I'm 50. High School was a long time ago. I love Ubuntu, and I love Java (they were looking for people for Enterprise Java tooling), but the inane high school questions were, for me, a strong indicator that "oldies need not apply."
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.
I'm in my 30s (and, fair warning, worked with Greg for a short while, he's a smart chap) and recently applied for a spot at Canonical. On these sorts of questions I just answered "N/A" or "not measured".
A recruiter reached out to me and wanted me to take what I can only but describe as the equivalent of Phrenology and personality quiz through a coding quiz. I reached out to the recruiter and informed him that such things are likely illegal in the US and on top of that, I'd stated on my resume that I do not participate in Leetcode, etc.
What shocked me was the response: "Thank you for your withdrawal of interest in working at Canonical."
I've been a sometimes-active member of the Ubuntu community, contributing to various parts of their wiki until that became less usable, as well as providing help on their IRC channels, occasionally stepping in to help a package maintainer here and there, etc. For the position that they were hiring for (developer relations advocate), you'd think I'm the kind of person they beg for, but it really shows that they wouldn't hire the people who volunteer their time.
The inferred subtext of "we only hire yes men" put me off as much as anything. Who wants to work with a company full of them? Life's too short for that.
It used to be that tech companies and startups were for the young, but now that every company is a tech company (bringing along all the societal baggage) we’ll see more of the same systemic incompetence, but mostly from companies that still think they can move fast and break things. It’s a new ballgame and regulatory agencies are paying attention.
I worry about grade inflation as well - a 1990s 1st means you are in the top 10% of students but a 2023 1st just means you are in the top 40%. Very different hurdles to clear.
Based on the process, Canonical is the choosiest beggar I've bothered to apply to in the tech world.
It was quite obvious to me I would be rejected, as the form is much more focused on "things that look good on paper" rather than "what this person can do", e.g. asking for your GPA.
This presumably reflects the internal culture which leads to a history of user-hostile decisions: snap, Unity, that Amazon fiasco. They probably looked good on paper.
I'm only salty because I think people with atypical profiles like mine could truly make their software better and more adapted to today's FLOSS world. Oh well, guess I'll just keep working on maximizing someone's profits.
They're inherently related. The medium dictates the context of both the questions and responses. Trying to communicate things on a form that are not accurately communicated on a form is a fools errand. Interviews, code tests, etc exist to communicate things that aren't well communicated in that format.
There are 8 billion people on the planet and remote work & automation is changing the game.
If you won't crawl through broken glass, cool, there are 5000+ people in India who might, and a couple hundred jr IT support types a lot closer who are being replaced with an IAM system.
Two World Wars killed the main working segments of entire generations -- young men -- and allowed the West to take the lead for a while. The tech booms prolonged that a little further. But now them halcyon days are over homie. Hustle, or I'm replacing you with a math whiz from Delhi.
Go ahead. That math whiz can't deliver solutions fit for the real-world. I've seen it time and time again. But hey, I'm hoping you throw your money at that math whiz because you wasting your time and money is how I'm going to beat you!
Maybe you want that, but some people like working beside people who give a shit. Some of those places give equity, some give good paychecks, and some give a good work-life balance. Not everyone is motivated the same way you are.
So work for a place that gives out equity? Maybe I'm getting a totally different view of offers to engineers (at non-Canonical companies) than you are, but most of mine have contained passion-inducing amounts of equity - if you believe in the 409A. Which you can't, until you can.
The great thing about being FI is the lack of worry over this garbage. I would have truthfully answered that I was a terrible student, that I could only focus on subjects that truly interested me, and that one of those subjects fortunately happened to be coding.
They want to toss my resume for my struggles 20 years ago? So be it. It's as good of a filter for me not wanting to work for them as it is vice versa.
I'm pretty sure I'd have great answers for those questions, but that was also 30 years ago and the fact that those questions are being asked tells me I don't want to work there.
I've hired lots of software engineers in my life, and even for ones right out of university, I'm not sure I could recall what university they attended.
I wonder if the real test is to get a candidate who will do something like "I took a look at the interview questions and determined that most of them aren't a productive use of time for either of us, here's why. Now, here's a short description of why you should hire me and what I'll bring to the company." Like looking for someone who can cut through the bureaucracy.
Good grief, that's definitely the bigger WTF. Each of those engineering questions could be its own essay. What's even left to talk about if you answer all of those?
