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A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it
47 prestelpirate 36 8/13/2025, 4:42:13 PM tomkranz.com ↗
Glassdoor hasn’t been a good barometer for anything. When your reviews get removed because the company paid them, you’re just being shown what the company wants you to see. Their salary data is highly inaccurate and deflates the industry wages. That site needs to be banished into non existence.
Why would they be unemployed? Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, 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.
You qualified for the interview, but did they qualify for you?
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.
> 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.
Minor nitpick, but Mark hails from (and was schooled in) South Africa.
Agree with your overall point.
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.
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.
And just to add to the Canonical shame too, I’m all for that.
- It sends a message that the actual compensation is going to be rubbish.
- It sends a message (combined with the evidence from the advert spamming) that the hiring company will be paying different levels of compensation based on where the applicant lives.
That last one is particularly inexcusable. We call it a 'compensation package' for a reason: the employer is compensating the employee for using their expertise, time, and energy to make the employer money. It has nothing to do with the CoL where you live, and everything to do with how much the company values you in that role.
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While I mostly agree with the sentiment I think this is pretty normal and not nearly as much of a faux pas as the author is making it out to be. Kinda applies to a lot of his points - some of these aren’t unequivocally bad hiring practices, they are just polarizing or a matter of pros and cons.
Hot take: a lot of job openings for highly specialized skills or from small-medium sized businesses are not posted with specific salary bands in mind, just “as much as it takes to get a great candidate, but not more than their expected value”. In some cases you could legitimately be open to candidates costing anywhere between $80k and $500k - it looks weird to list a job that way, would you do it? Maybe it turns some candidates off, maybe it prevents scaring off candidates who would be great fits and accept the offer. Maybe it’s not worth getting upset about
Regardless, I think there are underrated issues with mandatory pay bands that aren’t obvious unless you’re on the hiring side. Let’s say you legitimately are open to hiring candidates from anywhere from $100k to $300k. For candidates closer to the $300k end they might not want to apply if they think they might get offered way less than they want, and it might attract a lot of candidates on the $100k end who will make it all the way through the process and then get upset when they’re not offered something closer to $300k. Also, for companies like Canonical, they have enough name recognition and genuine supporters that they probably don’t want to talk to candidates who are only applying because they saw a big number (and if they have to, it makes harder for candidates that are better fits to get noticed).
There’s understandably a lot of strong feelings about hiring practices right now and I know a lot of candidates will tend to assume the worst because of how they’ve been treated by other companies. But sometimes companies just make multiple listings so they show up for candidates around the world instead of as a spam tactic, are flexible on salary, and have a culture that values different things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857
FWIW, I disagree with this logic
It's not about cost of living, it's about supply and demand. If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.
You can see this in how engineers don't volunteer to take pay cuts so janitors and fast food employees get paid the same...
At best companies act in good faith but are dysfunctional/incompetent to make this an efficient process. At worst, employers are exploiting the current labor situation to their advantage.
Will this ever change back? I don't think so unless you can eliminate the internet and AI systems.
In my region in the Midwest, we have several well known companies that have been doing this for a very long time. They basically promote the same insane hiring process and then compare their companies hiring process to getting admitted to Harvard - they actually say they're hiring standards are more stringent than Harvard's.
The other funny thing is these same companies who hold themselves out as "elite" pay 30-40% less than market rate. So in essence, you go through some insane hiring process, jumping through all the hoops, and you're still going to end up in a job that pays 30% less than every other company doing two or three interviews before hiring someone.
Will this ever change back? Probably when market dynamics change back in the favor of developers, which could be a very long time. I wholeheartedly believe the "gold rush" of the tech industry has ended. Gone are the days where you had 4-5 different companies vying for your talent year after year after year. The whole industry feels like its contracting.
he just stretches everything out to the max to keep himself "busy"
all these stages and high school nonsense its designed to waste your time and to fill their day with easy nothingness
if you were a good, fast hiring manager, people might start wondering if they even need you
i would do the same tbh
Welcome to the world - labor is also subject to supply and demand.
Thought experiment: Get a job, then move to a higher COL area, do you expect a raise? No. Move to a lower COL area: Somehow we expect lower salary?
The truth is these companies want Stanford, Oxbridge, MIT engineers for minimum wage or close to free. But of course, no-one that will work to be exploited for their below low-ball offers.
Thus, they scream for the bullshit "skills shortage" delusion. The ones that continue to do this are almost certainly joke companies that can't afford market rate.