I remember seeing Ubuntu hiring recently, like a half a year ago or a year ago.
Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".
Well, well, well, who would have thought "maths geniuses" are really bad at DDoS protection and running infra in real life. And academic marks / IT degree mean nothing in real IT work.
Think twice next time you hire people, Canonical. People without a degree, but with extensive experience you rejected might have prevented this situation in the first place.
I'm not connected with this DDoS attack in any way, just in case, but I remember their arrogant hiring attitude and now it's amusing to see the outcome of it.
> Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".
Man that like barely scratches the surface of the surrealness of canonical's hiring process
You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).
I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.
Cray cray
I don’t remember it as particularly surreal. They did a remote programming interview over Zoom (in 2014 or so) and it was a really interesting problem - to make a PRNG for a specific range of integers using two other PRNGs. Their solution had a branch and mine was branchless and decently random. It was, at least then, a very personalistic company, centred around Shuttleworth, but his influence didn’t usually extend more than two org levels, and different parts of it behaved as different companies.
reply▲I don't think the specific individual technical interviews are the surreal part about canonical's hiring process
reply▲I remember reading an article describing Canonical’s predatory hiring practices, but I can’t find it any more. Do you have sources?
reply▲reply▲> We have hired outstanding individuals who did not attend or complete university. If this describes you, please continue with your application and enter ‘no degree’.
But not if they got bad grades in HS lol?
Yeah, I considered applying once, but saw others online saying their process was long and outdated. In my case, I applied anyway, but during the screen call I asked if I would have to use Ubuntu even if I didn't use, and also their new (at that time) Juju for all tasks, even if that wasn't the best tool for the job. The position was related to automation of services. They told me I would to use both Ubuntu and Juju, and I couldn't use other tools if those two worked, which I understand, but I thought being stuck using Juju probably wouldn't help my career after a few years.
reply▲> They told me I would to use both Ubuntu and Juju, and I couldn't use other tools if those two worked
Dogfooding is a valid strategy to improve their product, but you’d be heavily invested in Juju’s success.
Seeing as how Canonical launched several Kubernetes products, this strategy didn’t survive for long.
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