“As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today”
Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams.
Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?
Yeah, tbh I was a little shocked he put that out there. Speaking for myself, I know I wouldn't publicly burn a bridge like that for what seems to be no good reason, and I'd advise anyone leaving a job to try to do so on reasonable terms if possible.
If Canonical is really that bad, people already know (and judging by the comments... yeah... not great).
He needs to explain why he tried to get tons of people to work on Canonical adjacent tech, but is now leaving.
He'd be burning bridges with all his contacts if he didn't off them an explanation as to why Canonical tech is no longer something they should contribute to.
I don't agree. He could simply say "After reflection and thinking about what I want to do next in my career, I've realized it's time to part ways with Canonical.". Frankly, that'd be about as detailed as what he posted, but without the parting shot (it's not like he elaborated on his management complaints).
He owes no one a detailed explanation for his decision and it's perfectly normal to keep things like this close to the vest.
Stéphane was very helpful to me on the Linux Containers forum[1] when I was just getting started with LXD. We now use it in production for Ark[2] and run each of our apps in separate LXD instances across our physical nodes. It's stable and it just works.
So I am sad to hear this as it's a great loss to the LXD/LXC community, but I do hope the best for Stéphane and hope he lands somewhere he enjoys!
Thank you Stéphane for what you did for LXD/LXC and for helping me with my dumb newbie questions some years ago :)
CLAs are a great reason not to contribute to corporate source. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know all the implications of what I'm signing, and I'm not gonna hire a lawyer just to send you a bug fix for your own product. Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs.
> Either take my code without a contract or live with the bugs
The less simplistic view of the situation is that major maintainers (corporate or otherwise) pay the price of keeping the project up for the long run, under the defined license, in all senses including the legal one. So the CLA is the way to integrate contributions without strings that remain legally attached to the author of these contributions. So the CLA is, ironically, the way for these major maintainers to say "no strings attached or wait until we fix the bugs" back to you.
When I interviewed with them, they were doing an intelligence test that involved quickly identifying rotated shapes. But later in the interview they acknowledged that they only hire people from the community who have already been contributing. The intelligence and personality tests are a misdirection: they want you to do an unpaid internship.
is this the same laundry list I got twice from its HR? so lengthy that I gave up right way, it asks from high school courses all the way to your adulthood, the stupidest questionnaire I have ever seen for any jobs.
By the way, I'm done with ubuntu after almost 20 years and will be migrating to full Debian this year, not going to replace my deb with you snap, thanks for the ride.
24 questions, each question describes a situation, you select which adjective describes you most and least. you end up picking random words because non fit.
> Canonical HR is the worst. They use a discredited "personality test" company.
They also have a really weird focus on your education history when applying, to the point that when I was considering applying there, their application form made me realise I don’t want to work there.
Stephane is a great guy.
I never met him but we had several discussions in the LXC mailing list before the LXD project became a thing.
His knowledge helped me to enter to the linux container world and made a career of it.
I've met Stéphane, he's great in person as well. I briefly considered applying to Canonical despite the stories of poor conditions, just to get the chance to work with him. I hope he does well.
> Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project. That’s the news which we announced last week.
So is this like retaliation? Or an effort to reduce Stephane's influence over LXD? Or was it just that he'd been the one who pushed for developing LXD in the open, and with him gone they figured 'why bother'?
It was always pretty clear that something would have to get adjusted the day Stephane left the company, because it's a major project for Canonical and Stephane preferred to run some of the infrastructure himself. From his own comments in the forum:
"In theory Ubuntu Discourse should be more reliable in that it’s run by Canonical IS who has a 24/7 team of people looking after services unlike this forum where I’m the one running the infrastructure and dealing with outages."
Nothing is changing about how in the open LXD is developed.
I'm sad to see Stephane leaving, but it's lost in me how his departure towards doing whatever else he wants to do suddenly transforms into LXD not being open?
