Can you share the backstory behind your gripe, this comment feels oddly specific to what appears unrelated to someone outside who doesn't know what you know. Makes me think there's some personal and deeper roots behind it

It's pretty straightforward, go have a look at their careers site and application form. What parent is saying I believe is that they're leaving a lot of talent on the table because of questionable hiring practices; talent that would help proactively (or at least reactively) mitigate things like this.

Look it up so it isn't just coming from me. It's a quick Google "Canonical hiring process" and there's no shortage of wait wtf was that type of posts on this. You can also go on their website and try to apply for any job just to be further shocked.

They ask for; A massive multi-choice questionaire. A massive free form list of questions. An ask for an essay. Grades from High school through to University. That's to start the process of many rounds of interviews followed by finally an interview with Mark Shuttleworth himself who's known to say no on vibes.

Personally i applied for a senior management role after ~30years working at multiple other very large and well known companies. The pay at canonical was literally 1/5th but i was curious. I was honest about my high school scores and immediately given a thanks for your time but we will pass dialog on their website after stating maths scores in year 9. I'm not even fucking kidding. Obviously i was gobsmacked. It was a blessing to get knocked back that early all things considered.

Not my post but has more detail and matches what i saw. Be amazed at the insanity in the leadership at Canonical that allows for this; https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...

We're talking put him in a straightjacket loony tunes type of shit when it comes to Shuttleworth. You can also look up various personal interactions. It's utterly fucking insane.

You'd think space-faring South African billionaire would be Musk, but no.

> What sort of high school student were you?

What sort of answer are they looking for here?

"Top 10% of my class"

"Sorry, we only hire from the top 0.001%."

It's common. I interviewed there years ago - full rebel, did not provide them my transcripts, grades etc. Last interview supposedly is run by Shuttleworth himself. Anyway, got a better gig meanwhile.

Just go interview there and you'll learn all about it for yourself.

Not OP, but why is it unrelated? Hiring practices and salaries are very much related to staff working in a company. A lot of people just refuse to jump through the hoops when they have a choice where to work. People willing to do so will just go to FAANG to maximize TC. That leaves us with a more desperate and less qualified pool of candidates. I doubt many people dream about working in Canonical, it isn't Google from decades ago.

Lol what an infuriating comment. "you must be butthurt from your interview"

To be fair i did get knocked back but not at all butthurt since it was at the very first stage on the application after filling in high school maths scores from ~40 years ago in a country that doesn't even have GPAs (so i have no idea what to even enter in that box).

The knockback didn't hurt. It just made me think Canonical was lead by a lunatic and a quick Google will confirm this.

Hah, yes, see my comment elsewhere - it broke my recruiter's brain when I said I didn't have any Year 9 or Year 10 grades to enter, but had graduated high school.

I don't currently nor have ever even worked in the industry but have heard so many stories so often about this sort of thing it is now permanently associated whenever the name Canonical comes up.

I have no particular insight into Canonical's problems, but all large companies "ship their org chart" to some degree. Insofar as Canonical has abstruse hiring practices, it stands to reason that practical failures to perform adequate security responses are downstream of those practices.

It's because Canonical spams LinkedIn with tens of thousands of job posts (despite only having ~1800 employees) because they put ads for the same remote job listing in hundreds of different cities. As a result, basically anyone who's ever looked for a tech job on LinkedIn has at least looked at the first step of Canonical's job application process (including where it asks about how well you did at math in high school, your SAT scores, your college class ranking and GPA, etc).

Reminds me of Epic (healthcare company). I was close to finishing grad school, and they wanted my SAT scores. When I gave it to them, they couldn't stop gushing. I wanted to wash my hands with a lot of soap at that point.

They wanted it because the SAT serves (or used to serve) as a decent proxy for IQ. A business cannot ask an applicant to take an intelligence aptitude test without a lot of extra cost to ensure it complies with Griggs v. Duke Power Co (1971), so the cheaper workaround is to ask for SAT scores in conjunction with other proxies such as the school into which you were able to gain admission.

