Almost spilled my margarita.

Seriously, I don't trust Glassdoor at all and stopped looking at it.

Finding a current employee through a friend or knowing one seems to be the only way to get any accurate feedback.

Possibly seeing how company treats customers could be another point.

Edit: Glassdoor does not take money directly for taking down reviews. However there is an inherent conflict of interest because Glassdoor makes money from employers via various offerings and letting too many negative reviews on the site would affect that business model.

>When your reviews get removed because the company paid them, you’re just being shown what the company wants you to see.

Glassdoor does not remove reviews for payment.

Avoiding top rated companies should work as a decent heuristic though.

It's a fascinating problem. It seems there's always an endless stream of new applicants so there's no reason to change it. And there's an entire group of people contributing to ubuntu for free...

Oh. I remember once applying for Canonical, and i found those high-school grade obsessed questions truly odd back then. After applying they ghosted me. In hindsight, the interview process seems to be matching the personality of their founder CEO, so very glad i'm not working there.

I had a buddy go through the Canonical process, it's totally insane. They expect you to jump when they say, but then they may not respond for days or weeks.

It's unlikely my high school transcript exists anywhere. If it does it is in the basement of some government building in rural Wisconsin. So - 4.0 - straight A's, captain of the linux security team.

It's pretty typical for a CEO of a major tech company to have some kind of quirk in their behavior that is nonsensical but insufficient to ruin the company given its luck, etc.

Wow that’s insane, had no idea. What the fuck does my behavior at 14-18 have to do with my professional capabilities at 36. I had a terrible programming class experience in HS but was otherwise obsessed with computers. Hated programming until I took a CS class at community college with a great professor, starting my obsession with programming. One year out of high school. It’s been non-stop since then.

"CEO is obsessed with [thing]" isn't much evidence that the thing in question is worthwhile. Zuckerberg was utterly enthralled with the Metaverse, and we're not having this discussion in a virtual world as legless avatars.

There's two big reasons this is such a red flag: 1) Come on. Unless you are hiring highschool graduates directly, you have other means of finding out how good candidates are. If a highschool report card tells you more about a candidate than your own interview process, you need to fire everyone involved with that process.

2) Highschool performance is highly correlated with a bunch of causes that are very undesirable things to proxy-measure in your hiring process.

In the UK, where Canonical and Mark hail from, high school performance is a statistical proxy for class (wealth). In the US, it is a statistical proxy for ethnicity as well. You need to be careful with such measures, as selecting job candidates based on class or race is both unethical and commonly illegal.

Again consider that these are high school results. A person who is born to unlucky schooling opportunities can still compensate for the learning they were deprived of by working harder in college/university or their formal career after that.

I think many if not most companies have things they look for in employees that are irrelevant. Sometimes its a preference for particular universities over other universities that are effectively as good. Sometimes they like people who excelled in sports, or seem well dressed, etc. The point is that if you have some filters for things that matter, and enough candidates, you can also screen out people for terrible reasons and get away with it.

> is reportedly obsessed with high school performance, to the point of rejecting otherwise highly competent candidates who passed the whole process before that based on high school questions alone.

Right but given the pay, talent level, and more from Canonical, they should probably not be trying to invent new ways to filter candidates beyond what even top tier software shops are doing.

If Jane Street and Anthropic aren't rejecting candidates for high school performance, maybe your mid tier company with low tier pay shouldn't be either.

Oh is that why they asked? I just put whatever the minimum gpa for passing my high school was since I was never going to remember that number and only could confirm I passed.

If I wasn’t desperate for a job I would declined to apply out of the idiocy of the question

It’s honestly kind of discriminatory from a class perspective .

> Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical

who....cares?

I think we need to ask ourselves why we put up with this nonsense. Not even the serious tech companies and adjacent care about that aspect of your performance.

He would certainly have passed on Linus Torvalds if he applied to work at Canonical - because he did not got to some well known top high school or get the top marks Shuttleworth wanted.

I’ve been on the hiring side. It is hard but everywhere I’ve worked I’ve felt like it’s just been a fear reaction on the company’s side about possibly spending a dollar on a bad hire.

I had one position I was hiring for, for over a year where I just straight up told my manager that I didn’t care to interview anyone anymore until he was ok with them.

The process at every single place I’ve worked at was built to find a reason _not_ to hire someone because we might find the perfect candidate next week

How come a company who does X and already have employees doing X can't find new hires?

I'm sincerely wondering. So if you have 50 people on the payroll to do "SAP", where did they come from? A school? A course? Didn't they have coursemates to reach out to for more workers? Don't people and companies have networks? How can things deteriorate to the level that you have to put out ads for total strangers to apply?

if you are actually in a strong position, you can just refuse and say that you won’t continue the process without a range. i’ve never had a recruiter not cave on me

I guess no one who works there came across this (viral) post about how ridiculous their hiring process was. Maybe they're too busy reading applicant responses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059857

I had a great experience with Google. But once I got an offer, they were unable to even tell me what team/project I'd start on and refused to elaborate. Totally silly.

