with a key or something, but in many cases that's not the issue.
https://sowelo.eu/unsuccessful-recruitment/
Not knowing how to do that, or not knowing how to google how to do that?
I also joined some jobs as a noob when switching domains, where I was lacking skills that the more seasoned people would consider as being "basic", but I could also google what I was lacking most of the time and learn on the fly.
I don't care so much what you find interesting per se. I care about the intersection between what you find interesting and what my company does. I care how good you are at doing that kind of work, about your confidence that you can produce and solve problems without me needing to hold your hand all the time, and your likeability. If you can demonstrate those things better than the next guy, you'll probably get the job.
I don't know if this is what you're referring to by the phrase 'going on and on' but the phrase makes me think of my coworker who talks in circles about any topic, providing many words but little info. And the circles usually incorporate personal anecdotes. He hasn't realized people tune out immediately.
(I don't think it's true)
And I learned something about this type of culture, especially having read these comments in this thread:
Canonical sounds like a tech fraternity. Just imagine a traditional fraternity or sorority - the hazing (the boss eating food during your interview), the induction processes (hiring asking for high school background, the unnecsesary long essay prompts, unnecessary long interview process, the ghosting, etc)
They are filtering for a very specific person. Someone who is a "Yes" person to the point that they will demolish their morale values and respect on themselves. They sound like there looking for more younger & naiive, but brilliant engineers, that can be basically exploited to build great things. Asking for so much personal information about why they want to work there, there high school background, is basically from the HR perspective "Can I exploit this person if they work there, by leveraging their past against them?" It's a power play dynamic - it's easier to manipulate and gaslight someone you know more about
I have people on both sides of these spectrums.
On the applicant side, we sometimes call them 10x genius engineers that make everyone's life miserable because their code is way too complex for no particular reason. There also underpaid usually and promised promotions and payraises, but those are just empty promises to keep them on the leash. They say their coworkers code is dogshit but don't realize how many unnecessary abstractions that made in their own code. They also don't take advice from friends telling them they are being exploited either, and they usually have an addiction problem to compensate the exploitation (weed,drugs, alchohol generally speaking). They also do amazing work and build amazing things though on the other end, and usually invent very novel solutions that aren't easy for others to inherit or work on
On the business/HR/CEO side - these are the same people that never mature out of the applicant side, and continue the hazing process ritual. Usually the boss on the outside sounds very down to earth, respectable, but deep down inside he likes to have raging parties and feels like he/she missed out on the frat lifestyle growing up. It's externalized validation for them
Having a particularly confusing hiring process is actually a form of gatekeeping from keeping people that respect their boundaries from applying. It's the same level of logic as scammers who will intentionally misspell their emails to filter for people who aren't as grammatical or tech savvy - for instance, since it's easier to target more gullible or less-informed audiences
Not saying that Canonical is that case. But it definitely does sound like a tech fraternity. And the hiring process sounds like a hazing process at a fraternity. But, at the time I actually really wanted that tech fraternity life style and appreciated it for what it was. Most small / tech consulting agencies are more likely to have this cultural mindset, because working with new clientelle usually is an emotional rollercoaster. You do learn a lot in these environments - and it is stressful - and you do get treated like dogshit without you realizing it (someone outside the company has to tell you) - but you also learn to appreciate a more mature better work/life balance afterwards.
It's not terrible for a first job if your young single and have no kids, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way
From outside it looks very much like HR is out of control.
Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.
It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.
This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.
ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.
I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)
I can imagine a huge company throwing a third interview in there, because HR has to justify its existence, but more than that is abusive and - more importantly - useless. Actually counterproductive, because talented people are not going to put up with it.
I wouldn't even object to the long interview process as such.
Written materials? Sure! I'd love to see the bar raised on developers' writing skills! Why not.
But man, that High School question? The implicit agism and the shere fuck-you irrelevance of my circumstances 35 years ago just stops me in my tracks every time.
Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.
