[diegoveralli]

I don't know whether it's a deliberate strategy but this definitely happened to me during my interview with Canonical this year.

From a diversity perspective, putting any focus on teenage years will probably select candidates from a privileged background, or people who have re-written their past into the award-winning narrative that's implied by the questions.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe someone could answer the question "what was your biggest achievement during high school" with "I got clean", "I ran away from an abusive parent" or "I spent all my teenage years being bullied, and survived a suicide attempt" and they'd land the job.

[markshuttle]

In my experience it's university access that's very heavily shaped by privilege, not high school.

High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".

We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?

[diegoveralli]

To be clear, while I believe focusing on high school has a negative impact on diversity, I don't think this is intentional on Canonical's part.

Also I should say the overall recruitment process works, I was not the right candidate for the job, and the job wasn't right for me. But I think there were much stronger signals pointing to that during the process than what I did during high school.

[pydry]

I ran into somebody recruiting for Canonical who mentioned, regretfully, that it would matter.

It's sad because they were otherwise very convincing. It was too big of a red flag though.