alt Hacker NewsIt's Canonical. The company that literally asks for high school grades and a multi-page essay on any job application and will pass if you're not in the 99th percentile of year 9 maths even while requiring many years experience (which means you probably don't even know what your year 9 maths scores were). All the while they pay a fraction of any other Bay Area tech company.
What i just described isn't a joke or an exaggeration either. It's literally part of the application process and you can look this up.
Anyway they are quite simply hopelessly mismanaged and no one should be touching Canonical products at this point.
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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.
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
EDIT: I'm shocked.
Canonical is looking for bureaucrats, so at least they are honest in the hiring process. Look at the Canonical people on the Debian lists.
High school grades? That's pretty wild man.
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.
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
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!"
And just for full disclosure, I've never applied or have went through their process, all I know about it is second-hand through comments like these. It's just a terrible look to have that be what people think about your company.
Feels like India approach where they will ask high school certificates and every personal details like marriage, family history and things like that lol.
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
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.
Also I have never seen a post on HN, Reddit etc about Canonical/Ubuntu that doesn't complain about hiring process. I think it does a pretty incredible amount of damage to the brand.