Oh. I remember once applying for Canonical, and i found those high-school grade obsessed questions truly odd back then. After applying they ghosted me. In hindsight, the interview process seems to be matching the personality of their founder CEO, so very glad i'm not working there.

I had the same experience. I even made the mistake of being honest: In HS I didn't care about computers and had poor academic performance. It wasn't until 6 years later I even knew what computer science was, and didn't look up until 11 years and a PhD later when I was writing software for NASA or managing robotics teams at FAANG/ startups. I got an immediate reject for a robotics SWE position. I'm trying to temper ego even now, but I was qualified for an interview.

sounds like you dodged a bullet.

You qualified for the interview, but did they qualify for you?

Tbh, to keep my ego in check, whenever i get rejected ghosted, or whatever, I just assume the company/interviewer is doing a perfect job for screening for the kind of candidates they want and need, and if I don't pass it means "there wasn't a fit", tbh if we were totally honest with myself, I don't fit well into most corporate cultures, and I should not care if they ask me questions I did not care enough to answer well in the first place.

A highschool performance question is not odd. It is meant to filter me out - that is perfect, because why would I want to waste my time on an interview in a company with this mentality, in the first place?

Of course this is the most sensible take - Seneca would be proud of this logic.

But it offends some folks world view to live with folks who hire based on signals like this, vs raw capability.

So, we come to this forum to kvetch.

It's unlikely my high school transcript exists anywhere. If it does it is in the basement of some government building in rural Wisconsin. So - 4.0 - straight A's, captain of the linux security team.

Considering AIs hunger for data, I wouldn't be surprised if companies start paying to digitize all the neglected basement records.

I had a buddy go through the Canonical process, it's totally insane. They expect you to jump when they say, but then they may not respond for days or weeks.

Reminds me of Apple, and once you've signed they treat you like dirt, wasting all the effort.

Wow that’s insane, had no idea. What the fuck does my behavior at 14-18 have to do with my professional capabilities at 36. I had a terrible programming class experience in HS but was otherwise obsessed with computers. Hated programming until I took a CS class at community college with a great professor, starting my obsession with programming. One year out of high school. It’s been non-stop since then.

It's pretty typical for a CEO of a major tech company to have some kind of quirk in their behavior that is nonsensical but insufficient to ruin the company given its luck, etc.

"CEO is obsessed with [thing]" isn't much evidence that the thing in question is worthwhile. Zuckerberg was utterly enthralled with the Metaverse, and we're not having this discussion in a virtual world as legless avatars.

There's two big reasons this is such a red flag: 1) Come on. Unless you are hiring highschool graduates directly, you have other means of finding out how good candidates are. If a highschool report card tells you more about a candidate than your own interview process, you need to fire everyone involved with that process.

2) Highschool performance is highly correlated with a bunch of causes that are very undesirable things to proxy-measure in your hiring process.

In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from, high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well. You need to be careful with such measures, as selecting job candidates based on class or race is both unethical and commonly illegal.

Again consider that these are high school results. A person who is born to unlucky schooling opportunities can still compensate for the learning they were deprived of by working harder in college/university or their formal career after that.

> In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from

Minor nitpick, but Mark hails from (and was schooled in) South Africa.

Agree with your overall point.

i think it’s pretty clear GP is not saying it is worthwhile and is actually implicitly criticizing the practice.

> high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well.

the degree to which this claim about wealth is true is impacted by confounders. it is generally less true than commonly stated. outside of the public sector, that a measure is correlated with race/ethnicity/class does not make it a priori illegal to hire based on.

> is reportedly obsessed with high school performance, to the point of rejecting otherwise highly competent candidates who passed the whole process before that based on high school questions alone.

Right but given the pay, talent level, and more from Canonical, they should probably not be trying to invent new ways to filter candidates beyond what even top tier software shops are doing.

If Jane Street and Anthropic aren't rejecting candidates for high school performance, maybe your mid tier company with low tier pay shouldn't be either.

Jane St is not a good example of a company that doesn’t care about HS performance. Lots of finance firms ask for SAT scores years out and Jane St weights heavily on college (which in turn is exclusively a function of HS performance).

> hey should probably not be trying to invent new ways to filter candidates beyond what even top tier software shops are doing.

Exactly spot on.

Surely everyone would also agree with this and at this point, just don't bother with Canonical and ignore them. They do it because they are not interested in hiring at all, even if the post is there.

Would much rather go to Anthropic if I had my time again, which there is far more upside and pays extremely well than whatever pathetic amount Canonical could ever come up with.

It’s honestly kind of discriminatory from a class perspective .

> Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical

who....cares?

I think we need to ask ourselves why we put up with this nonsense. Not even the serious tech companies and adjacent care about that aspect of your performance.

He would certainly have passed on Linus Torvalds if he applied to work at Canonical - because he did not got to some well known top high school or get the top marks Shuttleworth wanted.

> > Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical

> who....cares?

Presumably everyone reading the article. It’s about bad hiring practices and uses Canonical as the example, thus Canonical’s CEO and their inane contributions to the hiring practices at their own company are relevant to the discussion.

I think many if not most companies have things they look for in employees that are irrelevant. Sometimes its a preference for particular universities over other universities that are effectively as good. Sometimes they like people who excelled in sports, or seem well dressed, etc. The point is that if you have some filters for things that matter, and enough candidates, you can also screen out people for terrible reasons and get away with it.

Oh is that why they asked? I just put whatever the minimum gpa for passing my high school was since I was never going to remember that number and only could confirm I passed.

If I wasn’t desperate for a job I would declined to apply out of the idiocy of the question

I got a second round interview that I turned down from them. I was homeschooled and have no post secondary education of note. Maybe my non existent education section on my CV intrigued them.