Canonicals Interview Process

Internally, toxic culture has resulted in large turnaround which is biased to the most experienced people in the company (those smart and valuable enough to realize they don’t have to put up with the crap and can do better elsewhere). It doesn’t matter how brilliant the new hires are, there’s no way to replace the lost institutional knowledge and experience when an old-timer leaves.

Canonical’s interview process is all kinds of broken. This has been discussed widely on the internet and internally but as long as Mark (who is the main driver and firmly believes it’s a revolution in how hiring is done) and his hiring minions continue to justify it and refuse to change it, it will remain so.

Canonical is a remote company so location doesn’t matter but - what they do is, they post the same ad but selecting specific countries or cities to get better SEO positioning in most geographies. You’ll see the same position advertised for a bunch of cities (hence the inflated count) but the job posting text will actually say it’s remote.

It’s like “growth hacking” but for hiring post positioning.

I wouldn't hold Jobs up as a paragon to aim for. Falling short sounds like a good thing here

based solely on anecdotes and rumors and feelings, I wonder if it's a nonprofit problem. Reminds me of the kind of grift you read about in various NGO charity type organizations

Thanks. I rarely saw this usage before, hence the question

The reverse is also true, Canonical employs a bunch of Debian developers who work on Debian upstream during their paid time when it makes more sense.

>It is unusual to be interviewed by someone more than three levels above the position you are applying for.

This happened to me, and it was by far my worst interview ever.

Early on in my career right after graduating I got interviewed for a Jr. Sysadmin position at a high frequency trading firm of approx ~1000 employees. The first few behavioral interviews they repeated the exact same questions, including some soft linux knowledge questions (what would you use to troubleshoot network problems lol). Then they took me for a 4 hour on-site gauntlet where they asked the same questions, again, and then I had to do a python leetcode whiteboard problem which I immediately bombed because I hardly did much coding back then. The application said "familiarity with bash/python scripting". If I remember right the problem involved binary search trees which I had no idea about at the time. I didn't know my ass from my hole.

Suffice to say after that, we had lunch. all 4 employees on my team. And all 4 employees that were in the office at the time, which was pretty much empty, because apparently nobody really went in. They gave me a really cold, wet, and soppy burrito. This was the off the mark "vibes" interview where they shot the shit and pretended to be friendly to gauge my personality. I embarrassingly had to play along even thought we all knew it was a total waste of fucking time.

Afterwards, I was shuffled into a big empty meeting room where the CEO interviewed me on screen from California. I was asked the exact same fucking behavioral soft questions down to what I would use to troubleshoot network problems, then he asked me to walk through an example. But at this point I was pretty much mentally blown up from the whiteboard problem and had no motivation to continue. My mind went blank. I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me.

Fastest rejection response I ever got.