I use it a lot for personal homelab infrastructure. I find it feels a lot more natural than single process containers for the workloads I use (torrent clients, game servers, plex...). I've unfortunately never used it for production workloads, and likely never will after recent news.
I also find lxc system containers better than OCI style immutable containers for dev environments for my personal projects, and LXD is the best way to manage them AFAIK.
- if you have a good hardware , you can easily build digital ocean / aws lightsail like environment with a single install in 5 mins of configuration - A VPS Like experience for both Containers and QEMU
- Quick and easy multi-tenancy
- Very easy to build development enviorment isloated from the system.
- Isolation host for docker containers.
- Automatic networking support with DHCP , OVN or MacVLAN if you have multiple physical IPs.
- Home Made Cluster of containers.
It is literally best way to host multiple docker containers. Isolated from each other.
You wont need K8s in many case , infact if you don't have 10k+ users , do not need to worry about 99.999 uptime and redundancy - LXD is all you need.
Or if you have only one Physical Machine and want to test K8s cluters , you can use LXD Containers for that instead of resource intensive VMs.
He is a great guy , i helped debugging ZFSMount problems with him - which causes LXD Container restarts to fail. It was just solved in previous release ( usual suspect , it is because of snap. ) . I would like to contribute on his new opensource projects.
Can I ask about the unusual punctuation? I’ve never seen a country where you put a space before the comma or where you space around parens like that. I’m only aware of the French adding a space before ! and ?
On a side note - has anyone applied to Canonical for a software job? Their first step is a written interview which requires as much, if not more, effort as a graduate college application.
I applied to two different Canonical jobs, and the process was so off-putting I dropped out of both at different stages.
One position required me to take a psychoanalytical test where they judge your personality traits to A.) make sure you have the desired personality traits for the role and B.) that you're smart enough for the role. I looked at the terms of service for the company they outsourced this test to, and it seemed like a data breach waiting to happen. I expressed my concern to the HR team in charge of hiring, and said I wouldn't feel comfortable having that kind of deeply personal info shared. I further expressed surprise that an open-source software company was using this test at all, given the usual penchant for data privacy in the FLOSS community. They (cordially) said I could either take the test or drop out-- I chose the latter.
For the other role, the interview process was going well, and I made it to final round. But, I ran when I saw their tech stack and tech debt. Lots of Jenkins and heavy reliance on Launchpad for almost everything. Launchpad might not technically be proprietary since it's GNU-licensed, but it's as good as proprietary if Canonical is one of the few companies using it commercially. And Jenkins is just Java / Groovy garbage all the way down.
It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company.
Lastly, I read a lot of negative press about Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth while researching the company. In general, Canonical seems like a sketchy place to work.
> It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company.
That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?
For me, I have a separate laptop for every contract I work on, sometimes more than one for a given contract (for complicated compliance reasons). The reason for this is to a) prevent cross-contamination between projects, and b) because the laptops could get caught up in legal shenanigans. If one contract ends up in dispute, the laptop could end up getting subpoenaed, and if it was my only laptop I would be SOL. Or god forbid, code from two projects gets mixed by accident, and now I'm in violations of multiple NDAs. In one case, the customer paid for my hardware during development, and when we were done they took ownership of the laptops along with the code.
Your work computer is just like your work code: At the end of the day it's not really yours, don't get attached.
Have you thought about having one machine plus a hot spare, and swapping out hard drives? If it gets subpoenaed for job X, put the job X drive in and give it to the lawyers, then put the drive for the current job in the spare, order a new spare, and carry on.
Of course, if you can bill the machines through to the clients, why bother!
You don't even have to open up the laptop anymore with pcie pass through on thunderbolt/usb4, you can attach NVMe physically externally without the typical USB IO hit. That gets into a discussion of enough ports and docks and what not but it is possible and in many cases pretty easy. Of course, that tends to cost extra as that tech isn't ubiquitous yet, but it's cheaper than a separate laptop.