A Canonical dev in the replies offhandedly mentions that they read every one thoroughly whether its "3 or 30 pages" which is certainly an ask when you have people submitting an autobiographical novella as the first step in your interview process.
The first sentence of the questionnaire says it's to work on Ubuntu WSL.
It's funny to imagine that the barrage of questions from Ubuntu is merely a tactic to suppress the obvious question from the candidate: why is the company seeming to fall for that move by MS.
I agree. This is a great filter for companies you do not want to be a part of. Keep in mind that your future bosses will evaluate you based on useless and silly metrics like these.
There are a great many other places to work that DO value your actual accomplishments.
Unless this attracts the desperate who wouldn't apply without these filters, the compensation necessary to secure the winner will be unaffected or might even go up as the smaller pool of applicants will have Canonical over a barrel.
More likely they do this because they have so many applications coming in that having to pay more to a lesser worker is worth more than having to hire many more HR staff to process all the applications. The hope is that it will scare off most people, and if that fails a machine can filter on these values. It could be any arbitrary value – race, religion, random number – but courts have effectively ruled that any filtering mechanism that isn't directly related to the job or school could face severe legal consequences, so this keeps the lawyers happy.
Truly desperate or people with ulterior motives maybe, don't want to be paranoid but maybe only someone who is working undercover for some agency would want to go through that lengthy process of the interview. Maybe Canonical thinks this way it can detect this kind of people. idk
It's more likely that they had someone junior write these questions and no one senior ever looked it over. This reflects badly on the HR department at Canonical, it's probably not some conspiracy to find desperate people.
> I would be able to give "impressive" answers to those questions
I want to complain that they don't have a "won the state championship" answer for the math question. The allowed responses don't even capture my full, 30 years ago high school glory.
I think OP was just pointing out the irony of complaining about high school English questions while making a high school-level English usage mistake (would of vs. would have)
English prescriptivists are even more ironic-er. If they'd of bothered to take even an undergraduate level course in linguistics, they'd understand how wasteful a pastime "grammar nazi" is.
Can you define a couple of hundred? Just to be clear I am a language descriptivist, and am looking for a timeline I can hang you on for being wrong. Also to preface, if you pick a timeline older then the phrase “the bees knees”I will think you are irrelevant, and if you can pick a younger phrase but I can show language evolution on top of that, I will also consider you irrelevant.
HR: Our records are incomplete, please provide a copy of your degree and transcript.
Me: I don't have a degree.
HR: We only hire people with degrees!
Me: Well I have a contract and get paid so...
HR: What is the highest education level you've achieved?
Me: I finished high school 20 years ago.
HR: Great, please provide a copy of your certificate and transcript.
I ignored them, six months later practically word for word we had the same conversation again.
A tool I hate, surpassed by my hate for mindless sheep following corporate red tape and scripts. Something something fire with fire. Maybe there are positive uses for chatGPT after all, reducing mundanity for all.
Not that I agree with it, but maybe they ask those kinds of questions because they want people who will just answer the damn questions, rather than argue with them over it.
> High School: I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school.
...is this evidence that the filter is bad, or evidence that the filter is working?
Is this evidence that the applicant is bad, or good?
This story is real, but I understand if you don't believe it: The year I finished school, all but one of my school's English Lit students failed the state exam (TEE). The only one that passed was the guy coming bottom of the class.
Depends on what kind of applicant they're looking for. In some roles you may want someone who is not afraid to challenge rules and conventions, in some roles, rules and conventions exist for very important reasons. The preferred balance varies per organization/team/role etc, just as it does for any other attribute of someone's style of work.
That stood out to me too. This could be very valuable information, in the employer's opinion, to make their choice.
The author's counterpoint might be that there are a lot of similar behavioral/subordination/personal-history questions that they could have asked, but didn't, because, as TFA discusses, a lot of stuff you did when you were barely starting to be an adult doesn't matter after a few years.
The problem with the hiring process is that there's no one correct way to do it.
What consistently confuses me is why any highly marketable professional would be frustrated about an organization filtering in a way that they disagree with. If you can tell that an organization is not for you in the application form, that's literally the best time to find out. I don't know why anyone would want to go into business with people who they disagree with on how to run a business.
I interviewed for Canonical and they pull even worse bullshit later on the process. They asked me to write a x00 page essay on something-something... it's borderline ridiculous how their HR works.
The best way to see if someone will perform well at a job, is to have them do that job and see. The second best way is to ask them for proof they succeeded at a similar job. That proof is usually a combination of references and a discussion about work they did at the previous job.
