I went through much of the same process while applying for a role at Canonical. They asked me the same 38 questions for a junior position (straight out of uni but with co-op experience), which I still found strange even at my level because I’ve graduated from university, so why do you care that much about my high school? It took a super long time to hear back about anything, and I dipped out before doing the the technical interview because I got another offer from a company that wasn’t jerking me around.

I assumed this was going to be a negative article because my experience with canonical was equally disappointing. It only took me one go to drop it though. The pseudo-scientific questions in the online assessment got me so annoyed I was just cursing by the time it was over. Companies with this kind of selection process do not deserve the talent they get.

Shuttleworth’s involvement in the recruitment process explains why Ubuntu is such an annoying operating system to deal with. He probably gets involved in wrong places all the time. There likely is some kind of vision, but the dude won’t listen to critique, and surrounds himself with yes-men.

Redhat was… not as bad, but there’s something equally annoying about yet another opensource company deciding to copy silicon valley recruitment processes, instead of thinking for themselves and trying to be innovative in that regard too.

Anti Commercial-AI license

This is is brutal, especially the interview with Shuttleworth:

To the question “How was your university?”, I answered that it wasn’t prestigious, and pretty small and rural, as we could see cows from the windows. Shuttleworth immediately interrupted me to say “don’t play games, don’t try to muddle your answers. I’m interviewing you for a senior position, I’m asking you questions, I’m expecting straight answers.” I was so flabbergasted that instead of answering properly (“As I’m interviewing for a senior position, I’m expecting proper senior position related questions.”), I gave a meek “Okay…” Some parts of the conversation were equally awkward and filled with an unhealthy amount of salt, especially about upstart (“They’re a reason why Chromebooks are using it”, the reasons are mostly technical debt, not technical excellence.), mir (“Wayland has the same design flaws as Xorg”), … At some point, someone bought him a plate, and he started to eat, without excusing himself about doing so. I asked him why he would spend time interviewing prospective employees in non-executive positions, let alone individual contributors, as this is likely eating a lot of his time, given that Canonical currently has around 1200 employees. He told me that he like to know who is hired, and that this process allows to root out average candidates. After 40 minutes out of a 60 minutes scheduled interview, Shuttleworth said “Ok, nice talking to you, have a nice day,” and abruptly ended the interview. I seriously thought about withdrawing my application, as I really didn’t want to work with him, but since the position was only senior IC, odds are that I wouldn’t have to, so I didn’t retract it.