A short while ago, we talked about the hellish hiring process at a Silicon Valley startup, and today we’ve got another one. Apparently, it’s an open secret that the hiring process at Canonical is a complete dumpster fire.
I left Google in April 2024, and have thus been casually looking for a new job during 2024. A good friend of mine is currently working at Canonical, and he told me that it’s quite a nice company with a great working environment. Unfortunately, the internet is full of people who had a poor experience: Glassdoor shows that only 15% had a positive interview experience, famous internet denizens like sara rambled on the topic, reddit, hackernews, indeed and blind all say it’s terrible, … but the idea of being decently paid to do security work on a popular Linux distribution was really appealing to me.
↫ Julien Voisin
What follows is Byzantine and ridiculous, and all ultimately unnecessary since it turns out Mark Shuttleworth interviews applicants at the end of this horrid process and yays or nays people on vibes alone. You have to read it to believe it.
One interesting note that I do appreciate is that Voisin used their rights under the GDPR to force Canonical to hand over the feedback about his application since the GDPR considers it personal information. Delicious.
Oh man, I had this same experience. In 2022 I applied to for a product management position at Canonical, and over the course of (many) months, slowly interviewed my way up. It started with a questionnaire and written interview with the exact questions Julien discusses. After multiple in-person rounds, I got to interview with Mr. Shuttleworth himself. He was somewhere in Africa at the time, if memory serves. During my interview, he literally just stopped and said “I don’t see you in this position” and transitioned to talking about something different (developer relations). I actually stopped him again and asked him to confirm what he just said. Indeed, he had decided I was not going to be a product manager after talking to me for about 15 minutes, regardless of the many rounds of previous interviews I’d made it through.
You won’t tell a successful man how to run his business. Also, any business is “peoples business” first, especially at SME level. This is why they are efficient and competitive — before they grow too big and crushed by the burocrazy.
What a weird response to someone sharing their own similar experience in a simple and factual manner.
Aankhen,
I don’t think Andreas Reichel’s post was a justification for Perplexus’s experience, just about why things are that way. At a certain point most large companies become plagued by the bureaucracy. All sensibilities get lost to it and everyone becomes a cog in the machine.
Alfman,
I think that’s a very charitable interpretation, to put it mildly, and I’m still struggling to read it that way. But I certainly agree with your comments about how size affects companies.
Simple and factual argument: Canonical is a SME and Mark’s “baby”. He will always have the last word and right fully so. It’s his money and if he does not feel it then it won’t happen. That’s how family owned companies work. That’s what made them so incredible successful and strong (in general, not specifically about Canonical).
You KNOW that before you apply because you made your homework.
And it works in two ways: if the boss just likes you, you are in even when your CV would never have survived in a large corporation. If he does not you are out.
One more thing: most successful SMEs are built upon the principal “divide et impare” and so all the previous interviews were meaningless.
Things only change when investors show up and force the founder stepping aside.
Been there, done that. Didn’t bother to get the T-shirt – I don’t dig the weird purple/orange colour scheme.
I applied long ago and went over a bunch of questionaries until I got extremely bored and just didn’t follow through. And I wasn´t at all motivated by the idea of getting to know their beloved leader either.
Lately I tried again for a more interesting position but I didn’t even pass the first stage: I guess it’s just not for me.
I was an Ubuntu contributor from 2012 up until around 2020. Canonical basically always had two types of employees: One one side you had the highly motivated ones who were very visible, invested much more time than they were being paid for and were always suffering under the internal structures and Shuttleworth’s many, many, many bad decisions. I mean just remember how he sunk about half a billion dollars of his personal money into Ubuntu during the “Ubuntu Phone” days, which – to me knowledge and interpretation of the company filings – he still hasn’t made back yet.
On the other side you had the quiet employees who just followed orders and basically never talked back.
The highly motivated ones all left over the years, with some being actively removed from their roles. I was being motivated a couple of times over the years to apply for one role or another but never applied. I always had a bad feeling about it. Seems like the whole interview process is set up to attract more people of the “never talk back” type, just like in any other corporate structure that doesn’t want too many people shaking up the system.