If you can't do any of those things, like for some recent grads, then the next best predictors of job performance are going to be psychometrics, specifically IQ and trait conscientiousness. Colleges heavily select for these traits during admissions, but less so with the actual course work. These traits are most predictive when you expect to teach a person the job on the job, with their prior experience being irrelevant.
So it's not that there is no evidence for these questions being useful. It's just that there are usually better signals on offer.
> "specifically IQ and trait conscientiousness. Colleges heavily select for these traits during admissions"
Out of curiousity, can you cite these claims? I mean I buy the conscientiousness, but I wouldn't guess they heavily select for it or IQ. Or at least not both together, not past a point.
You can look at the standardized tests (SAT, ACT) and their respective correlations to IQ tests. I'm not claiming that colleges give IQ tests themselves, just that they care a lot about other tests which are highly correlated.
There are many studies on the correlations here, and you should do your own survey of the literature if you are curious, not trust a cherry picked study posted by some guy on HN.
I've looked at various ones over the years. I even still have the reference for at least one (that shows a negative correlation between ACT SR+R:M+E ratio and success in college, and recommends that colleges should select against such ACT composite scores). I just wanted to also read whatever papers or articles you were thinking of.
I also know that, all else held equal, super-intelligence starts to show a negative correlation with success in college if the super-intelligent individual is curricularly mainstreamed in pre-college school. So the correlation with intelligence, at least, does break down in various cases. I'm sure it does with conscientiousness as well.
Whether this is at the level of admissions? I know that selective schools tend to pass on students who score wildly above their average, because the student is less likely to attend if accepted (and for college rankings purposes this looks bad).
They use the same format for Accounts Payable Clerk as they do for Director of Devops. Slightly lazy, sure, but not really blog post worthy. If you're an experienced hire just put do not recall and move on with your life.
Could be auto-culled based on those types of answers, and that may be completely ok with any number of us but the vast majority of folks probably just answer as they normally would.
What if you recall, but your math, physics, or computer science studies took place at home (e.g. the COVID cohort)? It only accepts answers for results at high school.
No job I have had since the first one has asked about college in the interview process. Nor do I ask anyone except new grads about their college experience. No, it's not relevant.
Asking about High School assumes everyone graduated from it. With dual enrollment it's quite possible for someone to get a college degree without ever getting a high school diploma (or even taking high school classes).
Really wish I'd taken a route like that. First couple years of college ended up being way easier and far lower-time-commitment than last couple of high school. I could have been less-stressed and earned an associate degree, ready to transfer to a bunch of universities toward a bachelor's degree, while also working more hours at a job that was giving me direct tech industry experience. All in the same couple years I spent absolutely miserable and gradually getting more and more mentally ill in high school (it's like school hours, lack of winter outdoor daytime activity in higher grades, and school building design are all intended to induce SAD).
A common situation in my country is that quite a few high school math teachers are psychotic sadists -- maybe a few of the hardest-working students will clear the bar for the equivalent of an A or B. Sometimes the students with "the most potential" will have average (or worse) grades because the teacher prepares special, harder exams to push them harder. High school is usually an unrepresentative mess, I'd to love learn about the background of the person that decided this question is valuable.
I had one like that for 10th grade algebra. Basically failed the class , and the teacher was always mad at me. After I got he highest score in my county on some standardized math test and was given some award, the principal looked at my grades and saw I had a C- and had a conference with the teacher and myself where I found out he was giving me a different test than everyone else.
I feel like the teacher could be either the hero or the villain in this story—pushing you to excel, or tearing down a gifted student. What was the outcome of that meeting?
Definitely tearing down. However talented I was, my sister went through 3 years earlier and was a math prodigy on the national level, and I think this teacher viewed himself as partially responsible for her success. So I came in later, not nearly as good, but still locally great, and I think my lack of desire to push myself to excel like my sister did ticked him off and he wanted to punish me for it.
End result was I got an A in the course, but had to do extra credit assignments.
My high school math teacher went crazy on me when I withdrew from the math olympiad prep class due to scheduling conflicts with assembler language class in my first year and then did everything possible for me to fail over the next 4 years. Not sure how would that teacher bear hearing I made it to top schools despite their best efforts...
Their hiring process is, ah, "interesting", but without getting into that let me note:
1) There are more questions about high school if you make it into the interviews, so they do take it seriously.