> In the US, businesses ask for it because the SAT serves (or used to serve) as a decent proxy for IQ. A business cannot ask an applicant to take an intelligence aptitude test without a lot of extra cost

Epic actually did (does?) administer a full blown "entrance exam" - generic problem solving skills, with some basic coding and math stuff. They literally arrange with the university to administer it in a classroom setting. So yeah, kind of like an aptitude test.

See https://pigment.is/blogs/blogs/epic-systems-skills-assessmen...

I actually don't mind that, as it ensures all applicants are being judged on a level field.

It's quite rare for people graduating with a BS to be quizzed about SAT scores - the focus tends to be more on GPA, etc. But asking for SAT scores when you've been in grad school for so long...? Kind of ridiculous. And if you are going to ask, might as well ask for the GRE scores instead.

They also did (do?) a full personality quiz. You know, the type where they give you a scenario, and say are you more of A or B, and you often find yourself to be neither or both...

Businesses can and do ask applicants to take general cognitive tests, without excess compliance costs. IQ testing is presumptively legitimate for essentially all white collar jobs. The biggest companies that administer these tests for hiring companies have logo crawls that include a few of the best known companies in the world.

The reason more companies don't use IQ tests is that they don't work well for candidate qualification. Also, candidates hate them.

Thanks, I must have been misinformed. I was told that 20 years ago when a lot of NYC HFT firms used to (still do?) ask for SAT scores.

can confirm, interviewing there was unpleasant and demanded a ridiculous amount of work before ever getting to talk to a human. There was a post on HN a little while back about someone who made it much further along in the process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44149549

Made me happy I was cut loose early.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I worked there for a couple years. IMO, the hiring process holds Canonical back from scaling like a typical tech co, but they probably don't want to. It also attracts a very specific type of person; everyone I personally worked with was very bright and capable.

IME, because of pay, they have a hard time retaining "senior" talent, eg Nvidia, Chainguard, Amutable, Lambda, etc etc etc all have lots and lots of senior+ Canonical engineers. Especially in the age of AI, I think this is a "people-strategy" mistake.

The application process is very long and you absolutely lose great candidates because of it. Salaries are not US-tech competitive, but absolutely are Central/South America and Europe competitive. Lots of great Brazilian and Polish engineers, for example.

> It also attracts a very specific type of person; everyone I personally worked with was very bright and capable.

How well did you and your colleagues do at math in high school?

Well if they work at canonical we know they did very well

If they're so bright and capable why can't they patch their OS?

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I wonder why these bright abd capable people didn't join a company that actually pays reasonably.

>I wonder why these bright abd capable people didn't join a company that actually pays reasonably.

Sounds like they do when they get the chance. I've worked for a company that didn't have quite as crazy a hiring process but they had the same basic profile - very good at hiring for potential in juniors, but underpaid for the ability they wanted. As a result they really struggle to hire seniors and are often a stepping stone to a better paid position. They do manage to keep some people until retirement, though (a very bimodal distribution - generally either brilliant but don't care to work anywhere else, or utterly useless and can't get a job anywhere else)

Feels like India approach where they will ask high school certificates and every personal details like marriage, family history and things like that lol.

Indian corporate has problems but this doesn't seem to be true apart from standard background checks (a la HireRight).

High school grades? That's pretty shocking.

Not the worst part. I didn’t even reach the stage of multiple psychometric tests others report.

I just love that this is always one of the top comments when it comes to Canonical.

"Nah, let's not build up our technical street cred by doing stuff right, we'll torpedo that by making bizarre aspects of our culture stick in people's minds. Success!"

Canonical is looking for bureaucrats, so at least they are honest in the hiring process. Look at the Canonical people on the Debian lists.

I wonder why they stop at high school grades. I don’t touch distros unless their engineers had perfect grades throughout elementary and middle school /s

Haha, I remember years ago I did apply there but as soon as I saw the high school questions I just closed the page. Always pay attention to these red flags

[delayed]