Last time this came up here, Shuttleworth popped up to tell us it was just what they needed so there you go. No need to apply. :shrug:
Implicit ageism describes it well. Was it age discrimination? I wouldn't go that far based on what I saw, but they either don't want older/experienced people or they have no idea how bad that looks. Either way, I had options so I didn't go any further with them.
I don't do asymmetrical interviews. I'll consider a take in coding test in lieu of something else (or a very trivial one), but a written essay means I'm spending time and they are not. A phone or face to face interview requires an actual investment in their time, and doesn't treat my time as completely disposable.
> Are you hiring me or 16-year-old me? Well then.
i wonder what is preventing you from just lying. like, how are they going to confirm or deny what you're saying ?
Frankly it seems like a way to have something they can use to reject you with something that's hard to debate against.
Integrity? Also the self-interest of not wanting to work with liars and yes-men.
Basically the same reason I don't lie during the rest of an interview process.
Then again, we don't know how they evaluate this. Maybe overly positive unverifiable statements are actually negatives for them.
As for notable things I've done, I worked on an experiment in undergrad, which won the PI (small group) the Nobel in physics in the late 90s, writing computer software for experiment control. That and getting a PhD in physics from a student of a student of a different Nobel laureate. I founded and ran my own company for about 14 years getting to millions in revenue with no external initial investment. I worked with my business partner to try to raise money to build accelerators for computing in 2002-2007 as I'd argued that they would be the dominant form of HPC in the mid 2010s. No investor would bite.
But sure. Ask me about high school. Not the 40 years since high school.
Canonical is a complete waste of time/effort. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but the hiring process is so completely flawed, as this article and many others (check out glassdoor, my interview is now up as well)
That someone (likely very senior) greenlit this process, signed off on it, and thinks it is successful enough to keep doing it, is a massive set of red flags about this company. The company reviews (not interviews) on glassdoor tell me the same story. Its like their employees have written a collective "WTF", and management is completely impervious, blissfully clueless, as to how broken, how disfunctional, their processes are. The implicit assumption in this is that if they were aware, they would adapt and change them. I do not believe this to be the case.
So, in summary, steer a wide path around this company. You don't need their crap. Maybe, eventually, they will get a clue. Though I think this would only happen when there is a materiel leadership change at the top.
They know, and it's been discussed often.
They want young motived people who they can pay sub-par wages and convince to work long hours. 30 year veterans would rock the boat and demand too much money, and dip when it's clear the middle mgmt are clowns.
You're the one I want to get advice from on hackernews...
Same! 30 years of experience. Technical and management. I applied to two roles and both auto rejected. I had contact with a human once to ask if I had a change at all since I don’t have a university degree and was told to not bother.
Their loss.
Why would you pay a senior engineer salary for someone who is just barely competent enough to bang out CRUD apps, when you could spend a little more time searching and find someone who's a force multiplier and can lead projects?
Funnily the engineer who was responsible for the application also sent a very bureaucratic sounding email acknowledging my withdrawal.
I can’t imagine their process for interviews doesn’t reflect what working there would be like - if it doesn’t then they really need to fix their pipeline
It's a shame because the product and my Hiring Manager seemed great, I'm curious what candidates make it through.
compliant ones I would expect, which seems to be the aim of the process.
The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven't you should apply here, where here liked to the US government website.
EDIT:
I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshuttleworth.com/work.html
Around 2004 it said:
"Brilliant. Tell me about things you've done in which you have truly excelled. I don't mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you've setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven't done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you'll fit in just fine"
The very last "here" was a link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/
https://web.archive.org/web/20040606095703/http://www.marksh...
https://archive.is/o2rJa
But hopefully it stayed in the past
Maybe that's what it said what it said.
This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available.
Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth.
I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical.
They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind.
But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users.
Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html
Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant.
> NIH
If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative.
Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment.
We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable.
That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers.
And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
That is not what they said, the desktop was plain GNOME and that experience was the same as any other distro running plain GNOME.
What set them apart was the installer and the rest of their post.
It was polished GNOME. They were but of the jokes at the time for the color theme chosen, but it had polish that plain GNOME didn't.
