Ok I’m doin the thread I said I wanted to do last week. (feel free to mute unless you enjoy a little second-hand drama as a Monday morning treat)
Attn #devrel people! Are you job hunting? Does this pic of search results look familiar? Have you ever seen a bunch of job postings like this from Canonical and thought “gee I should apply to one of these”?
In early 2023 I spent ~3 months interviewing for this role at Canonical: I made it all the way to Shuttleworth himself turning me down.
The same req# I applied to is live today: watch and you’ll start to notice this globally-remote job regularly re-posted across multiple major cities in order to keep the linkedin search spam fresh.
IMO this role goes unfilled as long as they’re private. If you’re still not convinced, allow me to share my cautionary tale…
So let me be super clear: I read all the HN threads, the Reddit discussions, and the Glassdoor reviews, and (I thought) I knew what I was getting into with their interview process. I still chose to apply because Canonical, and this role in particular, is a niche within a niche, and it’s my niche. I would have kicked ass.
If you’re actually considering applying you probably feel the same way.
Okay so what you really want to know about is the application & interview process. Let’s go.
1: THE ESSAY QUESTIONS
Google it, glassdoor it, read the HN and reddit threads. Everyone knows about these. I knew about them going into it. I did it anyway. I wrote 18 pages. Pic is 1 of 4 sections (~30 Qs total).
@sara Heh, they have the same thing on the dev side of thing, made me just close it because well… while I technically did went to high-school it was grade-less and then I never went further.
Sorry I mean "psychometric assessments”. Rotate shapes in your head. Spot the odd word out in a group of related words. Timed number-related tasks. Nonsense that has no actual relevance to work performance. I scored “above average” on these, for exactly what that is worth.
@sara fucking wild that they decided that pattern matching ability tests are applicable for what is ostensibly a mainly social role where that skill has almost no real influence.
Finally! We’re weeks into the process at this point.
An initial round of four hour-long technical and skill-assessment interviews. These were actually quite enjoyable, and the individual interviewers were as a whole lovely people.
Of note: every interviewer warned me, unprompted, in various words that the CEO was "difficult".
A timed personality test. "Pick which of these words most applies to you", ad infinitum.
A WILD HUMAN APPEARS
After “passing” the personality test, an hour-long behavioral interview with a real-life HR person; textbook STAR-method questions. At the end of the hour I was able to discuss comp and benefits for the first time. I learned the role reported directly to the CEO.
At this point I’m notified I’ve made it to the “late stage”. Three more hour-long technical and skill-based interviews are scheduled. Again, these were fine, reasonably challenging, and the individuals themselves completely pleasant to speak with.
Canonical apps are run by a “hiring lead” who’s not a recruiter or the hiring manager. After months of emails, I finally get a call from my lead.
On the call I learn his "only concern" was my personality test indicated I was not "dominant" enough. Canonical wants dominant people. He asks me to persuade him I can do the job. Whatever I said apparently worked: "he would like to move forward with an offer". The offer just has to clear finance, HR, and CEO approval.
An hour-long interview with the CEO is scheduled. I’m excited to finally speak to the de facto hiring manager. To finally get to talk about my vision for the role and my philosophies of management and devrel. I also prep for more technical skill grilling just in case.
Plus, like, I’m a fuckin fangirl, right? I’m looking forward to this 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."
@sara Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù])[1] (meaning humanity in Bantu) describes a set of closely related African-origin value systems that emphasize the interconnectedness of individuals with their surrounding societal and physical worlds. "Ubuntu" is sometimes translated as "I am because we are" (also "I am because you are"), or "humanity towards others" (Zulu umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). In Xhosa, the latter term is used, but is often meant in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".
Canonical CEO: I only have a job for the top 5% of humans, not you pleb pos
@panos@sara@me the original commercial product was Launchpad; Ubuntu was mainly the tech demo that you could build on top of that. Once Launchpad failed, Ubuntu became the product. So there was a time when "Ubuntu was about humanity" applied
@ebassi so, even if that's the case, you are saying that the tech demo of a commercial product, built by the same company, had nothing to do with profit? @sara@me
@panos What I was saying is that, by virtue of not being the commercial focus, Ubuntu was allowed to ignore the "let's make money" side of things for a while, and that's mainly when it got big, by taking what upstream projects like GNOME and freedesktop were doing in order to make the Linux desktop usable, with Canonical engineers working upstream.
