> Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16."<p>What a silly take; generally brains aren't fully developed until the age of 25 or so and some people mature earlier than others. Whatever you were or weren't at 16 says very little about you if you're over 30, or even in your 20s. Never mind environmental factors which are often much harder to deal with at young ages, such as a less-than-ideal family situation, being bullied, and things like that.<p>But according to Mark a ~5-year window defines who you are for the rest of your life... Seems like a classic case of someone thinking their own experiences (or their perception of them, which may not necessarily align with reality) is the only possible path to be a good person.<p>I always assumed these questions about high school were mostly to writing capability more than anything else and that the content doesn't greatly matter. Well, guess it does :-/
I've been suckered into that tarpit myself. It's a gruelling and mostly pointless process that is designed to suck the soul out of you and crush any hope of ever getting a job there. It starts almost inviting, but gets progressively disparaging and obscure. After the 6th round of interviews I got zero feedback other than "other candidates were better suited for this position".
It's an utter nightmare that any sane person should avoid.
Reddit and Forums are full of people with similar experience.<p>Canonical currently uses this "psychometric test" as a decisive critera for candidates<p><a href="https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Example-Booklet-2018.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.thomas.co/sites/default/files/2019-08/GIA-Exampl...</a><p>And from their own words "they take it very seriously".<p>The result is exactly what you would expect of this kind of test. It is unsurprisingly utter rubbish.<p>It asks the candidate to solve "important cognitive tasks" and translate that to substract 2 number as fast as possible, identify letters as fast as possible or rotate an image as fast as possible.<p>I would honestly be curious to know how anybody with a functional brain can believe 5 seconds that this can be an important selection criteria for a senior software engineer, a SRE or an engineering manager.<p>Is the goal suppose to be identifying the best human-based GPUs ?<p>I wonder how many top talents they lost in early selection process due to this kind of garbage.
> Mark begins our call by saying: "I've read your essay responses. You say you didn't go to high school. Generally I only want people who are in the top 5%. You obviously can't prove that applies to you. So tell me why I should believe you were the equivalent to the top 5% of your peers at 16."<p>Ah, so those education questions are there for precisely the BS reasons it seems like they're there for.
Hehe, Canonical has a bit of a stink in the industry for this.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38128573</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738894</a>
Canonical and Gitlab are both on my “ignore until the end of time” list due to their dehumanising recruitment approaches. Some companies design their recruitment processes around the “let’s see how much nonsense they will put up with” approach to filtering people, and I don’t to work with, or use the products/services of these kind of companies. They are dead to me.
When I saw the title I knew what the author was up for. No not really, I was wrong. The most lengthy interview process that I am aware of and have seen first hand is faculty member hiring at a university -- that was really challenging and demanding -- but worth it. Canonical? What kind of cult is it?
The hiring process sounds like it is made to recruit unquestioning human drones.<p>I guess that makes sense given how closed and hypocritical "the maker of the world's favourite Linux system" is. Employees having any actual interest or passion in what they are supposed to be doing would cause issues.
See also: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_and_their_disrespectful_interviews/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/17mmren/canonical_an...</a>