That is valid even today; just the choice of default font is huge. Ubuntu font vs Cantarell? They are not even in the same league.
But sure, here's the comparison.
Ubuntu 4.10: https://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=664&image=ubuntu_histo...
Fedora Core 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Fedora_C...
Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
All these actions to make Linux more accessible were a pretty big deal.
That's a matter of preference. Regardless, the Humanity theme is much closer to what standard GNOME looked like back then. Which goes against the original point that they were especially polished.
> Besides a slightly less clunky selection for theming, the game changer was the installer and the willingness to chuck the Free Software purity, back when the FSF was at the height of its influence and the terrible that was setting up Linux made it inaccessible to even CompSci students, let alone the general public.
What is with this weird, warped memory that is so common these days? First of all, many distros eschewed "Free Software purity": SuSE, Mandrake/Mandriva, Linspire, etc; and they definitely did it better than the early versions of Ubuntu. Ubuntu didn't get known for being "easy to install" until 2+ years after its release when jockey was reworked in 6.10/7.04. As to difficulty to install? The Anaconda, SuSE and Drak installers offered much the same experience as the standard debian installer that early versions of Ubuntu used, but with GUIs. And it took two minutes of googling "nvidia fedora core" to find RPMForge then click the "add to repos" link to add the necessary drivers to the single of the aforementioned distros that didn't offer it.
But sure, let's just do another direct comparison.
Here's the Ubuntu 4.10 install:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLX3vJgLdrw
Here's the installer for Fedora Core 1, which came out a year and a half before the first version of Ubuntu (even with the fact that this person chose to manually partition their disks, it's pretty streamlined):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6c3prrIhzI
If you honestly believe the Ubuntu install is easier or more friendly than the Fedora one, you're delusional.
And for further comparison:
Mandrake 10.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTnKhruF9kc
Linspire 5.0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_lL4HE5a0o
Yeah, you're right. They're much more difficult than Ubuntu to install (especially for "CompSci students").
In addition, their stance on Free Software went way too far when they started developing in their own bubble and refusing to upstream any of their patches. At the time they were mocked for their ugly brown color, for their overly opinionated stances and for holding back advancements in Linux. AIGLX's ( developed by Fedora+the Free Software community and the eventual GL extension to Xorg) development was delayed by the fight with Ubuntu/XGL, who just wanted something pretty now to show off. Same goes for all the constant fights they start [and always lose] to do things "their way": systemd vs upstart, flatpaks vs snap, mir vs wayland, GNOME vs ubiquity, etc, etc etc.
Their reputation has always been that they use the Linux community to do all the dirty work for them, and give nothing back. At least, for people actually involved in the community.
> The delivery of Live CDs (I believe initially they still had a Live/Install split like other contemporary distros) was _huge_ also in places where broadband was too slow to make downloading the ISOs practical if you weren't 100% committed since before even starting, and it reached many countries, in South America it'd for sure be a huge pain to download ISOs.
There you go. This is why they were popular. In a time when many people were still on slower broadband or Dial-Up (or had to pay 3-10usd to order a disc); having a millionaire cover the cost of sending it ...
I grew up in a modest family, small village (3k people), 14k modem, and yet every (all the two of them) newsstand had at least two biweekly Linux magazines. They cost something like 5€ (or whatever currency we had at the time) and they always had either 2 linux installer cd or one installer and one cd with some cool software to try.
And they had serious quality articles too. I still remember one where they described in detail how they built a DIY magnetic tunneling microscope and used it to recover some data from an hard drive.
By the time Ubuntu free cds came out I already had a big collection of Linux installers, none of them downloaded on my own.
Agreed about the rest. They've always been poisonous towards upstreams and probably contributed to set back the famous year of the Linux Desktop by diluting the efforts in dead-end projects instead of working with upstream towards a common goal.
