btw., looking into this Tim Lunn aka darkxst:and only one guy seems to have known more
He was a GNOME maintainer for Ubuntu since 2012, when Ubuntu tried their Mir, he was the one running ubuntu-gnome for years as technical lead while Canonical did nothing for it. When Ubuntu went back to GNOME in 2017, they seamlessly promoted ubuntu-gnome back to the position as the real thing.
There were questions whether or not Tim works for Canonical, and Canonical offered a non-answer:
Yeah, he was there. There was some confusion about whether or not Tim worked for Canonical or not, so it was good that we were there to explain the situation. He’s an active member of Ubuntu Gnome and has been for a long time and there was
Tim faded away, he stopped contributing in 2018, despite being promoted as a Debian guest maintainer that year. It looks like he got hired by a company doing home automation and that's what he is up-to now, with no involvement in Debian or Ubuntu anymore.
I think that guy got punched in the face hard. A person who contributed to Ubuntu while sitting on a military base and who was gone for years cause he raped children, got hired, while the guy contributing for 6 years without break as technical lead to the spin that became the main version, doesn't even get a "Thank You".
There is also this very interesting article of someone explaining the hiring process of Canonical:
Mark Shuttleworth himself, in person, interviews anyone who gets into the late-stage of an application and they dig HARD into the past of anyone who applies.To the question "How was your university?", I answered that it wasn't prestigious, and pretty small and rural, as we could see cows from the windows. Shuttleworth immediately interrupted me to say "don't play games, don't try to muddle your answers. I'm interviewing you for a senior position, I'm asking you questions, I'm expecting straight answers." I was so flabbergasted that instead of answering properly ("As I'm interviewing for a senior position, I'm expecting proper senior position related questions."), I gave a meek "Okay…" Some parts of the conversation were equally awkward and filled with an unhealthy amount of salt, especially about upstart ("They're a reason why Chromebooks are using it", the reasons are mostly technical debt, not technical excellence.), mir ("Wayland has the same design flaws as Xorg"), … At some point, someone bought him a plate, and he started to eat, without excusing himself about doing so. I asked him why he would spend time interviewing prospective employees in non-executive positions, let alone individual contributors, as this is likely eating a lot of his time, given that Canonical currently has around 1200 employees. He told me that he like to know who is hired, and that this process allows to root out average candidates. After 40 minutes out of a 60 minutes scheduled interview, Shuttleworth said "Ok, nice talking to you, have a nice day," and abruptly ended the interview. I seriously thought about withdrawing my application, as I really didn't want to work with him, but since the position was only senior IC, odds are that I wouldn't have to, so I didn't retract it.
A company with over a thousand employees, has the CEO himself do the final interview.





