You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).

I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.

Cray cray

I don’t remember it as particularly surreal. They did a remote programming interview over Zoom (in 2014 or so) and it was a really interesting problem - to make a PRNG for a specific range of integers using two other PRNGs. Their solution had a branch and mine was branchless and decently random. It was, at least then, a very personalistic company, centred around Shuttleworth, but his influence didn’t usually extend more than two org levels, and different parts of it behaved as different companies.

I remember reading an article describing Canonical’s predatory hiring practices, but I can’t find it any more. Do you have sources?

No to mention the absolutely absurd questions they ask. I looked at a sr position there and they were asking about performance in individual courses _in high school._ I haven't been in school for 20 years. I've learned and forgotten so many things since then, like I'm going to remember or care what I did in econ 101 multiple decades ago... It was so silly I didn't bother applying.