Canonicals Interview Process

Context

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.

First application

I first applied there in October 2023. Canonical's careers' website asks a bunch of odd questions like:

• How did you perform in mathematics at high school?
• How did you perform in your native language at high school?
• Please share your rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above. Make reference to provincial, state or nation-wide scoring systems, rankings, or recognition awards, or to competitive or selective college entrance results such as SAT or ACT scores, JAMB, matriculation results, IB results etc. We recognise every system is different but we will ask you to justify your selections above.
• What was your bachelor's university degree result, or expected result if you have not yet graduated? Please include the grading system to help us understand your result e.g. ‘85 out of 100’, ‘2:1 (Grading system: first class, 2:1, 2:2, third class)’ or ‘GPA score of 3.8/4.0 (predicted)’. 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’.

As I was applying for a senior position, and because there was no such thing as ranking in my entire scholarship, I didn't think much about this, and wrote that I wasn't bad at school, and that there was no ranking. I got instantly rejected. I asked around, and some Canonical employees reached out to me on mastodon to tell me that I should lie on this step of the hiring process, as people who aren't in the top 10% in high-school are automatically rejected. So I made things up, and didn't get rejected this time.

I then got an email about the "written interview", asking me to provide my answers to 38 questions in a PDF. It took me a couple of hours to write it down, boiling down to 21 pages of text. Once sent, I was asked to do modern phrenology "psychometric assessments" from Thomas. The first one is called the General Intelligence Assessment, and features with questions like those:

• "Bob isn't as fast as Carl" → Who is the fastest? Carl or Bob?
• "a B f H" vs "k b j z" → how many letters in common? (1)
• Given 3 numbers, find the bigger and smaller, which one is the farthest from the middle one?
• Given a group of 3 words, which one has nothing to do with the 2 other?
• Given a pair of letter "R", with some rotated and some mirrored, how many are only rotated?

The second one is the Behavioural Assessment, and is based on picking "the word that corresponds the most to your personality and the one that corresponds the least" for 30 minutes. Their "methodology" is based on the DISC assessment from 1928 which is completely made-up pseudo-science. Heck, even their brochure only has 5 references with none from after 1957, and the 5 mentioned "studies" don't have sources, data, details, … This made me equally amused and worried.

The technical interviews ("Ubuntu Skills Interview", "Security Skills Interview", "General Management Skills Interview") felt a bit empty content-wise, and sounded more like some random conversation with open-source enthusiast people at a bar. The only technical questions I remember were "What's your favourite git command" and "Can you tell me about Ubuntu packaging". Keep in mind that the position I was applying for was "Ubuntu Engineering Manager", so I was expecting a lot of technical questions. Don't get me wrong, the conversations were really nice, and I really liked the reflections on Canonical's positions and philosophy.

In December, I had an HR interview with a "Talent Science Partner", which was a regular bland STAR questionnaire. Here is some feedback from the interviewer: "In the first 5 minutes of the call, I asked them about their biggest achievement at NBS and they replied "Apparently you haven't read my 20-pages written interview". I then explained to him that I have to ask the same questions to all candidates and they offered me a terse answer." What's the point of asking for an extensive written interview with those very same questions, only for it to be completely ignored? It felt disrespectful to me. Also, amusingly "During our interview, they will [sic.] be typing away.", so candidates aren't expected to take notes. I was simply writing the questions down, as well as some of my answers, likely the very same thing that the interviewer was doing.

A couple of hours later, I got a "Follow up - Benefits at Canonical" email, listing all the benefits, but less than 24h after, I got the very same automated rejection email I got when I first applied in October. I sent an email to enquire about feedback but never got a reply. During the whole process, I was not once able to ask questions to a recruiter.

Second application

A couple of months later, I decided to reapply, hoping that maybe the previous rejection was a misunderstanding or whatnot, even though seeing that Canonical had more than 32 000 job openings smelt like bullshit was worrying.

I applied both for a Manager position and an Individual Contributor one. I got instantly rejected for the former via an automated email, sent twice; but was invited to continue the process for the latter, via the "Fast Track - Security." I learnt that this didn't mean that there would be less interviews or that the process would somehow be faster, but simply that my resume was interesting enough to warrant interviewing me before picking a team for me to fit in, a bit like how Google is hiring.

I re-used the written interview, as the questions didn't really change. This time, I also had to spend 2h on DevSkiller for a bland-at-best "Python test." The first part was questions like "Which ones of those words aren't python logging levels: URGENT, CRITICAL, INFO, FATAL, TRACE, …" or "What does this small python snippet output" which is a matter to copy/pasting in into a python interpreter locally. The second part was LeetCode-like exercises, but since there were no humans involved, odds are that the only piece of information that can be extracted from the candidate is "can they successfully paste the question verbatim into a search engine/LLM."