So, to clarify: when Ubuntu came out in the US, the only truly accessible methods to get access to Linux were to live in a city large enough to have big box tech stores with hobbyist/DIY sections or to order online. And to have some reason to want to try it. The US was much more entrenched in a monoculture/duopoly from the early Mac and DOS days; while Europeans were still happily hacking about on Amigas, Commodores/Ataris, BeBoxen, etc.
As to why Ubuntu took over, over there? I can only hazard that the gains they benefited from near ubiquity and eventual ease of use just osmotically permeated across the pond. But you're correct, I think the free discs probably had less of an influence.
What they really did well and made them known very well is they would ship you cdrom for free while for other distros you either had to buy them from a store, download it or buy a linux computer paper magazine that came with cdrom install of a different distro every month.
That was a big deal when very few people had access to fast internet connections.
That entrance to the market and that initial leg up was also the height of accomplishment for Canonical.
They were weaker in the technology aspect and, ultimately, they were a privately-owned corporation, so space for community participation was limited, which made them lose the mystique by year two or three.
As they tried to find ways to monetize, as a nicely packaged desktop OS in live CDs wasn't the way to go, they tried to get into vertical integration and more infrastructure-centric developments, that again, weren't their forte. As this went on, they went more noticeably corporate, making them lose further appeal and goodwill.
Oh, it was far, far more than that. For example, wifi support was still extremely immature when the first ubuntu releases came out and a lot of people made out-of-tree drivers to support the various wifi chips that were on the market. Out-of-tree drivers were not included in any distro but Ubuntu, and installing them on a distro like Fedora was a major pain, my laptop of the time depended on one of those drivers, the original developer probably got tired of the process of mainlining a driver and abandoned it and I had to modify the source code to adapt it to whatever API refactoring happened at the time on the kernel version used by Fedora to get it running. Running a roller like arch while depending on this stuff? ah, nonono.
By out-of-tree I don't necessarily mean proprietary driver, there were a lot of open source drivers that weren't mainlined, it was kind of a wild west.
It was also the first major distro to feature a Live CD installer. Sure, you could theoretically install LiveCD distros like Knoppix, but it wasn't recommended - and the desktop and assortment of apps lacked polish compared to what Ubuntu preselected.
It gave you a fresh debian system with recent packages without the breakages that happened routinely in sid (Ubuntu came out in an era where debian had major struggles with stable releases. These days it has gotten a lot better and I use debian stable now. Flatpak and containers also solved one of the pain points of LTS.)
As a long time linux user who started with slackware and the pain of configuring xfree86, the pains of winmodems and other hardware troubles of the past, I've come to appreciate polish and when Ubuntu came out I really liked it. The more the years come by, the less I want to fuss with my system. Ubuntu had a level of polish that was absolutely unmatched. These days, the differences between distros have massively shrank and I do not find Ubuntu any more convenient than regular debian and even arch isn't that harsh to use (though, after experiencing some package updates causing breakages I don't want to fuss with anything rolling anymore), but when Ubuntu came out, it was a revelation.
And the revelation lasted for quite a while, it didnt stop at the original release, because when Gnome 3 came out, it was incredibly barebones and painful to use (they didn't even want a menu entry to reboot your computer. Seriously. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/howto... "The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down." I mean, what the eff? ),
while Unity introduced really innovative features that I still miss to this day, like the global menu that allowed you to use functions from any GTK software by typing words on your keyboard, showing all entries that matched. It was a very efficient way to navigate software, more than moving the mouse and hunting for entries trying to find the right submenu.
Using Ubuntu when Ubuntu introduced Unity meant avoiding the worst time period of Linux desktops. It was also the era of KDE 4 which should have been named "SIGSEGV 4.0" a full featured desktop that showed constant segmentation fault dialogs.
Ubuntu didn't become popular for no reason. It was a really sad state of affair.
I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Since they dropped Unity they completely abandoned any contribution to the linux desktop as a whole, while snaps are flatpak but much worse (the more you install, the slower your boot, and apps launch much slower than on flatpak) and with a proprietary backend. I see it now as a me-too distro that does everything worse. But I have fond memories of it. Debian stable + flatpak + podman is giving me th...