2) There is research indicating that "who or how we are" is pretty well determined in our formative years, with the high school years being a prime driver, so there is at least some rational motivation to ask about it.
Ex: I self-sabotaged two different classes (and my grades therein) due to personality clashes with teachers. If one believes that I am fundamentally "still the same person who did that", then it might seem worth exploring those situations and my responses before hiring.
> I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school. The difference between my high-school performance in English classes and professional accomplishments as a writer is vast
Ironically, if I was a hiring manager I would much rather care about your history of insubordination than your self-ascribed writing skills.
> I would much rather care about your history of insubordination than your self-ascribed writing skills.
A valid strategy if servility is a trait matching the role.
But I doubt it would be present in those capable of producing insightful or thoughtful writing. Unique value usually emerges from some degree of risk taking, including the risks involved in hiring talented people over reliable sheep where needed.
Or it means they they assume to know everything and are absolutely odious to work with in any sort of knowledge profession.
You're hearing noble assumptions of risk taking and talent, sticking the neck out and lording over the sheep, but all I'm seeing is narcissism and overconfidence.
It depends on what you are doing. If you are being given access to an important shared code base, being a team player seems much more important than a single minded rock-star.
My "high school" was not in the US. They don't even _have_ a GPA! No matter how it's calculated, they don't have it. They have quarterly tests(some lesser tests in between), and they have a weighted average of your scores for that particular year. You are above some number, you pass, otherwise you fail. It does not carry over to the next year. How would someone like me input anything resembling a GPA?
Also, it was a long while ago.
I would not be surprised to hear that companies that ask these questions also have ageist policies.
"Not applicable" is the most appropriate response. If that entry is not accepted, it seems reasonable to convert it to an equivalent value in the system they're looking for.
Shopify has an initial round with recruiter called "Life Story interview". You basically start from the beginning, talking about your high school experience, what did you like there and what did you study, your childhood hobbies ...
A few years ago I worked at a place that wanted to implement "Life Story Interviews." I had the experience of several candidates responding, basically, WTF?? and hanging up.
"My high school career was defined by the discovery in my early teens that I had been raised in an obscure Jesus People offshoot cult, followed by a several year process of distancing and extricating myself from this environment without excessively antagonizing my family.
Coding was as much a stimulating intellectual challenge as it was a pretext for gradually increasing the time I spent away from both home and my customary social obligations, down at the library's computer lab."
> This seems strange for a middle aged candidate, what are they looking for here? Communication skills?
Culture fit, probably looking for a few keywords or experiences that match a profile.
Seems fraught with peril from a legal perspective, IMO. Lotta hooks or opportunities for discrimination.
OTOH I could also see the appeal, e.g. you're not the ideal-on-paper candidate, but you did a bunch of X and Y, had experience w/ Z, tell me about the other stuff, sell me a little. I'm not an MIT hyper-literati type but give me the chance to show why that doesn't matter, etc. etc.
I think the part that most "worker" people reading this are missing, is that with mature markets you get someone that is vaguely, a little bit, experienced and on your side, to give feedback over time.
The last "team" you want setting every question, and expectation, and results.. is the adversarial side that is trying to get the most out of all candidates with the least trouble to themselves..
I went to High School in the 1980s. I think I did okay in those classes, but I fail to see how something that happened more than 30 years ago would be relevant for hiring purposes in the 2020s.
Fodder for discrimination lawsuits. The more information they have like this, the more they have to work with when defending a suit. School-based discrimination has been deemed legally acceptable, thus "Our records indicate the plaintiff did not meet our high school expectations. She was not hired for that reason."
I did terrible in high school and ended up going to university 6 years later and did very well. High school is barely a faint memory of my past and being judged on that would definitely irk me.
Same. I barely graduated high school (I only did thanks to a guidance counselor that basically made things up for my transcript) but I graduated from uni within 4 years with a 3.9.
I met a former HR person from a company that had these kinds of questions, such as your SAT scores. She told me the point was hiring people who are competitive enough to care about that stuff.
I worked at a hedge fund that asked for SAT scores as part of the hiring process. They used it as a general indicator of intelligence I think. There were definitely a lot of really smart, bright people there and some definitely came from schools that weren't at all impressive. I think this was their way of recognizing bright people who didn't have the opportunity for impressive schools for whatever reason. Working there was pretty toxic, though, so maybe I'm being too charitable.
More generally, I don't care for how education and social-status assessment is conflated. School shouldn't be a competition. Education is compromised by the assessment aspect.