Now, if you're doing this for concerns regarding discovery, I'd just use separate devices, as my confidence is low the court wouldn't just require the entire host(s) involved anyway.
This is personally why my environment is not tied to a specific host. Should any given device(s) get caught up in discovery I can still build/recover a full fresh environment on a new device relatively unimpeded - and do so regularly to ensure it's not just a theoretical. It can be a hassle, but at least I'm not trying to juggle devices in that way and have flexibility to either BYOB or work with client supplied kit and still bring my env and tools with me.
no, not whatever OS you like. Windows installations are coded against doing this. You can copy your Windows partition to a new disk and insert that, carefully, but you can't plug it into a different motherboard.
but you can with Linux.
I've never tried it with MacOS but the days of swapping Apple harddrives are in the past anyway.
The biggest reason I separate work and personal devices is that I do not want my personal devices subject to discovery if my employer is involved in a lawsuit. I can't stress this enough- if my employer is sued, I don't want the opposing law firm to get copies of my data.
The second reason is that I don't want my personal devices subject to security monitoring, and most companies that at least pretend to care about security require some level of endpoint monitoring.
I don't know where tedivm works, but their concerns are reasonable for almost any industry.
Small companies usually can't be bothered worrying about those risks (and small companies aren't typically worth suing anyway). But a company of any appreciable size needs to worry about the kinds of things mentioned in the comment.
I don't know many other jobs that work this way. Imagine getting a construction job and having to supply your own jackhammer or take out a temporary loan to buy one. Doesn't the company have some they should supply you with? Gig-economy jobs work this way, e.g. Uber and Lyft, but those are problematic for the same reason (and a lot more reasons imho).
As another commenter said, you're adding wear and tear to your own device. Sure, I have my own computers, but they're all spoken for, hosting VMs and containers or acting as my lab. Why should I subsidize the profits of a multi-million-dollar, for-profit company by letting them use my computer at no extra cost?
Your e-waste point is a good one, but I don't think Canonical's managers were looking out for mother nature when they made that choice.
Chefs bring their own knives. Many skilled laborers in construction bring their own hand tools, especially at the high end (cabinetmakers, finish plasterers, etc). In many industries workers must pay for their uniforms and safety equipment (the uniform part seems particularly egregious to me -- it is company specific yet you have to pay for it and look after it). Lawyers and salespeople have to pay for their fancy suits.
Comparing to other industries is unlikely to be useful, because many craftspeople do own their tools and bring them job to job. Who owns the tools will depend on the specific tools and needs of a job.
Indeed, your hammer isn't going to be taken from you if the building firm does something bad to another company, and besides your hammer doesn't potentially have your bank/email/etc details on it.
Construction workers (and mechanics and most other jobs where you're using standard tools) do require you to provide your own tools, that's why you'll often see Snap-On trucks touring around garages. Obviously for bigger, specialized equipment like a jackhammer or an excavator, they provide them, but I think a laptop is much closer to a set of tools in this analogy.
That's a good point, a computer is probably more screwdriver and less jackhammer. I still dislike companies that externalize their costs to their employees, but I do agree my analogy was slightly off.
Funny, I actually mentioned Snap-On by name in one of my other replies, probably around the same time you were commenting. They've got good brand recognition, apparently!
> I still dislike companies that externalize their costs to their employees
I actually agree, I would personally not work somewhere that made me bring my own laptop, I prefer having a solid divide between work and home. But on that note, I also don't like having a work laptop, I prefer to have a desktop, that way I know I'm never taking work home lol
That's true. And for new mechanics that don't have their own tools yet, there are vendors like Snap-On that drive tool trucks to different garages will sell them tools on a payment plan. This creates a situation where a person in a new job starts out in the red, being indebted from the start simply because they need new tools.
At least it's not as bad as the gilded age where workers got paid in company-store scrip and lived in company housing in a company-run town. Still, I think it's a step in the wrong direction.