This really shows your disconnect with reality. Arch is nowhere close to as 'easy' for a beginner as Ubuntu is. Canonical and Ubuntu have established themselves as one of the most user and beginner friendly Linux distros out there.
Arch ain't it.
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked "out-of-the box" just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn't not work because they couldn't, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren't popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6-7 versions).
> The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to.
Again, it was bog standard GNOME with the Humanity theme. The experience and "defaults" were about equivalent to Fedora, until they started forcing in their own customizations (ads, their sidebar, macOS style titlebars/menus, etc).
> Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people.
Sure, there you go. The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
Too bad it came at the expense of them not upstreaming any of their work, taking overly opinionated stances that rarely panned out and created temporary schisms in multiple communities (GNOME, systemd, Wayland, Debian, Flatpak, etc) over their collective ego until their personal projects inevitably fail, setting each back considerably each time.
Of course this wasn't a technical innovation, it was just an exercise in pragmatic legal risk-taking.
SuSE, Mandrake and other distributions were shipping proprietary software in their base installs in 2003-ish; four years before Ubuntu did.
There's no doubt that Fedora and Debian's hard stance on Free Software turned people away. However, even if they did include them, Ubuntu would still be where it is today. Because their popularity mostly came from the millions of CDs they shipped to people for free.
Fedora (or Mandriva, Xandros, Linspire, etc) would be the most popular distro today, if Shuttleworth did the same for them (and just included jockey on the Fedora discs, with the RPMForge repos pre-installed). But then his ego wouldn't have been stroked and he couldn't be in charge, despite the outcome being far greater for the Linux community overall.
Regardless, let's pretend your point is accurate. The bigger point is they didn't do anything new or better than anyone. And, in fact, were a net negative for many communities/efforts.
It helps if you read the entire post, not your own little cherrypicked context.
From a technical users' perspective, super easy...if you already knew what to do, or what to search for to figure out what to do.
The point was that with Ubuntu, you didn't even need to do that, so non-technical users could use it without hassle, and this was the entire point of Ubuntu.
The point was, other popular distros were doing that 4+ years before Ubuntu was. Fedora and Debian were just about the only major Linux distros that didn't include them. Just like how other distros had better installers, better themes/user experiences, etc than Ubuntu:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068058
Also, if you had the "technical skill" to even know to download Fedora, I find it baffling that you didn't have the skill to type "nvidia drivers fedora" into Google. People were doing the same thing for Windows for a decade+ at that time.
Sure, Ubuntu eventually became nice-looking and easy to install. But they didn't innovate those things in anyway. Instead, they became so off the backs of a bunch of other communities doing real hard work and contributing nothing themselves.
Credited for creating the most painful interview process.
I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.
I guess it’s valuable to be a mildly smart kid in a really bad school.
Not to excuse the behavior, but different times were different times.
This Shuttleworth guy sounds like a smarmy jackass, and after reading that article on the hiring process, I wouldn't even wanna bother, especially considering I could literally apply at a MAGNAM company and get double the compensation.
They can have their "fanatical fan base employees" with my blessing.
I still use Ubuntu at home, but it's probably just inertia at this point. I don't hate it, but I also don't really like it the way I used to.
Ubuntu has been underwhelming as of late. It’s fine, just underwhelming. Sometimes software becomes underwhelming as it matures but in this case, the hiring process seems designed to ship underwhelming software.
Then there is the particular issue. That kind of thinking/communication style doesn’t make me feel comfortable with Ubuntu (or any project he would have a leadership role in).
And finally, I’m really tired of how our industry seems to glorify jerks.
So we have:
1.) Ubuntu is rather underwhelming.
2.) The hiring process is so fucked that underwhelming software is the most likely result.
3.) There is a lot of competition and I can find projects with vaguely professional/secure leaders.
4.) I run more than enough jerk driven software.
(Obviously, we had NO idea what was coming.)
Yeah, those drone strikes from the Obama administration were pretty bad.
I know what you mean, but the phrasing seems odd given that the US has gone through multiple transfers of power because POTUS was murdered.
