I had a horrible experience interviewing with Canonical. I cleared all the rounds and impressed everyone, and the manager asked me to state what salary I'd like. It was a remote role, and I'm based in India.
The manager called me and he said everyone was super impressed with my performance in the interviews and wanted to know what Salary I was expecting.
My first question to him was do you have regional salaries. He said no. Canonical pays global salaries.
I'm a fairly good SDE2 who's almost at an SDE3 level. I've given talks at PyCon India and the local Python Meetup group, where I also conduct workshops and seminars on topics ranging from security to web application design and python internals.
So I told him that a salary between 100 and 125K USD would be good.
He said 110 would be doable. He said any higher and the management would have issues. I was prepared to hear him negotiate till 75K mind you. I was super elated.
Two days later I get a form rejection letter saying I was passed on. I reached out to the manager and he said I asked for too much for my experience.
I specifically had asked him for his budget and what the role could pay, but he pretended that he could afford whatever I asked for. This leaves me with two thoughts.
1. The manager was unaware of his own budget and didn't know if his company even had regional salaries or not.
2. The company is looking to low ball people from cheaper countries even if they're a great developers.
Tell me again why people should apply to Canonical?