I'm not trying to be dramatic or imply that Canonical's device policy is some act of pure evil, but it was a contributing factor to my decision not to move forward. I have a computer that would serve the purpose just fine. It's more about principles. By itself, that policy wouldn't have been so bad, but combined with other red flags it was enough for me to stay away.
Snap-On tools are great. They also cost an arm and a leg. Yet if you put a 3' pipe on your 1/2" ratchet and break the ratchet, the tool guy will fix it or replace it on his next visit.
As a house painter I brought my own boots, cap, and whites, my own paint brushes and rollers (and poles) my own 5-in-1, and my own caulking gun. Spray rigs and and other power tools as well as ladders and scaffolding were provided by the boss.
This might be OKish as long as Canonical doesn't insist on installing any management software or centrally-managed malware mitigation. You're still incurring wear and tear on your own hardware due to work activities though.
> That doesn't seem so bad to me. I have always preferred personal device whenever possible. Why not cut out the ewaste?
Because it externalizes their costs to employees and creates a bidirectional privacy nightmare (company data is exposed to programs running on a personal machine, and personal data is exposed to company programs - worse if they have any sort of management software but iffy even if not).
Only if the employment agreement upholds your privacy if you use your own device. I've seen employment agreements that claim the right to access your personal device at any time if you use it for work.
I enjoy closing the lid at the end of the day and leaving work behind. Separate user accounts doesn’t cut it. With WFH it’s tempting enough to spend too much time “at work”.
Specifically for Canonical, BYOD seems like a great way to dogfood running Ubuntu on all kinds of machines, rather than everyone having the same model of Dell workstation and a separate testing lab being the only place they encounter diverse hardware.
Not saying this is their reasoning - and if they're not too cheap, it would surely be better for tax purposes to buy your employees computers than pay them the equivalent in cash - but it's a reason at least.
This was one of the reasons. Also, how does a small company provide a laptop to remote workers across the globe in just about every locale and tax jurisdiction, many with specific job requirements and most with Strong Opinions?
There are many reasons not to work for Canonical, but the opportunity to pick and choose your own hardware rather than suffer what someone else thought your would need seems an odd choice.
My daughter once took a job at a place that did personality/compatability tests before hiring. As it turns out, it wasn't to help them avoid hiring crazy people. It's because they were the crazy people, and needed to find folks who are compatable with that ;)
> It also struck me as a red flag that Canonical is 100% BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and they do not provide a work computer. You can apply for a _loan_ to buy a computer for work, but they will not pay for one. If a company is too cheap to provide a computer at a job where you work remotely and exclusively on a computer, I don't want to be a part of that company.
So just add the cost of acquiring employer-specific hardware to the compensation package during salary negotiations, is it really a big deal? Don't you generally have your own hardware preferences anyways?
The problem would be if they insist on what software you run on that machine and if they put crap like spyware/backdoors on your device.
If it's just a "we don't care what you run, just be productive and do good work" kind of attitude, BYOD could totally be ideal.
Nothing is more annoying than having an employer shove something like an imac down your throat with a "use this backdoored garbage or quit" mentality.
Having said all that though, their interview process sounds more like a hazing ritual designed to filter out people who won't tolerate abuse. It's deterred me from ever pursuing a role there, despite probably being a decent fit for the work.
I applied and got to the essay and turned back. Feels like college admissions all over again. I’m too old and too mature for that. Technical questions? Fine. Behavioral, sure. Firing squad of 5 engineers for 3 hours of co-programming, ouch but ok… 1,000 words on why I love Canonical? I have just 6 letters: Ubuntu. If you really want to shave the neck beard down to 5: Debian.
Ugh, you’re right, Mondays suck. Debian is also 6 letters. However, it’s Ubuntu that really brings what I love about Debian. Ubuntu is downstream. Debian is up. Debian will always have a place in my lab.