I've literally never been asked my college GPA, let alone high school. My first job out of school wanted to know that I had a degree, which I did, and asked me practical questions. Every job since has asked me about previous jobs and then asked me practical questions.
While I agree that questions about High School are dumb, if a candidate answered the question with "this question is irrelevant" in a free-form text field (as they did in the screenshot), I would probably thing twice about hiring the person.
I think a lot of questions that are of the more generic- or incompetent-seeming-HR sort only exist to test for compliance and for bullshit tolerance. Plus for the kind of socialization that means you understand you're supposed to both pretend to take them seriously and use acceptable corporation-friendly answers to everything (even if they're lies).
Considering he also wrote a blog post criticizing this question, I feel comfortable saying that he already passed on this job. So saying you'd pass on him has "you can't quit, you're fired!" energy to it. Also, I don't agree that this demonstrates insubordination. There can't be insubordination without a subordinate-supervisor relationship.
I also don't think this is a "smartass" answer:
> This is an irrelevant question unless you're focusing on recent grads with no job history.
That is a straightforward statement of his opinion. He's perfectly within his rights not to answer any question, and explaining why he chooses not to is hardly an unreasonable thing to do.
His goal seems to be to effect change. My understanding is that before reaching these questions, he _was_ interested in the job. Explaining to a potential employer that they lost a candidate's interest because of their application questions seems like something they would want to know.
When I was 20 years old I was offered a job at D.E. Shaw (for Juno, not as like a quant) on a team of my friends. I was gearing up to move to NYC from Chicago when their HR process kicked in and asked for a copy of my high school grades, whereupon I immediately noped out.
I can think of worse red flags than asking about grades, but not like a lot of worse red flags. Don't put up with this stuff.
"In highschool I did well enough at Z80 assembly code in Junior year that I was selected as a teacher's assistant for the Pascal class in Senior year...Kiddo."
This is just the stuff on the web form. There was more on the written follow up:
In high school, how did you rank competitively in maths and hard sciences?
Which university and degree did you choose, what others did you consider, and why did you select that one?
At university, did you do particularly well at any area of your degree?
Overall, what was your degree result and how did that reflect on your ability?
In high school and university, what did you achieve that was exceptional?
What leadership roles did you take on during your education?
The first step of applying was filing a bug report, because applying wasn't possible. You can find the github issues people created. Yes, I did withdraw my application.
This certainly explains why Ubuntu includes bad design choice after bad design choice. You'd hope they'd learn from mistakes, but the people making mistakes over and over again were barely born the first time they were made.
I'll take Volkerding's memory of history at this point, and his interest in not fixing things that aren't broken. Turns out you don't need to hire all that many people with that approach, AND you end up with a better product.
Tangential, but... has anyone successfully prosecuted against age bias in tech? I've never heard of a single person that was able to prove it, and/or do anything about it.
As someone with 32 years experience, it's kind of freaky, honestly. If it's true that the number of software developers has doubled every 4.5 years (I don't remember where I read this, so don't have a source :( ), then that means there's 1.5% of people in my group and older.
Do anything about it like change the world? Probably not. Like get a settlement? Absolutely. There are a lot of JDs from Google Law School on this site and in the interest of not appearing as one, just look into plaintiff side employment law firms in your area. But disparate impact and disparate treatment are different and both are grounds for a lawsuit. A policy asking about high school GPA when we know there’s no good reason to ask that is taking steps towards a prima facie case of the former under US law, but especially in California if that’s where you are. Even in hiring this is very close to a no no here.
> Tangential, but... has anyone successfully prosecuted against age bias in tech? I've never heard of a single person that was able to prove it, and/or do anything about it.
> IBM is preparing to settle yet more age discrimination and wage theft complaints against the IT giant, though in one instance where it has already done so, Big Blue is accused of failing to comply with the terms of its settlement agreement.
> Back in 2018, IBM was in the headlines, accused of deliberately trying to get rid of older workers and replace them with younger Millennials. Two years later, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) concluded [PDF] that IBM's defense of its decisions – that was just a coincidence if its layoffs seemingly primarily targeted the over-40s – "does not withstand scrutiny" and that "there is reasonable cause to believe that [IBM] has discriminated against [employees] on the basis of age."
DE Shaw has a similar set of ridiculous questions on their swe application. If I remember correctly they wanted SAT scores and transcripts for both highschool and university. For someone 10+ years out of school. It was bonkers. I noped out of there before the recruiter could finish their sales-pitch. I never want to work at a place that puts any weight on test scores from decades ago. It's performative gatekeeping.
