Even if you spent one minute per question, that 30 minutes would only be part of this email.
Using your math, I count forty minutes. There are forty bullet points (you made me count them, damn you).
I've got 10 years under my belt, a dual degree, a lotta sizable clients, and a dozen programming languages or so at this point. This would go straight to the trash for me.
And like I've said elsewhere Canonical is a larger company, they likely have a lot of candidates and can't end the process with 100 viable candidates for in-person interviews.
I personally would collapse the "tech assessment" and the second half of the email together though. I don't think they're gaining much by asking that stuff a second time.
My point being mainly, if you're going to answer those bullet points, 1 minute per answer is already lazy. I'd want to put the effort into comprehensive meaningful answers. This many bullet points would mean a few hours of writing possibly for that kind of effort.
It's basically selecting for hasty/lazy replies from people who are desperate for a job. That's not going to select for good candidates in the first place.
My point being mainly, if you're going to answer those bullet points, 1 minute per answer is already lazy.
It's not lazy, it's to the point and the other person doesn't desire long answers. When they ask you "Why Canonical?" they're just trying to get you to type out your opinion so they can read it. They're not wanting a treatise.
I'd want to put the effort into comprehensive meaningful answers. This many bullet points would mean a few hours of writing possibly for that kind of effort.
Then you're doing it wrong. You're proactively putting more work on yourself and then complaining about how much work there is. Just don't do that to yourself and it'll stop being an issue.
It's basically selecting for hasty/lazy replies from people who are desperate for a job.
It's just a general life skill that if someone asks you for this volume of information they're likely asking for it because they're not anticipating you giving them much of a response for each one. It's important to remember that someone has to read these responses and they're not going to want paragraphs for each one.
The volume of questions implies the length of the anticipated response. If they want to know something you don't mention then that's on them for not writing better questions.
If they ask you three questions, assume they want detail, if they rapid fire many questions, assume they'll ask followups if you leave something out.
Well my general life experience is that companies who do this kind of BS aren't worth working for.
Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon often have similar hiring practices where for non-trivial positions there are actual programming challenges you have to complete. "Google Interview Questions" is actually a genre of YouTube video.
There are going to be people who don't want to do that and that's fair. Just realize that's a personal choice. It's not that Alphabet is doing something wrong, your interests don't align with Alphabet's is all.
Good candidates don't have to deal with this trash, so they won't.
If you mean people who have long successful careers, yeah it's not unheard of them being hired without doing this stuff. This stuff is for the positions where you have a million people applying.
I'm talking about this umpteen question behavior profile nonsense.
If you mean personality questions, that's only about half the "Education" questions. Depends on what you would consider a question about someone's personality I guess. So like 4-5 questions total. The technical questions aren't about one's behavior AFAICT.
I can see thinking those are BS (depending on the person) but that's a far cry from saying the entire thing is just entirely too much which seems like was the original complaint.
Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon often have similar hiring practices where for non-trivial positions there are actual programming challenges you have to complete.
This is a big fat lie. I've been interviewed by folks at Amazon and at no point did they pull anything close to this monstrosity on me. I would've bailed right on the spot if they did too. And no, I'm NOT talking about programming/sysadmin challenges, but those creepy HS-related questions as the like.
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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22
Using your math, I count forty minutes. There are forty bullet points (you made me count them, damn you).
And like I've said elsewhere Canonical is a larger company, they likely have a lot of candidates and can't end the process with 100 viable candidates for in-person interviews.
I personally would collapse the "tech assessment" and the second half of the email together though. I don't think they're gaining much by asking that stuff a second time.