Reading this was kind of depressing, because it makes Canonical hiring sound primarily like a charade based on how well you write and how well you can charm the reader. Like cool, but maybe you should be asking better questions that aren’t engineered to alienate people that don’t know the word games you’re expecting them to play.
I have not heard of a single good experience about Canonical’s hiring/interview process, but I have heard of plenty of bad ones. I feel like, if you can anticipate and identify these issues (e.g. “useless self-deprecation”, nervousness, lack of stories), as an recruiter or interviewer, part of your job is to help defuse them so you can assess the candidate better.
Some might say it’s on the interviewee, but the whole hiring process is so synthetic and unusual by comparison to what it’s like being on the job that I feel a company is doing themselves a huge disservice to leave it at that — you might miss out on the perfect candidate because they didn’t study some engineering director’s twelves rules for job applications.
I feel a company is doing themselves a huge disservice to leave it at that — you might miss out on the perfect candidate because they didn’t study some engineering director’s twelves rules for job applications.
Unless what they’re looking for specifically is candidates who will religiously study the edicts of every director and apply them right away :-). Some organisations thrive on autonomy, initiative and a profession-oriented culture, some thrive on orthodoxy, hierarchy, and a company-oriented culture.
Don’t get me wrong, I would hate to work for the latter kind. Things like asking engineering professionals about high school grades are a huge red flag for me, I wouldn’t work for a company like that if it were the last engineering job in the world and I’d have to go do something else. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat (and this particularly gory variant of this idiom is in fact the appropriate one in this case, I think :-) ).
I didn’t intend this to be a guide for Canonical (I don’t think it even mentions Canonical by name) but for a role anywhere. I think the rules apply generally.
It’s particularly aimed at people who don’t have the advantage of networks of good advice to help them navigate the way that hiring works in software companies, or don’t understand what the expectations are.
I’ve had multiple people at Canonical tell me that their application process is the most selective of any tech company. A lot of people want to work there, and they don’t have a lot of openings, so I guess they can do that. Most companies are selective but not THAT selective.
This is a pretty good article on how to be gregarious in interviews, if what the company is looking for is a high level of gregarity. Many people like to work with sociable coworkers, so this advice is great in that category.
The efficacy of the recommendations is reduced by the relation to Canonical. I’ve never heard a positive opinion of that company’s hiring process, neither from people who have succeeded or failed, and inclusive of present and former employees. At a recent tech event where names were named of companies doing good and bad in hiring, only Canonical was brought up more often than a local banking conglomerate as having a more confusing and frustrating hiring process. I’m consistently frustrated by how often Canonical comes up as an example of convoluted interviews, especially for a company I have otherwise loved and supported — even financially — since its inception.
I’m consistently frustrated by how often Canonical comes up as an example of convoluted interviews, especially for a company I have otherwise loved and supported — even financially — since its inception.
Indeed; this is a bit of a tangent, but I feel similarly about Canonical in general. I was super into them when they hit the ground in 2004, was the first LoCo team contact in my country in 2006, handed out disks on Software Freedom Day, and hoped my first proper programming job might be with them. (I was in high school at the time.)
It didn’t take long for my idealism to peter out, meanwhile a friend from high school (with whom I shared that enthusiasm!) got a job with them in 2010 or so, and has been working for them ever since. I’ve never heard from him in an “open source context” or seen any of his work likewise — brushing shoulders in a mailing list or a pull request or whatever — because AFAICT in the 15 or so years since he’s mainly worked on Launchpad and the Snap store, which themselves are so .. Canonical in their design and ethos. It makes me kind of sad.
In my experience, any job that cares about my grades is one I want to avoid.
I’ve been writing software professionally since 2008. If that isn’t good enough, then I’m seriously concerned about what their priorities are.
I found out that my last job looked up high school transcripts and would cancel the hiring post interview if your school didn’t use a specific service. Didn’t find that out until 2 years later that we didn’t hire anyone who went to high school outside the US or a school that didn’t pay for said service. It was very odd.
I never understand why top management lets HR get away with absolute nonsense like this? Does HR seem too uninteresting for them to care? Is it because it’s very hard to quantify the damage done by not hiring the people you’ve silently filtered out due to idiocy like this? Either way, it always seems to me like HR has zero accountability for the way they choose to conduct their business.
Well this was way too long read carefully but I didn’t see the “Situation Task Action Result” method mentioned so I’m sharing it here. It’s is an excellent starting point when you want to tell about specific events without rambling.
I’m sorry you don’t like my writing, but it is all mine.
You probably don’t need the advice, but there are plenty of people out there who do.
I wrote it partly from my experience as an interviewer and a hiring lead, but I have also run multiple workshops on the subject of hiring, for example at software conferences in different African countries, where most people don’t really get good advice on how to approach their job applications.
Candidates who are surrounded by friends who know the industry and its expectations don’t tend to make easily-avoided mistakes, but that’s a luxury many people don’t have, and it’s a real shame to see them do badly because they had no advice, or bad advice.