I wish more companies screened for writing competency. The better the writer, the smaller the 1000 word hurdle is. With async & remote work this skill is as important as ever.
A good technical writer produces clear and concise text. A 1000 word essay about the company is more of an exercise in creativity (and one might even say an exercise in "brown nosing").
I've been chatting with someone as they go through the process just recently. It seems completely and utterly insane.
Completely off-putting, and seemingly filled with nonsense that isn't providing actual value. There were so many bonkers things that I gave up trying to follow the particulars and just decided I'd never apply there.
I did. I passed all rounds and was extended an offer, but the pay was way below what I expected and so I declined. They also don’t sponsor visas or relocation, which was a dealbreaker for me as well.
Is it usual to go through all rounds of an interview process without getting a salary range and asking if they sponsor visas and pay for relocation? These are round one questions for me and I assumed everyone else.
There seems to be a whole school of HR / recruiting which tries to make it taboo or uncomfortable to ask those questions early on in the process.
From what I'm reading here, I suspect a place like Canonical would end discussions early if you even asked. It sounds like they're looking for cheap talent.
Part of what I remember about the process is that you don't actually get to speak to anyone until quite late in the process. I think I only finally got to jump into a call with the hiring manager after passing both the written essay and the personality test. I also have to admit Canonical was the first company to get back to me during my latest job search, and I the time I had no other offers so I just kept moving forward with them. Their process is relatively lengthy, however, so when I reached the offer stage I was interviewing with other companies and even had some verbal offers, so declining wasn't too hard.
I applied a while back. Made it through months of tests, interviews, all the way to an interview with Mark Shuttleworth. I respect what he has built, but the interview only really focused on what I had done in high school. I graduated 36 years ago - I just don't see the relevance. I am glad he passed on me given all the news coming out since.
As I recall, high school was a big focus of the essay questions when I applied, too. Like you, that was a lifetime ago, and my growth since then is much more important. If I was a lawyer, I might try to round up a few grayhairs that have had similar experiences for a class action suit.
A friend of mine, a person with a Master's degree and multiple years of extremely relevant work experience, dropped out of their process after multiple interviews because they would not continue without having her high school report card. Absolute clown town.
who even has access to their high school report card? I suppose maybe I could contact my high school? But I didn't keep a copy of my own grades for more than a week maybe even in school.
I was signing up for EMT classes and they required proof of English comp and algebra. My highschool takes 3 weeks to approve a records request. The community college would not accept my passing grades in differential equations or tech writing and I had to pass tests instead. Turns out the emt class doesn't even require those competencies but the comm college did.
What a strange requirement. I can't imagine how I'd get that card. I'm guessing the record doesn't exist anywhere. Another commenter talked of how this is not ok for people who lose their paper records in a disaster. But is "high school report card" even the sort of record people have and keep? I have nothing like it in my personal records. I don't think I have anything at all from my school days.
What on earth. That’s definitely the sort of thing that would make me close the tab immediately.
What are they trying to select for here? Are they hiring all 18 year olds, or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management.
On the other hand, a lot of people that did well when I was in HS are the same who would diligently perform this sort of busywork no questions asked.
> or does someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s or beyond need to justify themselves slacking when they were a teenager in the eyes of management.
That's exactly what they expect.
Anecdote: MS was part of the tail-end of my interview process and after I brought up that it was a bit much asking me for justification of decisions I made decades ago, he stated - I'm paraphrasing here - that he believes that someone's decisions at that stage of their life are consistent with how they will react and respond later on, which is why they ask the questions to begin with. I nope'd on out afterward.
Only advice I can give is beware companies that cultivate a cult-of-personality around one or multiple execs. You will be required to drink the Kool-Aid and - when you invariably don't - that's that.
I saw an entry for one of the positions there on LinkedIn. The application page wasn’t too bad at first glance since it doesn’t involve registration like Workday or Taleo. But as I began to scroll down, I saw those high school questions and that was enough for me to nope tf out of there.
