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.

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.

If I wasn’t desperate for a job I would declined to apply out of the idiocy of the question

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.

EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.

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?

And just to add to the Canonical shame too, I’m all for that.

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.

How do I know? I did it. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a move to full-time remote work. I liked the people that I worked with, but I spent over a decade there, management started going downhill, and I could tell the company was on a trajectory of slow death. I spent HOURS almost every day for six months applying to jobs on LinkedIn. I restricted myself to positions that I thought I was actually qualified for without stretching. I avoided consulting/MSP companies. I probably applied to well over a hundred positions.

How many responses did I get? Zero. Not a single one. Occasionally, a recruiter would ping me and say they had a job opening that was a perfect fit. Every single time, it ended up being a contract position.

I DID eventually find my current job on LinkedIn, but only because I recognized the company name as one that a friend of mine moved to 6 months earlier. I called him up, asked him how it was, and he provided a referral. It dawned on me after I accepted the offer that every SINGLE job I have ever had was either through a friend's referral or because I knew the manager beforehand. The old adage, "it's who you know," is still as relevant as ever.

Seriously, I don't trust Glassdoor at all and stopped looking at it.

Finding a current employee through a friend or knowing one seems to be the only way to get any accurate feedback.

Possibly seeing how company treats customers could be another point.

Glassdoor does not remove reviews for payment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

I had one position I was hiring for, for over a year where I just straight up told my manager that I didn’t care to interview anyone anymore until he was ok with them.

The process at every single place I’ve worked at was built to find a reason _not_ to hire someone because we might find the perfect candidate next week

I'm sincerely wondering. So if you have 50 people on the payroll to do "SAP", where did they come from? A school? A course? Didn't they have coursemates to reach out to for more workers? Don't people and companies have networks? How can things deteriorate to the level that you have to put out ads for total strangers to apply?