Canonical Senior Software Engineer interview questions

The canonical interview process is notorious for being slow, inefficient, and incredibly demanding. You can find a lot written about it on the internet and if you search youtube, twitter, hackernews, glassdoor - you will find a lot of negative things said about it and also comments from the CEO Mike Shuttleworth rigorously defending it. Having recently interviewed at other companies too, I can definitely attest that a lot of this negative feedback is true. The process is really unusual. However, it would be unfair of me to say that the interviews and research I’ve done around Canonical’s products hasn’t helped me with my career (e.g. Alex Jones from Canonical has a really nice youtube channel that thought me some cool stuff). The interview started off with a “Written interview” - you can find many examples online and it’s a pretty big list of relevant and irrelevant questions. This step can take a really long time if you want to answer all the questions with quality. After going through the written questions I was given a Thomas International IQ test. They won’t share the results with you automatically. To get the actual results after completing the IQ test you have to send multiple emails to HR recruiters which will first send you a dumbed down version of the test results (they say they share the dumbed down results to preventing you from falling into depression). To get the full results I had to send 5 emails in total. The third step was a generic HR step. They said the point of this step was for you to see that there are real humans behind the automated emails. This step is quite pointless but you get to talk to someone from Canonical. The fourth step was a take-home assignment. I was tasked to create a “production grade” python program. The program is supposed to read some debian repository information - you can use google to find implementations of similar programs. The fifth steps were two technical interviews. The guys in these interviews were nice. After both interviews I asked about the Canonical's products and the fact that they are not that popular - I noticed that reddit polls don’t even mention their products as a poll option. The interviewers admitted that the products are not gaining traction. The next day I got an automated rejection email. I’ve asked for interview feedback but I was given a generic response. - I’ve heard most companies don’t give feedback to candidates these days so I guess that’s fine. The overall process was extremely long and exhausting - I think I like the FAANG (tech-screen + on-site) format a lot better because it is more respectful of your time. I would recommend you apply only if you really like the role or one of the products.

Longest interview process of my life. I started with a written interview of about ten pages where I wrote a lot of my experience at university and job, followed by a psycometric test of 45 minutes. After that , three interviews with employees from different team where I told the same things about my job experiences, with a little technical deep. After that a complex home test made in 6 hours. After that an interview with HR and then another tech interview where we watched togheter the home test with some question about the code. All this interviews where made in three months. Then I received a mail in which they told me that the interview process will stop. Without any reason or anything else. After three months of time spent, they should give me a reason!