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 finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.
Cray cray