I've never seen this outside investment banking or management consulting, and even then, it was a very local thing (Scandinavia)
edit: Because they wanted "full picture" of the candidates. Meaning that they don't put too much weight on your HS grades, but that having been a consistent performer throughout your life, is a positive trait for them.
It wouldn't be very difficult for me to get my high school transcript if I wanted to.
But hypothesize that someone in their 30s now grew up in a country like South Africa, Zaire, or one of the Balkans. How exactly do you even prove you attended High School at this point? Much less get a transcript?
I've sometimes wondered how easy it'd be to lie about where I went to university, even. In my 15 year career I've literally never had anyone ask for any proof of my degree. I did some research just now though and there is in fact a National Student Clearinghouse that background check companies use to verify school info, so maybe it's been happening as part of background checks?
It's actually really easy to verify someone attended/graduated. It's easier than an employment reference since there's usually someone to answer the phones in the Registrars' offices and this is exactly why they exist.
What's a bit trickier is verifying the University exists. There are fake colleges where you pay for a bogus degree and subscribe to their bogus registrar service for a period of time so when employers conduct a degree check they answer the phone and lie for you.
Yep, that's a standard part of background checks. If things don't match up - especially if its something big, then that tends to be a fairly good reason to not proceed with the candidate.
Best case you get a job you want. Worst case you apply to a different job. Seems outsized in the gain department, for all parties (considering how dumb a GPA requirement is on a resume).
Nah, the worst case you end up in court facing damages, fines, or jail time, depending on the lie and who you told it to. And unable to find work in your industry again.
As the over supply of labor increases more and more, you're going to see more and more incompetent highering practices. This is a natural outcome of just too much talent chasing too few jobs.
I would focus on companies that actually need talent. The big incorrect assumption people have is that if they see positions open then it means they need talent. this is incorrect, most especially for positions that have been open for a long time: that's a big red flag. If a position has been open for more than 6 months, they obviously don't need anyone to fill that role and so have no incentive to learn how to higher the talent needed for that role.
I think canonical gets a bunch of applications so they make the barriers to entry sufficiently annoying so only those who are truly interested will complete the application.
FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.
Is there really enough consistency between all the classes in all schools candidates may have attended across all the decades they may have attended in that this is in any way a meaningful point of comparison?
This type of thing is great for people who hire or run companies - the more other organizations focus on meaningless things the more great people are available if you can find them!
In the United States, this is absolutely not true.
> The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older.
So this might be a good case for some lawyer: this question and email follow up definitely make unreasonable barrier for somebody who finished high school 40+ years ago.
Yeah, it seems pretty discriminatory. As someone with ADHD that was undiagnosed and untreated until after finishing college, I suspect there's also a reasonable case that it's illegal discrimination against people with disabilities.
Because they don't want to have to create a separate form for "people who have been in industry for > 5 years", "people who have recently graduated" and "people who are still at university"? It takes you 30 seconds to answer the question and is going to be useful information for the recruiter in many cases.
Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school. I don't know if any of them would work at Canonical (which has exhausted most of its growth potential by now), though.
Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does.
For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amount of time you want to spend on interviews per unit time, an amount of time you're willing to spend per unit hire, and just optimize those metrics. If you're hitting those targets, there's no harm in all sorts of arbitrary selection criteria that don't hit protected categories. They do two things: help you hit the time budgets, and transmit your priorities to candidates.
Personally, I find it hard to be upset about someone else's selection criteria. That's their honest expression of what they care about. It's like people complaining about interview feedback. Why ask if you're going to fight about the answer? It's like that.
Or any for that matter...the majority of schools educate for the lowest common denominator. Most talented individuals I know did supplemental education on their own outside of school systems.
Right, it's exactly as you say. They educate to and test to the simplest form. Failing at even that means you fail at something the lowest common denominator, as you put it, passes at. That's a pretty strong indicator of something.
There are those who refuse to play the game because they don't see a poor schooling experience as useful and you're saying those people are the same as those who can't do basic math. Or at least you're not distinguishing the difference.
> Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school.
To me this simply shows a lack of life experience. One of the best engineers I know left school before graduating. Has ADHD, was a bit messed up with drugs wrong crowd etc at that time.
