Mastodawn

General PSA: don’t apply for a job at Canonical. Do NOT apply for a job at Canonical. Treat the blatantly artificially enormous number of job openings they post as the mirages of trickster fae. They are unhinged. Mark Shuttleworth is unhinged. They will drag you through the mud, disrespect you and your time, and definitely not give you a job. This article I saw today is like the thirteenth of its kind that I personally have seen https://dustri.org/b/my-experience-with-canonicals-interview-process.html

My experience with Canonical's interview process

Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin

@0xabad1dea All those questions in the written part about school for a senior role.

I STUDIED COBOL IN SCHOOL.

How's that matter in a senior role with Ubuntu? Obsessed with how senior staff did 10+ years back. I barely remember or care what I did in another position 10 years ago, and I learned more there than I did in school.

Eva Winterschön Jun 2

@xinit @0xabad1dea agreed. I don't even bother putting the details of my job history prior to around fifteen years ago. Most of the companies either dissolved or went through a merger/acquisition, so whatever Perl or Cisco stuff I was doing back in the mid-2000s is really quite irrelevant to anything other than occasionally funny stories from a very different era. I list the roles and the years as bullet-points, but that's all.

@winterschon
The questions about ranking and performance in HIGH SCHOOL are also concerning. Is this some sort of "peaked in high school" thing for the CEO?

@xinit @winterschon I do get the impression Shuttleworth believes that only people who were already stunningly competent in high school will ever be any good at anything, so he doesn’t look at anything you did after that at all.

Jason Bowen 🇺🇦Jun 2

@0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon I did quite well in school, but I'm 35 and just don't remember what my GPA was from high school or what my SAT scores were exactly. I've started applying for a couple of jobs that asked similar questions and withdrawn because it's not worth anyone's time for me to try to dig up that info when I have 13 years of work experience with references since graduating university.

Raccoon🏳️‍🌈Jun 2

@jbowen @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon
I feel like I'm one of the few people who would do well on this, considering I went to a magnet school and studied programming, meaning my GPA had to be at least 3.5 and I did in fact learn several programming languages and APIs before I turned 18.

Chris Real Jun 2

@Raccoon @jbowen @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon

I suspect that your 'doing well' would rely more on how cheerfully you would allow yourself to be infantilized by Shuttleworth, less on your 'qualifications' . . .

Jonathan Hartley Jun 3

@_chris_real @Raccoon @jbowen @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon Can confirm.

Passwordsarehard4 Jun 2

@Raccoon @jbowen @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon that’s awesome, someone cast an early net and caught talent they could nurture. It sucks for the girl in Missouri whose 3rd grade teacher thought a woman’s place is in the home so education was a waste of resources. She can’t start learning until she gets away from there. If she learns in 3 years what you got to do in 15 she deserves it at least as much as you.

@Raccoon @jbowen @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon It's so weird? I obliterated high school. First in class, 4.76 GPA out of 4, armfull of Academic Decathlon medals-- and I'd probably just close the Zoom window if somebody started asking me interview questions about it. It becomes so irrelevant after uni OR 2-3 years of job experience, let alone both.

Jason Bowen 🇺🇦Jun 2

@Nentuaby @Raccoon @0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon Yep, lol. I'm not playing that game.

@jbowen Is he gonna check it anyway? Will all high schools be able to verify it still? Will I have to sign something that they can give to the school to show I want them to have that information?

I was an unemployable prat at highschool who flunked a lot of classes and would have screwed up your computers, you wouldn't want to hire me at that stage. Once I had some experience with computers from my first computing job I was then awesome. I've had 3 jobs since then, why don't we focus on those?

Jim Salter Jun 2

@chrisp @jbowen I very nearly didn't even *graduate* high school, largely due to a very traumatic home life. But I'd like to believe what I've done in the nearly four decades since then is quite a bit more relevant to anyone thinking of employing me in 2025.

As a side note, it is **startling** how much less of this you get when offering business to business consulting as someone who owns their own business... Even if it's a solo business, and you charge 3x what an employee would cost.

Tony Yarusso Jun 3

@xinit @jbowen @0xabad1dea @winterschon I don’t think I could have told you my exact GPA while literally holding my high school diploma… “Quite good, but beyond that quite irrelevant”

@0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon
I have the feeling that after I say "I was homeschooled" I'd be sent packing.

Basically it's the kind of thing where if your life was non-stereotypical in any way, then fuck you.

@artemis I don't have a degree, so I feel that :D

@0xabad1dea @winterschon

Sara Safavi Jun 5

@artemis you might make it through the gauntlet - I did, but this is what Shuttleworth said about it https://hachyderm.io/@sara/112117156883684126

@0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon

Sara Safavi (@sara@hachyderm.io)

10. THE CALL Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16."

Hachyderm.io

@sara
That CEO interview, though. "Can you prove X. Convince me yo really did Y."

Insufferable.

This all makes the spontaneous TED Talk on "any subject at all that I'm an expert in" look a bit more reasonable.

@artemis @0xabad1dea @winterschon

@sara
I wonder on what kind of people actually make it through that call.
@artemis @0xabad1dea @winterschon

Kevin Granade Jun 2

@0xabad1dea @xinit @winterschon I would pass on the high school criteria and I also think this is incredibly wrong, what has happened since then is far more important.

Also if I'm applying somewhere and they give me a pseudoscience personality quiz I'm bailing on the process right there.

Chuckles ❤️🇪🇺🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦❤️Jun 2

@xinit @winterschon @0xabad1dea it's because Canonical really only wants to employ people who are 23-29 years old, it's not mysterious at all.

@celeduc Then maybe something more like "Peaked in high school and still too young to come to terms with it"

@winterschon @0xabad1dea

Chuckles ❤️🇪🇺🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦❤️Jun 2

@xinit @winterschon @0xabad1dea either that or Shuttleworth is obsessed with exacting symbolic revenge against the people who peaked in high school, and seeks to surround himself with a gang of outsider nerds who will, under his guidance, ascend to new heights of vengeance, performing a live-action Revenge of the Nerds V in a battle against (checks notes) Bill Gates?

@xinit @winterschon @0xabad1dea @celeduc 24er (with 6 YoE) who got rejected by canonical and now thriving elsewhere: nah

Buster | Felipe Jun 2

@xinit My bet is that he (and other billionaires) come from a supremacist mindset, so of course good candidates would have to perform well even in high school, if it comes in their genetics.

@winterschon @0xabad1dea

Jim Salter Jun 2

@xinit @0xabad1dea I can understand looking at something like a high school GPA as a very inexpensive filter when one is investing very little in an interview process, but it's a *ludicrous* measure to include in a process as lengthy as the one you describe.

I have to say that, apart from the weird and clearly unnecessary CEO interview, this sounds like identically dystopian hell to any time I've tried to apply unsolicited for a position in any enterprise sized business, though.

@xinit @0xabad1dea In addition to the CEO’s “high school is destiny” thing, I’m convinced they include stuff that far back as a soft way to do age discrimination. No evidence for it, mind you, but it has a smell about it like that.