Interesting, I've checked the LinkedIn link of Jakub Stęplowski, a software developer proudly presenting himself as "from Poland" - 10 years of working outside of Poland in Italy and Switzerland. Yep, that checks out. I was wondering where he could have gotten $1,000 to generously burn on this project as a sponsor, with Polish salaries.
Nothing bad about it, of course. It's just it's long time overdue to move to Switzerland as well, I see.
There was a developer who I worked with at a mortgage company who had moved to the UK from Czech Republic. He would sit at his desk playing games on his phone all day and had outsourced his entire job to his friend back home for 25% of his UK salary.
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Their requirements was ridiculously outdated, like "we want maths geniuses with great marks, send us your marks or gtfo".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.
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.
These are the people who brought you the Snap package manager. The one nobody asked for. The one that constantly harasses you every half hour to close programs that you have open because there's always something with a goddamn update waiting. Then when you close it, it doesn't get updated, and you have no idea. Then you wait 30 seconds because every Snap app is slow as dog shit to launch. Then it tells you to close it because it needs an update.
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.
No to mention the absolutely absurd questions they ask. I looked at a sr position there and they were asking about performance in individual courses _in high school._ I haven't been in school for 20 years. I've learned and forgotten so many things since then, like I'm going to remember or care what I did in econ 101 multiple decades ago... It was so silly I didn't bother applying.
I've read some surreal recounts of the Canonical interview process. The CEO appears to have a fairly extreme fixation on candidates' high school experiences.
Needless to say, this is just absolutely bizarre. What kind of kid you were is a terrible proxy for professional competence or even present-day fit. (Not to mention that people's high school experiences are very likely to differ greatly based on things like socioeconomic status, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, etc., and imposing a normative idea of what high school experiences ought to look like would probably unfairly discount candidates through no fault of their own.)
> 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’.
I find this take a bit silly. There are perhaps a dozen companies that could put as complex a surface out as Ubuntu has and actually expect to defend against any sort of sustained interest from a nation state. Canonical absolutely could have made better decisions in the design of many things for this situation but doing that as a corporation that isn't under attack is extremely hard when no one wants long delays for theoreticals.
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.
Canonical has a tradition of inventing something that’s ahead of its time only to see nobody else is going the same way as they are. Sometimes they realise it was a mistake and follow everyone else.
Juju had a different problem: it was big-bang rewritten in Go and that froze features for too long for them to keep their mindshare. Rewriting was the right decision, as Python had poor concurrency back then, but doing that while freezing features was a mistake.
But how is this supposed to help against scraping? This is ridiculously ineffective against scraping. Just pretend to have a standard set of extensions and you are good to go.
For context, this is paraphrasing a 1907 manuscript by Kenneth John Freeman [1], which itself was summarizing the complains that older generations would direct against the youth in Ancient Greece.
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