I don't know why, but I've sort of expected them to get bought up by MS or something like that for a while.
Are they special because they can be ultra selective with who they bring in to the fold and have a loyal army of "true believers" working for them? Or something else? I get it, I watched a fabulous company get nearly ruined by a couple of bad hires. I'm a big believer in culture adds vs. culture fits and every time you bring someone in they're adding various traits to your culture, some are good and some are bad. We choose to be a little different, try to find the best fit, try to avoid wasting time, and then after 1 to 2 quarters ask some hard questions about if they're actually working our or not.
I suspect that there is something in his message about it not being the company he was excited to work for 12 years ago.
I noped out right there. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. If they cannot make a decision after two interviews (three at the absolute most) then I probably won’t want to work there.
Oh and they asked me if I would be willing to use my own laptop…
Below is the list of interview/application stages:
I don't understand ghosting. I really don't. It's not hard to keep a candidate informed. As a hiring manager I always let candidates know quickly, within a few days if I can, but I never ever ghost.
I saw that too. I mean, I didn't submit anything because too much of my work is hidden behind NDA. But at least with Oxide, it doesn't surprise me that they want to be a startup full of superwizards. Canonical? No. Just no.
Can't speak to the complete process, first step was fill out a google doc just to submit an application, and was ghosted from there.
> What did they have you write?
Work Samples, Writing Samples, Analysis Samples, Presentations Samples, Psychological Questionnaire
> What was the role?
Rust Embedded Systems Engineer or some such. Which given that I was previously the lead for a high availability modern C++ RTOS, had programmed in Rust professionally since 2017, and would regularly give talks on the state of embedded systems work in Rust (using slides running as a bare metal application on an Nintendo 64 written in Rust to put my money where my mouth was), I figured I should at least get to talk to someone there.
Starting with a giant doc you have to fill out just to apply should have been a sign to just not even bother, but I had a lot of respect for bcantrill. Some of which has now eroded.
Questions like when have you been happiest in your career? Unhappiest? A bunch of stuff about their core values and examples of how you or previous organizations have reflected those, have not reflected those, when two came into tension, etc.
I mean, those are ultimately psych questions. It's common for those to come up in an interview, but very non-standard to ask someone to write about those topics before you've talked to anyone at the company.
And at the end of the day it's the asymmetry of their process that I have an issue with.
This is slightly specialized for the Product Marketing role; for engineering roles, the Market Analysis section is replaced with a similar section for engineering / system analysis.
(I work at Oxide, but this link is publicly available, albeit hard to find on the website)
And the pay is about the same as my current job. I was thinking of applying again now that I have more rust experience just to see but then I remembered how off putting the process was.
From what I read they pay low rates but have a certain group of people really wanting to work for them. So an involved process seems good at very cheaply filtering out people unlikely to fall into the latter category. I also suspect going through such an involved process that includes praising the job would psychologically make it more likely that you'll take the low pay.
I guess they have a surplus of people... because that process looks more intense and picky than e.g. Google's, and Google is only able to do what it does because they pay very high and had great perks and a reputation.
All this stuff about high school performance, and choice of university -- really?
Actually what I get from this is that they're aiming to hire cheapish new grads and have no interest in senior industry-seasoned talent.
Because there's some serious arrogance there if they expect to put applicants through the ringer like this without a commensurate effort upfront. Any senior engineer is going to look at that and wonder why they should bother.
That's absurd. I am not answering questions about high school or college, especially to that degree. I am a decade into my career at this point. I would turn this into a "creative writing" exercise.
According to TFA, [3] happened _because of_ him leaving:
"Following the announcement of my resignation, Canonical decided to pull LXD out of the Linux Containers projects and relocate it to a full in-house project."
Pretty damning comment. I don’t know the backstory here, but it seems aimed at management not doing a good job given the praise he lavished on the tech teams.
Can someone here fill me on the issues they’re facing?