Google is not great, but you're definitely not getting quizzed on your HS grades, doing personality tests, or writing essays. Resume, prescreen, 4-5 interviews (in rare cases more), done.

I mean it's the law in California that job postings must include salary ranges since 2023, so it's more than 'boy sure would be nice if I knew the pay range before applying': https://www.cda.org/newsroom/employment-practices/pay-scale-...

Though perhaps shining a light on shittiness like that might cause someone doing hiring in the future to think for a fraction of a second and reflect. Maybe it’d be better to do it in a less than an insane way and make their slice of the world just a smidge better.

And just to add to the Canonical shame too, I’m all for that.

Cold-applying to jobs on LinkedIn is a fool's game.

How do I know? I did it. A couple years ago, I wanted to make a move to full-time remote work. I liked the people that I worked with, but I spent over a decade there, management started going downhill, and I could tell the company was on a trajectory of slow death. I spent HOURS almost every day for six months applying to jobs on LinkedIn. I restricted myself to positions that I thought I was actually qualified for without stretching. I avoided consulting/MSP companies. I probably applied to well over a hundred positions.

How many responses did I get? Zero. Not a single one. Occasionally, a recruiter would ping me and say they had a job opening that was a perfect fit. Every single time, it ended up being a contract position.

I DID eventually find my current job on LinkedIn, but only because I recognized the company name as one that a friend of mine moved to 6 months earlier. I called him up, asked him how it was, and he provided a referral. It dawned on me after I accepted the offer that every SINGLE job I have ever had was either through a friend's referral or because I knew the manager beforehand. The old adage, "it's who you know," is still as relevant as ever.

>> This is happening across the board because it's a buyer's market for labor.

In my region in the Midwest, we have several well known companies that have been doing this for a very long time. They basically promote the same insane hiring process and then compare their companies hiring process to getting admitted to Harvard - they actually say they're hiring standards are more stringent than Harvard's.

The other funny thing is these same companies who hold themselves out as "elite" pay 30-40% less than market rate. So in essence, you go through some insane hiring process, jumping through all the hoops, and you're still going to end up in a job that pays 30% less than every other company doing two or three interviews before hiring someone.

Will this ever change back? Probably when market dynamics change back in the favor of developers, which could be a very long time. I wholeheartedly believe the "gold rush" of the tech industry has ended. Gone are the days where you had 4-5 different companies vying for your talent year after year after year. The whole industry feels like its contracting.

Of course they get many times more applicants than they hire. They have 1,200 employees but over 20,000 job postings on LinkedIn. I'm more curious about whether the people they end up hiring are their top choices. Because people need money for things like food and housing, it seems to me like forcing applicants to go through a months-long gauntlet with lengthy written essays, IQ tests, and 8+ interview rounds will filter out most people who are able to get hired anywhere else.

COL adjustments are not labor supply/demand. You don't pay a high COL because you want a candidate from SF Bay Area (unless you have your office there). Companies pay a lower salary in lower COL areas (relative to their target salary), because they have an excuse to and can save money. That's just how it is, I've been on that side of the table. Senior leaders saying "We're not going to pay them the same salary if they're living in nowhere kansas!!"

Thought experiment: Get a job, then move to a higher COL area, do you expect a raise? No. Move to a lower COL area: Somehow we expect lower salary?

Exceptionally, I had both the highest and lowest grade in linear algebra. Probably not what they mean though.

> If you want people in e.g Bay Area to consider you at all, you'll have to offer them more than you'd need to get the attention of people in Warsaw. That's why remote salaries can still vary by location.

Then why not take what you'd offer to people in the Bay Area and also offer that to people in Warsaw? That's what the author is taking issue with.

EDIT: This was posed as a question for rhetorical purposes, it's obvious that businesses don't do this because they don't have to and it's cheaper not to. Parent said they didn't agree with the author's logic, but the author's statement about companies paying based on value wasn't attempting to make a logical assertion, it was a lament about ethics.

Actually it's even more impactful when considering a whole country. To follow this example, renting in Warsaw can be easily 2-3x more expensive than in a random small city in Poland. You could slash the salary by 30-40% and still get people willing to work, as long as you keep it remote.

The hypocrisy in these situations is what I find annoying. Try to apply that in a different context "I can't find a Ferrari for the price of Ford, we have a Ferrari shortage!" and people would think you're a lunatic. But if you wrap that in "concerns about the economy" somehow, people take it seriously.