He’s also a genius, had his life together for over 20 years and a very senior person at my current company. Why should some bad decisions over 20 years ago have any relevance to the value he’d provide now? Why should anything you did over 20 years ago have any relevance, good or bad?
This is unquestionably yet another example of ageism in an industry that is riddled with it.
I didn't get these kinds of questions but when I interviewed there years ago, they were very straightforward and said I don't have enough experience for the role. Which is at least more than most companies will say.
FWIW, Google still asks about your highest education completion and GPA also (though they don't ask about high school unless, of course, that's your highest education completion).
A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest. You can call for references but in many cultures people do not want to be mean and will say nice things about you even if you were a terrible employee. People will also lie and scheme and it can be difficult to really dig into someone's professional career to know if they are serious and good people or not. This is where some official record like a GPA can be useful, or a live coding interview where you get the opportunity to at least prove you are not a total faker.
That would be a good argument if people were being hired solely on the basis of their responses to these questions. No one's doing that. These are simply filter questions used to decide who to do initial interviews with and need to be discussed in terms of their false positive/negative failures.
False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.
False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.
That is what background checks are for. They are irritating, but at least that would let the job candidate apply without having to fill in all the crap from the get go.
> A lot of people who have problems with various recruiting techniques seem to assume a universe where nobody is dishonest.
OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.
Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?
Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?
Seriously. Here is how to do it.
I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:
1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in.
(if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?
3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?
Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.
Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.
There are people who are good at tech, but not good at casual conversation about tech. They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts, and they may be afraid to ask for clarification on your terminology. And rightly so, as I've heard people act like I am a moron for asking "What exactly do you mean by TECH_BUZZWORD?"
Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
>Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
> They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts
Would that not imply they aren't a good fit for the OP's workplace? And presumably, a lot of larger tech companies, since communication must be a large part of your job.
I am admittedly not good at talking on the fly if I haven't prepped for it. I try to make up for it by trying to focus on writing well.
I've heard reports that recruiters might spend all of 15 to 30 seconds per resume during a screening exercise. Never mind not having technical expertise to ask technical probing questions, sifting through the top of the funnel is more of an exercise in coping w/ high volumes of resumes than it is about validating depth of expertise at the bottom of the interview funnel.
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
> Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?
Firstly because that's not their job, and secondly because recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers and they aren't going to be subject matter experts enough to judge between good answers to questions like that and bullshit.
> recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers
Most companies I've interviewed at over the years (basically all but the smallest startups) have had dedicated recruiters for developers; different people hired sales or marketing or other roles. This doesn't mean that they should be expected to be technical experts, but I do think it's interesting that the box-checking type of interviews rather than just having a genuine conversation also seem to be more common the larger the company is. It's probably not surprising, since the need for standardizing interviews is higher when you have a larger number of people performing the interviews, but it's a little ironic that the most boilerplate interviews I've had were all with recruiters who specifically only interview developers.
Then again, I also tend to get bounced around to different recruiters far more frequently with the larger companies. There have been times I've been passed around to half a dozen recruiters within the span of a month or so; one makes the initial contact, then another talks to me on the phone, then another coordinates my technical interview schedule, and then another actually gives me the offer, who then refers me to one final other recruiter to actually respond yes or no (and maybe negotiate if possible). I know some of these are probably a more entry-level position that I've seen referred to as "recruiting coordinators" rather than full-fledged recruiters (meaning that they often handle the logistics like scheduling but don't perform interviews themselves), but it still feels absurd to have to talk to so many different people for basically the same thing. My impression is that it's somewhat intentionally trying to put me at a disadvantage by making it impossible for me to carry over any expectations from one step to the next (e.g. one recruiter might say something about compensation or benefits and then the next one conveniently doesn't know what I'm talking about and can claim that no one would have told me that).
> 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.
Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.
As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.
When hosting technical interviews, I deliberately lead with this type of question before we get into high-effort questions. Many candidates will immediately reveal knowledge gaps which set the tone for the whole interview.
Frequently experienced candidates with interview practice will simply ramble for many minutes - listing extensive contributions in excessive detail. Unfortunately when this happens it’s usually pretty awkward for everyone.
The ideal candidate will answer this question very gracefully and enable us to proceed directly into problem solving questions.
Gotta agree with your point about good/bad interviewers. I want to add that good interviewers/interviewees know how to manage the “risk” of such open-ended questions leading to a pointless interview.
