Whoa, that dude is full of himself.
The "psychometric assessments" were specially dumb and I started questioning if I wanted to work at Canonical at that time anyway.
There's places where HR and processes as a whole look like just incompetency. And other places where the amount of people, processes and steps sounds like a mafia to employ a lot of people to achieve absolutely nothing (32,000 open positions?). This REALLY sounds like the latter (even Mark complains about why he's wasting time with a duplicate application).
Very very clever actionable using GDPR. And totally within the spirit of the law. I'll use it.
Honestly, I very much doubt a company with ~1200 employees has 32,000 open positions.
More likely it's HR reposting the same 20 job ads every day to keep them at the top of the linkedin news feed or some nonsense like that.
It’s like “growth hacking” but for hiring post positioning.
Umm yes? That's how it works everywhere, highest boss in the chain has right of refusal on new hires.
At a small company, you might well be interviewed by all of your teammates, your prospective manager, the HR person and the owner/president/CEO... in the course of one day.
At a large company, an IC might not even see their supervisor's manager's director's vice-president until they had been working for six months.
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.
I made time during a family emergency, and attended a call on US west coast time while living in EU (was supposed to be 9PM for me but they pushed it to 10PM right before due to recruiter messing up the invite and having it off by a week).
He didn't ask any relevant questions. He didn't seem interested. He just looked like he was doing a favor to someone that asked him to give me a shot. Original call was supposed to be 1h, then after reschedule it was 30m, but he thanked me for my time after 20 minutes. Ofc I got rejected after, even though the people before had good opinions of me.
All in all, if you're doing hiring, at least try to look interested. phew.
If everyone is using the same criteria, they are all competing for the same group of candidates. Using other processes, no matter how whack-a-doodle, will give you a completely different pool to select from.
As a result, the whole system has devolved into a “garbage in, garbage out” exercise. What began as a meaningful way to assess candidates has largely been undermined, and the original intent behind these evaluations—whether skills-based or culture fit—has been lost.
Do your own time. Take your paycheck. Don't rock the boat.
Honestly, I would have run away at the very beginning with this weird focus on high school.
If you can't be professional in your recruitment process, it's a big red flag.
Assuming everything is true, he did actually dodge a bullet.
The ‘what marks did you get in high school mathematics’ alone as a screening question (apparently an auto rejection if it’s not top 10%) and the ceo interviewing everyone personally gives a vibe of ‘you must have walked a very similar path in life as the boss to work here.’
Like there doesn’t seem to be any room to be the slightest bit outside of the lane of the ceos personal expectations. What the hell is this company like on the inside? A clone factory i assume?
Not necessarily, I would assume it's more of a 'yes man' mentality where you have to agree with everything the boss say (even when you didn't understand it lol).
Giving different opinion, counter argument, ... All the stuff that allows to make an educated guess and eventually take good decision is a big No-No.
The equivalent of fascism but in a company.
Usually the one who reach the top are those who suck it up, not based on merit. Overall bad working environment.
Thats how you end up with the famous Ubuntu-Amazon advertising relationship in the start menu, or the snap package.
Mark interviews are always the last in the process but since they’re the only ones that carry an automatic fail despite all other interviewer scores, they should be done first.
That would be impossible since there is only one Mark but a multitude of people who can conduct the previous interviews.
Really weird as someone who's worked at a staff+ level at multiple FAANGs with over 20 years experience. Apparently my GPA from over 20 years ago isn't high enough for Canonical.
This is amazing. Does the US have a similar law for us to get interview feedbacks like this? I can become a single-issue voter for this law /jk
Why do people use "they" and "their" for a single person? Is this the requirement for not misgendering someone?
Progressed pretty far into the process. 94% on intelligence assessment and positive on the behavioral. Then in a call with HR, I was was told a COVID vaccine was required. I said I was unwilling to take an mRNA vaccine. Rejected by email after that. (I did get Novavax a couple of months later when it became available in my area).
Overall, my impression was negative. Success at Canonical means you fit into a narrow model, subject yourself to unwarranted character judgments, and don't have an opinion about much.
jofla_net•1d ago
barbazoo•1d ago
Maybe an open source org hiring problem?
dingnuts•1d ago
spearmint1992•1d ago
loloquwowndueo•22h ago
Kudos•1d ago