If anything, this fact makes things much worse.
Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.
I am not claiming otherwise. I'm saying: it doesn't matter if the last president dies.
> Consider Andrew Johnson, who wasn't even the same party as Lincoln. He was impeached by Republicans and in his run for presidency got his votes mostly from Southern whites. He pardoned basically all confederates. The murder of Lincoln definitely was a violent transfer of power from an abolitionist to a Southern apologist.
What violence occurred during the transition of power? Who tried to stop the political processes?
There wasn't supposed to be a transition of power. A violent initiation to the transfer of power when transfer of power was not supposed to occur is a non-peaceful transfer of power.
Does it fit the somewhat quirky (but by far not unusual) interview process? Yes
Is it a sign of a moral flaw? No
I have talked to him a couple times while working for Canonical and, while I knew his reputation of being a very Steve Jobs person, he was never an asshole with me. And the CEO was a real sweetheart. I'd think twice if he called me, but wouldn't blink if she did.
The US government serves the US's interests. I have no illusions as to how well it behaves towards other countries.
The US government serves the US government's interests.
And so I ask again: He's an asshole because he wants to work with extraordinary people and made fun of george W bush?
see, I added the W. now answer.
Either please develop something interesting. Whether it’s a personality, ideas or expertise doesn’t matter. Just please cut out the bullying shit and become interesting. This is garbage and deserves to be called out.
Your immaturity and disrespect ruined what could have been an interesting thread. I’m very tired of this online wannabe troll shit. It’s immature and fucking boring.
"whoa."
and
"triggered."
Don't be such a negative Nancy; the internet is supposed to be fun and you're being an uncommonly wet blanket. As such I can tell you work for the government. The fact is, some guy in 2003 said you aren't brilliant and the shockwaves are still hitting you.
Judging by how defensive you're getting even at slightest criticism, and keep putting words in other people's mouths, ...well, But it's ok. Maybe you're just having a bad day.
>become interesting
Follow your own advice, maybe go for a walk, touch grass. Take an anger management class or some such. It'd help :)
I wrote one line of facetious comment. Definition of "obsessed" and "defending" are clear cut. Words have meaning.
There is no respected engineering leader who would look at this moron as inspiration for anything other than jumping out of a building. I can't believe someone who has no actual technical chops, no listed formal education, etc can be such a chode. Especially one infamous for the Ubuntu Unity scandal.
He's like a less important Elon Musk. Musk is a moron, but this guy takes the entire cake.
Some companies uses long and pointless interviews to discover and collect legally sound reasons to reject candidates without revealing the true reason of rejections (could be based on race, gender, age, disability, religion etc).
But, you probably don't want to work for a bad company anyway, so I guess just be happy for the fact that now you don't have to.
Like, sorry you didn't make it past the final stage, but here's a nice Framework laptop with Ubuntu.
Would look for a budget or have it reflected in their offer analysis though.
Once hired, you do get a “laptop refresh bonus” every 3 years, the problem being that it’s a bonus and so is subject to income tax, plus in some jurisdictions you can’t tax deduct computer purchases unless you are self-employed, so the purchasing power of the laptop refresh allowance is basically halved; i always ended up having to top up from my own money to get a decent laptop every 3 years.
Source: former Canonical employee.
It doesn’t feel tiny-tiny to me.
At my last contract job the company supplied the laptop we had to use, and that made me sigh before it even arrived. It was restrictive, with its controlled accounts and restrictions on what software could be used, which meant I couldn't use the best tools I know well. The software we could use was poor quality. It had very poor battery life and it also meant I needed to carry two laptops everywhere with me in practice, the other being my own. After all there was no way I'd consider it safe to put my personal files and personal projects on the work-controlled laptop.
I much prefer to use my own laptop for work when possible. Just one to carry around and it's a good machine, worth the expense. Two jobs ago was like that, and it was a much nicer way to work.
I do understand why each job had their way of doing things though. The more recent contract involved access to proprietary code they didn't want to get out and potentially sensitive patient data. When the contract ended I couldn't login to the laptop any more.