The notion of looking for a "React" developer is rather silly to begin with so any employer doing that can expect poor results. Competent hiring managers like look for more general skills plus the ability to quickly learn new technologies as needed. Tomorrow the industry will move on to something else and React will become obsolete.
If you need specific technical skills in React for an urgent project then retain a contractor or consultant, don't hire an employee.
Competent hiring managers look for folks with 10 years experience with React, C#, Java, DevOps, Embedded C++ Development, Mobile cross platform dev and ofc Rust for good measure, each.
We have long forgotten about doing one thing and doing it right.
You literally just have a conversation about the tech. People's true skills shake themselves out in an in-depth conversation about a technology that the interviewer is familiar with.
The problem is, this initial funnels are just recruiters. They're technologically clueless. They're just putting words on paper and finding people that say those words with the right number of experience attached.
They aren't engineers. Even engineers rarely solve problems anywhere near the optimal way, due to a million reasons, ranging from political to technical. How do we expect HR and recruiters to optimally solve hiring, a immensely complex problem?
The recruiting industrial complex seems to thrive on creating original obstacles with no consequences for how arbitrary they are. I suspect they benefit from the more work they create.
This is dumb. If you don't want to apply, don't. If you think something is no one else's business, don't tell them. But don't cry when they discard your application because they think it IS relevant, because shockingly you don't personally have a monopoly on truth...
Having proven conclusively that no job at this company could possibly be worth the desperately painful application process, we now just need to eliminate 100mil more companies one by one...
Canonical makes infrastructure that I (and a significant slice of the world economy) depend on. If they want to significantly bias their application pool to people who are willing to tolerate that question, then I'm a bit concerned that I've invested years and years building on a decaying foundation, and now I have to investigate.
Canonical's model is to copy Debian testing, change the branding and apply some set of patches to it, then ship it. Every six months or so they pick up the new Debian testing and repeat.
Debian is solid. Ubuntu's layer on top is a bit ymmv.
Question: Would I regret switching from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Debian Bullseye 11.X (and would I have to use Debian 10 to use an LTS version [0])? How many creature comforts does Ubuntu add onto the Debian base? Just based on the vibe I get from debian.org, I feel like my life would involve a lot more yak shaving (which I don't necessarily mind if it teaches me something that will negate future yak shaves).
Context: In 2019 I built a desktop (my personal workstation) and it was my first machine without a windows or Mac OS partition. That machine is still my personal daily driver (outside of work). Using it for ML/MLOps/misc engineering projects has taught me a ton about parts of how Linux works and is organized.
Debian testing will feel very like an Ubuntu install that doesn't crash on you. One package manager instead of N. Occasionally third party repos only package for Ubuntu, though they're likely to work about as well on Debian as they do on Ubuntu anyway.
For a long time Debian refused to bundle closed source firmware with the installer but they've relented on that now.
The holdout I know of is Ubuntu have zfs in the kernel and Debian as a package. That seems to make no difference in practice.
Small companies don't care because they want someone who can do the work.
Large companies' decision makers are much more risk averse. They're looking for a reason not to hire you. If you're a poor employee that makes no difference to the,, they are fine, if they take a risk by hiring you despite you once getting a B in high school spanish in 1837, they're the ones that will be embarrassed.
This is why small companies will take a CV, interview twice and hire you. But big companies have a dozen committees, a HR "portal" that takes a CV AND then asks for all the same details and more field by field and insists on giving you personality tests and a full horoscope. Those are not there to find good employees (or to weed out the old). They're just arse covering by middle management. And for that purpose they work.
So you can stand outside shouting that it's "not relevant" or you can apply elsewhere or you can jump through the hoops. No approach is right or wrong, they're just pragmatic decisions based on what you want.
Just an observation: what I said in my comment is falsifiable. I'm pretty certain you'd find, if you polled a bunch of job application sites for various-sized companies, that large companies are a lot more likely to separate out new grads and entry-level candidates into a separate funnel from more experienced professionals, with separate candidates and more "basic" questions.
If a company were to ask about my star sign, then I know that their idea of what is relevant is not grounded in reality and will avoid employment with them.
Someone asking me about my strengths in high school, which was decades ago, then that tells me they are looking for young people. (And from the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 you can see they don't care about my grad school experience, which was much more formative to my career path.)
In the US, age discrimination for employment for people 40 years or older is illegal. As the author of the linked-to essay correctly points out, these questions comes across like trying to discriminate on the basis of age without outright saying it.
Which trespasses on a special form of government monopoly that it can enforce.
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.