> But high school? Who got paid to write that? And why aren't they now unemployed?

Why would they be unemployed? Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, 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.

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.