I’m a huge fan of Linux. It’s been my personal daily driver for over 7 years and I’m lucky enough to work entirely on Linux professionally as well. I’ve bragged about my machine learning rigs, my mobile rigs, and even a fancy desktop machine I won as part of a contest.
I absolutely love the operating system and the ecosystem that’s developed around it. While my favorite distribution is System76’s Pop!_OS, I’m also a huge fan of Canonical’s Ubuntu and use it regularly as well.
This inspired me to apply for a Senior Engineering Manager role with Canonical.1While the archive.org link advertises a different title, it’s due to the listing having been updated between Sept 2024 and Feb 2025 but not being successfully crawled since then. The contents, save for the job title, are otherwise identical – down to the listing ID itself. It sounded like an excellent position … but after starting the interview process, I’m immediately withdrawing my candidacy.
My Background
I finished high school in 2002.2I know I’m outing my age here, which I don’t do lightly… While I was a good student, I didn’t earn many awards for my academic achievements. This is because I intentionally overloaded my schedule with advanced courses with the goal of impressing college admissions. The added benefit was starting college just a handful of credits short of being a sophomore.
I graduated in three years with a double major as a result.
While I didn’t finish with the best of GPAs, I still pursued a post-baccalaureate program (earning a second Bachelor’s degree in a single year) and went on to graduate school for my MBA.3Technically this was a Master’s of International Management degree, but it was through the business school and in the ~18 years since I graduated the program has been rolled into the standard MBA curriculum. I finished high school in the middle of my class, my first undergrad program near the same, my second undergrad near the top, and tied for the highest GPA in grad school.
Since then, I’ve worked in business strategy, analytics, and software engineering. I’ve been an individual contributor, a middle manager, and a VP in multiple organizations. My deployments have been both small (single-purpose CLI routines) and large (enterprise-scale AI/ML integrations fronting hundreds of millions of dollars).
I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in my career and how it’s demonstrated continuous, steady growth both as a professional and as a person.
The Interview
The first stage of Canonical’s interview process is, apparently, a written one. I received an email from a senior member of the engineering team asking me to answer 33 separate essay-style questions and upload a PDF of my answers into Greenhouse.
Thirty. Three.
Among these questions was the following section on education:
We consider academic results in high school and university for all roles, regardless of seniority. In every discipline, from engineering to marketing to operations and sales, we intensely value colleagues who are able to puzzle through difficult problems and find the optimal path forward.
- How did you rank in your final year of high school in mathematics? Were you a top student? On what basis would you say that?
- How did you rank in your final year of high school, in your home language? Were you a top student? On what basis would you say that?
- Please state your high school graduation results or university entrance results, and explain the grading system used. For example, in the US, you might give your SAT or ACT scores. In Germany, you might give your scores out of a grading system of 1-5, with 1 being the best.
- Can you make a case that you are in the top 5% in your academic year, or top 1%, or even higher? If so please outline that case. Make reference where possible to standardised testing results at regional or national level, or university entrance results. Please explain any specific grading system used.
- What sort of high school student were you? Outside of class, what were your interests and hobbies? What would your high school peers remember you for?
The email itself cited that it might take “a week or two” to write a response to the entire request, and that I could request more time if necessary. All of this before even speaking to a single human about the role itself.
I could write a pithy one or two sentence response to each, but based on commentary I’ve seen on Reddit and elsewhere, that would lead to a quick and speedy rejection. To put the kind of time necessary to provide quality answers to all of the included questions is unreasonable.
It’s as unreasonable as are the SAT scores I received in high school are irrelevant to my proficiency and performance as a professional over two decades later.
I still love Linux. I still think Canonical makes a stellar product in Ubuntu. But I wish they put as much care and passion into building a quality interview process that doesn’t feel like needless hoop-jumping and gatekeeping from the perspective of a candidate.