Reading this was kind of depressing, because it makes Canonical hiring sound primarily like a charade based on how well you write and how well you can charm the reader. Like cool, but maybe you should be asking better questions that aren’t engineered to alienate people that don’t know the word games you’re expecting them to play.
I have not heard of a single good experience about Canonical’s hiring/interview process, but I have heard of plenty of bad ones. I feel like, if you can anticipate and identify these issues (e.g. “useless self-deprecation”, nervousness, lack of stories), as an recruiter or interviewer, part of your job is to help defuse them so you can assess the candidate better.
Some might say it’s on the interviewee, but the whole hiring process is so synthetic and unusual by comparison to what it’s like being on the job that I feel a company is doing themselves a huge disservice to leave it at that — you might miss out on the perfect candidate because they didn’t study some engineering director’s twelves rules for job applications.
Unless what they’re looking for specifically is candidates who will religiously study the edicts of every director and apply them right away :-). Some organisations thrive on autonomy, initiative and a profession-oriented culture, some thrive on orthodoxy, hierarchy, and a company-oriented culture.
Don’t get me wrong, I would hate to work for the latter kind. Things like asking engineering professionals about high school grades are a huge red flag for me, I wouldn’t work for a company like that if it were the last engineering job in the world and I’d have to go do something else. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat (and this particularly gory variant of this idiom is in fact the appropriate one in this case, I think :-) ).
I didn’t intend this to be a guide for Canonical (I don’t think it even mentions Canonical by name) but for a role anywhere. I think the rules apply generally.
It’s particularly aimed at people who don’t have the advantage of networks of good advice to help them navigate the way that hiring works in software companies, or don’t understand what the expectations are.
I’ve had multiple people at Canonical tell me that their application process is the most selective of any tech company. A lot of people want to work there, and they don’t have a lot of openings, so I guess they can do that. Most companies are selective but not THAT selective.
This is a pretty good article on how to be gregarious in interviews, if what the company is looking for is a high level of gregarity. Many people like to work with sociable coworkers, so this advice is great in that category.
The efficacy of the recommendations is reduced by the relation to Canonical. I’ve never heard a positive opinion of that company’s hiring process, neither from people who have succeeded or failed, and inclusive of present and former employees. At a recent tech event where names were named of companies doing good and bad in hiring, only Canonical was brought up more often than a local banking conglomerate as having a more confusing and frustrating hiring process. I’m consistently frustrated by how often Canonical comes up as an example of convoluted interviews, especially for a company I have otherwise loved and supported — even financially — since its inception.
Indeed; this is a bit of a tangent, but I feel similarly about Canonical in general. I was super into them when they hit the ground in 2004, was the first LoCo team contact in my country in 2006, handed out disks on Software Freedom Day, and hoped my first proper programming job might be with them. (I was in high school at the time.)
It didn’t take long for my idealism to peter out, meanwhile a friend from high school (with whom I shared that enthusiasm!) got a job with them in 2010 or so, and has been working for them ever since. I’ve never heard from him in an “open source context” or seen any of his work likewise — brushing shoulders in a mailing list or a pull request or whatever — because AFAICT in the 15 or so years since he’s mainly worked on Launchpad and the Snap store, which themselves are so .. Canonical in their design and ethos. It makes me kind of sad.
The 13th rule for applying to Canonical is “Get good grades in High School”: https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/canonical_the_recruitment_process_really_is_that/
In my experience, any job that cares about my grades is one I want to avoid.
I’ve been writing software professionally since 2008. If that isn’t good enough, then I’m seriously concerned about what their priorities are.
I found out that my last job looked up high school transcripts and would cancel the hiring post interview if your school didn’t use a specific service. Didn’t find that out until 2 years later that we didn’t hire anyone who went to high school outside the US or a school that didn’t pay for said service. It was very odd.
I never understand why top management lets HR get away with absolute nonsense like this? Does HR seem too uninteresting for them to care? Is it because it’s very hard to quantify the damage done by not hiring the people you’ve silently filtered out due to idiocy like this? Either way, it always seems to me like HR has zero accountability for the way they choose to conduct their business.
Well this was way too long read carefully but I didn’t see the “Situation Task Action Result” method mentioned so I’m sharing it here. It’s is an excellent starting point when you want to tell about specific events without rambling.
This has the verbosity of LLM garbage, except it’s written by a human. Which somehow makes it even worse.
I’m sorry you don’t like my writing, but it is all mine.
You probably don’t need the advice, but there are plenty of people out there who do.
I wrote it partly from my experience as an interviewer and a hiring lead, but I have also run multiple workshops on the subject of hiring, for example at software conferences in different African countries, where most people don’t really get good advice on how to approach their job applications.
Candidates who are surrounded by friends who know the industry and its expectations don’t tend to make easily-avoided mistakes, but that’s a luxury many people don’t have, and it’s a real shame to see them do badly because they had no advice, or bad advice.