Funnily enough, while I could re-use my "psychometric assessments," I chose to pass the tests again, so I could compare the results, and of course, they showed some differences. This was followed by a weird "The security mission and roles at Canonical" email from Mark Shuttleworth himself, with a Message-ID …prod-greenhouse-sidekiq-automation-worker…, meaning it's another generic automated email, sigh. Then came the interviews. I systematically asked the following questions in all but the final one:

• What do you think about the interview process?
  • I often got praise about the written interview part, albeit nobody liked the process as a whole. Some high-in-the-chain people told me that they didn't really like spending time reviewing CV and interviewing people for a couple of hours every week. Heck, some of them that interviewed me weren't even going to work with me.
• Do you like working at Canonical?
  • The answers were a resounding yes, which kept me motivated to go through the process.
• How is the upper-management, especially Mr. Shuttleworth, as I'll have an interview with him and it feels a bit weird, but also because I've heard things™?
  • Those who work/worked with him told me (I took notes) that he was peculiar, involved, intense, special, opinionated, could come across as rude/harsh/know-it-all, and sometimes difficult to work with.
• I politely tried to gather feedback on the interviews, and was either told that they couldn't answer this question, or that I shouldn't need to worry as "everything looks green on the feedback."

Some interviews were pleasantly technical, and I really enjoyed the "Security Deep Dive" one about confidential computing. The "Hiring Lead Interviews" felt a bit useless, generic and similar, but provided some welcome colouring to how it is to work at Canonical. Hilariously, someone from the team I applied for told me that the role has been empty for more than 18 months, and offered a polite smile when asked why she thought that was the case.

The final interview was with Mark Shuttleworth. He didn't introduce himself, which I found a bit odd. His first question was whether I was applying for a managerial or a senior position, which didn't bode well: he had no idea what position I was applying for, and thus wouldn't be asking role-related questions, but likely only "vibe" ones. I got asked questions about high-school: how I performed there, why did I pick a particular university, … I was so surprised that I didn't think about asking on the spot how was any of this relevant for a fucking senior position. I did so afterwards, and was told that one of the sole common point for all Canonical employees is that they all attended high-school, so it provides a common base. Moreover, it gives some background, personal history and shows the motivations and goals of the applicants. I don't know about you, but when I was in high-school (around 15-20 years ago), my goals and motivation were really different than my current ones, as they were mainly, ranked in order of interest and importance: getting laid.

To the question "How was your university?", I answered that it wasn't prestigious, and pretty small and rural, as we could see cows from the windows. Shuttleworth immediately interrupted me to say "don't play games, don't try to muddle your answers. I'm interviewing you for a senior position, I'm asking you questions, I'm expecting straight answers." I was so flabbergasted that instead of answering properly ("As I'm interviewing for a senior position, I'm expecting proper senior position related questions."), I gave a meek "Okay…" Some parts of the conversation were equally awkward and filled with an unhealthy amount of salt, especially about upstart ("They're a reason why Chromebooks are using it", the reasons are mostly technical debt, not technical excellence.), mir ("Wayland has the same design flaws as Xorg"), … At some point, someone bought him a plate, and he started to eat, without excusing himself about doing so. I asked him why he would spend time interviewing prospective employees in non-executive positions, as this is likely eating a lot of his time. He told me that he like to know who is hired, and that this process allows to root out average candidates. After 40 minutes out of a 60 minutes scheduled interview, Shuttleworth said "Ok, nice talking to you, have a nice day," and abruptly ended the interview. I seriously thought about withdrawing my application, as I really didn't want to work with him, but since the position was only senior IC, odds are that I wouldn't have to, so I didn't retract it.

A couple of days after, I got the now familiar automated rejection email. I asked the hiring lead for feedback about why the rejection happened, but didn't get a reply. Not once during all the interviews have I had a conversation about compensation/salary/benefits/…

So I exercised my GDPR rights, and asked to be communicated everything pertaining to my interviews. I got a bunch of documents, and the reason I was rejected was "Culture/behaviour/motivation misalignment." Overall, would-you-hire-wise I got three "strong yes", eight "yes", and a single "no" from Mark Shuttleworth, with his feedback as following:

This interview did not go well at all; the candidate initially gave startlingly passive-aggressive responses to questions, in a way that I very rarely see at this late stage of the process. Their application was a duplicate with the same email address, and previously they had given a similar impression in Talent Science. I would like to understand why that duplicate, and outcome, were not noticed during this selection process.

After some difficult exchanges I focused on the candidate's personal interests, where they opened up. They are clearly passionate about low-level technical details, but are only engaged on things that personally interest them, with little evidence of teamwork or willingness to share load that is uninteresting to them. They would be a poor fit for a team where balancing work requires deriving some personal satisfaction from helping colleagues get things done.

