Their "interview" is a complete disregard for their candidate's time. Lots of steps involved, some of which are questionable at best and hands down stupid at worst. Why the living hell would you need a "psychometric test" for a software engineer that sent you a CV ?! You should be able to get a pretty good idea about what that person is capable of by looking at that CV, Have doubts? Talk to the candidate about the problematic parts of the CV. Don't want to talk to the candidate about the CV for some insane reason? Ask them to write about it. Oh wait, you're already doing that in the "written interview" (I am not kidding, this is actually a thing with Canonical). You know, that part of the process where you ask people to list their open source projects, but at the same time you tell them that they should remain anoymous in order to remove any bias. Some jokes simply write themselves.
They also take their sweet time between each step of the interview process. However, when I sent my interviewer an email about a particular step in this process, I didn't receive any response at all.
Seriously, it seems like pretty much all the software companies in the world figured out how interviews work, except for Canonical. I firmly believe that you should apply for a job with them only if you really, completely, totally want to work for Canonical and nobody else in the universe. If you have alternatives, go for those. It'll save you time and some of your sanity.
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Other Senior Embedded Software Engineer interview reviews for Canonical
I applied online. I interviewed at Canonical (Minneapolis, MN) in Dec 2023
Interview
Very long process. I started in December of 2023 and it was still going on in March of 2024.
Steps I went through:
* Online Application
* Initial questionnaire: many questions, my responses ended up being ~10 pages
* Psychometric online assessment - reasoning & speed of reasoning
* 3 rounds of interviews with engineers from various areas
* Personality test online - basic questions about how you view yourself
* Interview with a director
* Interview with HR that covers general info + the personality test results
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Lots of questions about Linux: e.g. initialization, tools, embedded concepts, kernel API, etc.