I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Canonical in Sept 2023
Interview
Application
The stages of the interview were:
1. Initial resume screening
2. Written interview
3. Standardised aptitude and personality tests (Psychometric assessment)
4. Face-to-face Meet & Greet interview
5. Online 15min Linux/Networking quiz / Python Coding Assessment
6. Live 1hr Linux Troubleshooting interview
7. Hiring Manager interview
Here are my comments regarding the different stages:
1. Initial resume screening
- Not all resumes are picked up. At other roles I got an email that I was not selected beyond this point.
2. Written interview
- Lot of people complain about this one. I do not complain. For another Canonical position (Senior Software Engineer) I wrote an 18 page essay. For this one only 10 pages. It had less questions. Also reused some portions (it is fine to reuse).
3. Standardised aptitude and personality tests (Psychometric assessment)
- This one is hard. No matter what others say about this one. This is hard.
- It is based on time and you are compared to other people.
- You might think that you got all answers correctly and you had a good speed, but in the end results will show that you are just "average"
4. Face-to-face Meet & Greet interview
- The person that I met was friendly. He asked questions about me and we ended up chatting about methodology.
However he was somewhat "shy". In other words he did not want to give away information about Canonical.
In short, here is what I was able to find out:
- For Field Engineers the team is very diverse. They have all types of specialist. They even have sales people.
- When asked about the "pains" at his company, he refused to answer. Talked about his previous company instead. 🙂
- When asked about a typical "client scenario" he refused again.
- In the end he told me that some of the clients (banks) are always asking for secure solutions.
5. Online 15min Linux/Networking quiz / Python Coding Assessment
- Now this one is also hard. It is a test on DevSkiller. It takes 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Steps:
-- 25 multiple choice questions (suggested time: 15 minutes)
-- 1 practice Python problem (to verify your environment)
-- 2 Python programming tasks of varying difficulty (suggested time: 30min and 40min)
Now you can take your time with the 25 questions and get them right, but it will take your time from the rest. This Python "quiz" is not easy and also asks for features introduced recently (walrus operator).
The counter is always running even at the practice exercise. You can take toilet breaks, but the counter (time/timer) will continue running.
The exercises are not that hard, but when you have to complete it in half an hour (each) it is very hard!
Again if you missed it: Very difficult indeed.
In order to pass this you need the following:
1. Have a huge collection of problems that you had "pre-solved". - When you do the "test" hopefully you can find something similar and adapt.
- Pay attention, you will find a variation of pre-solved problems. If you do not notice this in the problem description you will fail.
- Even if you notice all the details, adaptation could be challenging.
2. Do participate in competitive programming contents
- To gain experience with the time pressure.
In other words this test is equal to a contest done on popular competitive programming sites.
I was out of shape from these types of exercises (competitive programming) and arrived at the end of my run.
Very negative experience.
I spend a whole weekend writing a 40 page interview answering their questions about high school etc.
Then they invited me to an aptitude test that I had to do (as they told me) in my native language. The questions in the test were poorly translated to my language probably from google translate a decade ago (with missing articles and poor grammar) and most of them did not make any sense. I got ghosted after that. Throughout their process I did not had the opportunity to speak or contact any real person. Everything was just an automated human-less process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How did you rank in your high school, in your final year in languages and the arts?
Had to do the essay and aptitude test. Got rejected after. Was not even considered for the position. Not a good experience. the manager just clicked me away on the service they have without even reviewing my application. Feels like a waste of time, considering how long the process is
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Essay questions about my engineering experience education customer facing experience and why I chose to apply for Corona
I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Canonical (Japan) in Apr 2025
Interview
It was rather long and I had to take part in two interviews, one asking about different systems and another about Linux based operations. They gave me a set of questions to solve.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What kind of distributed databases are you familiar with?