Whereas the older job was all open source development, with a matching culture, so we were encouraged to use whatever tools worked best and keep publishing our work, and issues with work and personal files on the same device weren't a problem.
That said, despite proprietary work being the usual case, in 20 years all work I've done has been using my own devices except for that one recent contract, so I found getting a work-supplied laptop to be unusual.
The real issue here seems to be around expensing. You shouldn't have to pay tax on a laptop you use for work. Think about it as getting 80-100% more hardware for the same money.
* autocorrect manualfixes
They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.
In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).
One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.
Having to buy your laptop out of pocket is stingy to the point that I'd be reconsidering my employment. That's a pure cost-of-doing-business expense that the company should cover.
Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).
Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...
They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.
Canonical also re posts every month or so to also benefit from higher placement for more recent listings.
Why they care? I've heard a couple of explanations:
- Like with the standardized test (cough IQ test cough) obsession, they kind of subscribe to the racehorse theory, namely that some individuals are just born smart and have excelled all their lives. They don't just want hard working individuals, they want hard working and smart individuals.
- It shows a constant progression. They want people that have excelled all their lives, and not those with random spurs of excellence
And of course, just another weeding function.
From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.
It's sad because they were otherwise very convincing. It was too big of a red flag though.
High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".
We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?
Also I should say the overall recruitment process works, I was not the right candidate for the job, and the job wasn't right for me. But I think there were much stronger signals pointing to that during the process than what I did during high school.
Most companies have no reason to believe their process is better than taking a random resume (which selects for people who want to work for you enough to send a resume) and making an offer. Sure they have elaborate processes around interviews, tests, and the like. However are they helpful or just processes for the sake of process.
I know there is research on how to interview people. However I don't know where to find it, and most processes seem to have been created without looking at it.
“How would you change the company?”
Replace the bureaucracy with a 1 page web-form, fire most process management/agents, and hire more developers on a small per-project basis at first. If managers have to try this hard to remain mission relevant, there is likely a deeper issue with the business side.
Also, Canonical is still not Evil enough for the tech industry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGLveebwjo
Perhaps you wanted a more pleasing answer... but Deconstructionism is rarely productive.
Best regards =)
says it all really. just about done with this silly industry.
Canonical, isn't the Ubuntu company? I don't know much about it, but I can't imagine it's high-stress and fast-paced.
Please could someone explain how is this, claiming that someone's race and ethnicity defines their bias, not in itself racist?
I don't have a gene test on hand to confirm, but I'm pretty sure my heritage is all over the place.
Replace race with skin color in the GP comment, the point still stands
The original author wrote the word "white", not me. There are many ways to segment a population - that's demographics. Having "white" as the segmentation criteria and claiming that it affects whether the demographic is biased for an interview sounds very racist to me.
Your opinion that this argument is in bad faith or in order to fuel something is not supported by any facts and is therefore irrelevant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Hmmm, thinking back over it maybe she's internalised the US diversity thing and is judging everything through that lens?
The fact is that demographics have a lot to do with bias because people from the same demographics have similar life experiences. Having someone else with a different set of experiences can help to mitigate bias by giving their perspective in the group. It is a simplistic way to determine 'tendency towards bias' by focusing on demographics, but it is also a pretty good indicator that when you are in a group of all the same demographic then there is going to be some bias that will go unnoticed.
To answer your question -- the race part is incidental. A 30 year old college educated white male from an urban/suburban US upbringing is more than just 'white'. This is why it is not racist -- because race is one aspect of a demographic.
Hope this helps.
EDIT: Upon re-reading... are you really asking me to explain why skin color is part of a demographic? I guess I glossed over that because it doesn't make sense unless youwant to imply that mentioning 'white' in the context of other demographic variables like age and location is racist...in which case, census forms are racist.
No, I didn't ask that.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
You started a flamewar with here and perpetuated it downthread. We're trying to avoid these things on HN as they are tedious, repetitive, and predictably turn nasty. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.