In short, there are character issues here that we cannot address through coaching and development.

Now, to be fair, everyone who knows me would likely agree that I'm not the most empathetic person ever, and that communication isn't my strongest point, despite me investing a lot of care and effort there, as it's an important topic for me: I'm Asperger, meaning that a lot of social interactions, especially non-verbal and implicit ones are often non-trivial for me, and that I tend to be (sometimes overly) frank; but it's the very first time this came up as an issue, let alone a prohibitive one, in a professional setting. The two other Hiring Lead who assessed my "Personality Traits" didn't find anything proscriptive there, nor in any other categories for that matter. Interestingly, Shuttleworth's feedback is the only one without any supporting notes nor direct quotes, and reads more like an opinion piece than a proper artefact-supported assessment like the rest.

So now I'm really curious about the decision process here, as it seems that every interviewer's opinion is ignored if Shuttleworth puts some red marks. Would the outcome have been the same if it were someone else who had put them instead?

Conclusion

I was really looking forward to work at Canonical, being paid to work on improving a popular Linux distribution security sounded really cool. I now see that I should have, for once, listened to the collective hive-mind of the internet, and not pour so much of my time and energy into this. I'm of course a bit salty about the process, but not about the outcome, as it felt like I dodged some kind of massive bullet.

A friend suggested that I add some actionable advice hiring-wise to this blogpost so that it doesn't read too much like an angry rant about not being hired, but it felt pretentious to me. Moreover, as it seems that hiring at Canonical is Shuttleworth's pet project, I don't think my opinion on the topic will be useful in any way. Heck, I bet all the senior people spending some of their expensive work time doing interviews are frustrated when candidates they deem promising are rejected at the very of end on Shuttleworth's whim; yet as this has apparently been going for a while now, so I doubt a ranty article on my small corner on the internet would hold any sway. So if I didn't write this article to complain, nor to make things change, why bother? I wrote it because I would have loved to have read a post like this one while considering applying at Canonical, as it would have saved everyone involved a tremendous amount of time.

As a side note, it's completely ludicrous that I had to use the GDPR to get some feedback on what went wrong on a job interview: the hiring lead could simply have replied to my email with some high-level explanation, which would have saved them from being GDPR'ed almost 300 pages of unredacted PDF.

Timeline

• 2023/10/19: First time applying at Canonical
• 2023/10/20: Automated rejection email
• 2023/11/07: Told by Canonical employees that I should put "top 10%" to not get auto-rejected
• 2023/11/??: Applied again
• 2023/11/10: Written interview email
• 2023/11/16: Psychometric assessment for Ubuntu Security Manager at Canonical - General Intelligence Assessment email
• 2023/12/11: General Management Skills Interview with Person A
• 2023/12/12: Ubuntu Skills Interview with Person B
• 2023/12/12: Security Skills Interview with Person C
• 2024/01/11: Interview with HR with Person D
• 2024/01/11: "Benefits at Canonical" email
• 2024/01/12: Automated rejection email
• 2024/06/15: Second time applying at Canonical
• 2023/11/10: Written interview email
• 2024/06/18: Leetcode test at DevSkiller email
• 2024/07/01: "Psychometric tests" email
• 2024/07/15: "We're excited to move forward with interviews for Security Software Engineer at Canonical." email
• 2024/07/18: Software architecture and engineering skills interview with Person E
• 2024/07/19: Linux system skills interview with Person F
• 2024/07/19: Security deep-dive interview with Person G
• 2024/08/04: "Behavioural assessment for Security Software Engineer at Canonical" email
• 2024/08/05: Met with Stephanie Domas (Canonical's CISO) as Black Hat, who recommended me to apply at Canonical, and even got a warn recommendation from her husband whom I've met almost a decade ago a REcon.
• 2024/08/20: Talent Interview with Person H
• 2024/08/22: Hiring Lead Interview with Hiring Lead Person
• 2024/08/29: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person I cancelled
• 2024/08/29: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person J cancelled
• 2024/09/03: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person I
• 2024/09/04: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person J
• 2024/09/13: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person K
• 2024/09/23: Hiring Lead Interview, with Person L
• 2024/09/27: Hiring Lead Interview, with Mark Shuttleworth
• 2024/09/30: Generic rejection email
• 2024/09/30: Sent an email to the Hiring Lead asking for feedback
• 2024/10/08: Sent an email to [email protected] exercising my GDPR rights to get information about why I was rejected
• 2024/10/30: Got the GDPR info, 300 pages of PDF.
• 2025/06/01: Got pinged by a friend of mine about "that canonical article", so decided to publish it.