- Written interview. (8 written pages, ~2h) - Psychometric assessment. (30 minutes) - Coding assessment - 3 Different tasks, including code review, kernel module development and kernel backporting (git, essentially). (~16h) - Engineering team interviews (3 different interviews with different engineers). (3h, 1h each. Very nice, friendly, knowledge full people who provided very interesting insights and discussions about their work. Plus some very light and high level skill assessments. Definitely the best part of the process) - Behavioral assessment. (20min). - Talent team interview (1h, including more behavioral questions, and clarifying what it looks like to work at canonical). - Interview with hiring manager. Technical interview (no context was given to me on what this interview was going to consist of). My performance was underwhelming and my inexperience definitely showed (1h) Shortly after the latter, I received an email (1 single phrase with a spell typo...) saying that I was not successful and will not progress any further. This whole process lasted from October to January (took longer because of Christmas break). I want to be very clear. The negative experience is not because I didn't get an offer, or because I got rejected after the amount of time I put in. The Canonical interview process is openly a very long and thorough process, which I had no problem with from the get go. Every time I passed a stage in the process, I felt they were evaluating overall potential rather than how good you are right now (while obviously making sure you have the correct technical foundations), especially after making very clear that stages like the psychometric and behavioral assessment were taken very seriously. After my underwhelming technical interview (which I very openly admit), I got immediately rejected without (as it seems to me) any regard for what I had done prior to it. It felt like the whole process could've just been that interview alone (and entirely skipped the last 2 to 3 months of progress). While this may sound like I'm only frustrated that I got rejected (even though there is definitely some frustration there, I admit), what truly makes me despise this process what how little respect they showed me after all the time and effort I put into the whole process. After months of assessments and interviewing, the only thing I receive is a miss typed phrase saying I was not successful. Nothing more. Naturally, I politely followed up acknowledging their decision, but asking for additional feedback on what went wrong or what I could've done better, to which I had no response . I understand that giving feedback to every individual candidate is not viable, nor would it make sense, but when someone like me, who got through every process and assessment, spent hours working and preparing, took days off to be able to attend interviews in different time zones, doesn't even get a glimpse of the reason why he got rejected, I can only infer that they have no respect for the candidate's time. I really felt disrespected by, not only getting a very "dry" email saying that I was unsuccessful, but not following up on my request for feedback, which would've taken (at max) 5 minutes to write.
I will not be applying to Canonical again nor will I recommend anyone, who respects their own time, to do so.