@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress disclosure: I'm a hiring lead in Canonical, but not near the roles I shared or Sara's story.

I've not been here a year, yet, but see the process changing often. My initial doubts. have been largely put to rest by seeing both the good-faith intentions and the actual results.

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress I was going through the process about the same time as Sara, so know she ought to have met humans exactly at the step she joked about not seeing any. That's clearly a major fail.

(Also, the "personality" assessment she "passed” is not that kind of test. There's no score with thresholds, it only informs the interviews that follow to ask more meaningful questions.)

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress (more disclosure: I never finished high school. So I can be a bit sensitive about this.)

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress the goal here is to prevent hiring people who have shiny CVs with a lot of success because they've lived lives that have never really tested them. Failing to screen out these surfers-of-privilege is what leads companies like ours to bloat up with "fine" people.

We like to think that avoiding this has contributed to our growth even while the industry is in layoff season.

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress the hypothesis, then, is that early-in-life evidence of being extraordinary is more valid than later “I did well in the ivy league school my parents got me into” stories.

So the high school questions are *one way* to demonstrate being a smart and ambitious person. The GIA (which seeks to measure how adaptable you are, not IQ) is another. Many of us have other stories in our early lives to demonstrate this.

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress now that I'm on the other side of this, I feel the pain of false negatives acutely. Individuals that I believe would make stellar colleagues are sometimes screened out. But the “early evidence" criteria prevents false positives, which is the sort of classic tradeoff that's necessary to scale.

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress Sorry, I promise to stop spamming soon, but want to share: I was initially very concerned that it would introduce the very sort of bias we're trying to prevent. But the data looks good, so far.

@calisti @supersingular @AgathaSorceress So, finally, now that I'm inside I see it working in the aggregate.

I still don't *like* it, because the false negatives (which I think includes Sara) are not only lost opportunities to hire great people, but also damage our reputation and can scare off other good people. But I dislike the “hiring people like myself” culture I know from other tech companies even more.

@hans @supersingular @AgathaSorceress Thanks for your responses. I seem to come to some different conclusions, but regardless: I very much value your time and the information you provided! Thank you.

@calisti thanks for reading all that. As you can probably tell, I'm still working through my own perspective and it's helpful to write-think.