The next hour is spent picking through my educational background and early employment choices. To be clear, I’m an old lady: this is not recent history. He wanted to know what standardized exam I took to get into college and what I scored. He asked if I could "prove" that score. He wanted to know why I chose my major and school. He asked about a specific place I lived near >20 years ago, and I realize he’s looking at a map as we talk. We run over-time.
The day after that call I received a curt rejection email saying Canonical would not be moving forward with me as a candidate. I asked if there was any feedback, and I hear that the CEO call "could have gone better" and I "had not persuaded Mark that I had a strong understanding of what Canonical needs".
With their three months of assessment and notes on me, I ask what next steps would be if I wanted to explore other roles at the company. I never received a response.
Pages of essays written: 18
Psychometric evaluations: 3
Personality test: 1
Number of interviews: 10+
Days between first and last contact: 107
Number of women I spoke to throughout the entire fucking process: 0
Emotional trauma: priceless
@sara
regarding time scale, my personal record is:
6 months for a confirmation that the (paper) application was received (those 6 months ago).
6 years later I received the first invitation to the job interview I had applied for back then.
PS: yes I still run Ubuntu on literally all of my (work+play) machines, and that won’t change any time soon… a community is more than any single person, no matter how big that person thinks they are.
@jonny@sara It's more or less how I got run around by Google some 15 years or so ago. The second time it happened, I told them never to contact me again with job offers.
@jens@jonny@sara I did 3 different rounds of interviews with Google, every 5 years or so over 15 years. The 4th time they contacted me I told them that I would agree to interview so long as they were willing to pay me $1000 per day of interviews. I didn't hear back.
@danjac@sara If I had a nickel for every time a white male South African billionaire who made his money in 1990s dot-com boom financial cryptography by taking advantage of the post apartheid international regulatory loopholes went on to convince himself he was a technical genius and turned out to have issues...
@sara damn, I met him at an event (15 maybe?) years ago and he left me a good impression, but of course it's entirely different to be someone visiting a community enthusiastically promoting your product, and being a ceo looking for people to work with, seems like this process got way out of hands, sorry you had to go through that.
@sara now picturing a tv series about someone who does months of prep and schemes in order to get through this process and get close to the ceo so they can stab him
@sara Matches my own experience for another type of position. The strong warnings of major red flags from the CEO got me to stop just a little bit sooner, fortunately.
His fixation on high-school-30-years-ago and pseudo-science tests are proofs that he has major issues with understanding even the basics of human psychology.
@sara Sympathies! One thing that really struck a chord for me, though in my case it was at a small company: if you're over say 30 and the hirer cares more about your education than about what you've done, especially if you have a degree but they want to talk about school, it's a red flag. I wish I'd known that; I ended up walking out of that place without another job lined up.
@sara Holy shit this is wild that a man who got to CEO of a Linux company thinks that how someone did 20+ years ago accounts for anything. That's enough of a red flag for me.
@sara And all that for what would have been pretty crappy pay, right?
I tried applying for a job there last year too, but I didn't get to talk to a human. I did essay, IQ test, and two takehome coding challenges (I was pretty proud of those too).
I'm pretty sure that Marky Mark has no idea how to run a company. What has Canonical done and actually managed to make good on?
bzr? git ate its lunch.
Launchpad? Github ate its lunch
Upstart? systemd ate its lunch
Ubuntu One? iTunes ate its lunch
Juju? Ansible, Terraform, Salt, and even Puppet ate its lunch.
@JordiGH Canonical made linux-on-the-desktop accessible to "regular folks" in a magical way that nobody else has quite managed to touch yet, and especially as a "devrel person" I respect their laser focus on end-users that made that true. I was ready to evangelize SNAP for them (lol) just to be a part of the machine for a little while.
But nah, that's not Mark. It's the people doing the work in spite of him.
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