Canonical reviews

3.2

49% would recommend to a friend

(440 total reviews)

Mark Shuttleworth

40% approve of CEO

46% positive business outlook

Canonical has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 440 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Canonical employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

440 reviews
1.0
Feb 25, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Ability to work from home - (Mostly) knowledgeable, high quality colleagues who you'll want to stay in touch with - Frequent Travel opportunities - Good basic salaries - Nice London location - Interesting tech brand

Cons

- A dysfunctional empire (mis)managed into non profit by its founder - Poor quality senior management team who have achieved nothing of note either inside or outside the company - Constructed on a "business" model that will never deliver profit, if the founder gets bored - watch out! - Appallingly bad morale in sales, marketing, bus dev departments - the tech team seems to have a slightly better time - Huge staff turnover - the worst I have seen anywhere! - Lacks any sort of meaningful direction aside from pet projects of founder and his desire to reinvent the wheel - Huge waste in terms of costs and resources - many work out its impossible to achieve anything here and find a place to hide long enough so they can get a new role somewhere else asap! - No training or induction to speak of - expect, however, to be tossed in depth technical questions at company gatherings by an irate founder and pulled to pieces when you are unable to answer to his satisfaction.

3.0
Jan 15, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Friendly co-workers that you want to stay in touch with. Most have prior industry experience and behave professionally. I saw the young ones starting new families, which is always a good sign. While benefits are thin, new employees are welcome to negotiate salaries aggressively.

Cons

Ubuntu has a lot of cache among techies. As a Linux/GNU operating system, that's rightfully so. But Canonical is another matter. It's a tech company where people can have good and bad experiences. A software developer's experience varies, depending on the project, the job function and the manager. For example, prior reviewers in the Lexington office expressed disappointment with "packaging" jobs. This is true. Yet at the same time, there's a lot of excitement and enthusiasm among those involved with other parts of Ubuntu. To be fair, this is true at any tech company. When I was there, I saw a rotating door for technical staff. A good number voluntarily left; others were let go. Personally what sank my commitment was the remark I heard from one technical manager, something that goes like this: "Ultimately, (software) engineers are replaceable." That last point isn't too big a surprise so long as one keeps in mind that Canonical is a for-profit company sitting atop a system built on open source sweat and devotion, huge in numbers and enthusiasm. In this situation, engineering talent is, to be blunt, cheap. At least from the top looking downwards, it appears so.

1.0
Dec 14, 2013

Sinking company

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They are forced to pay fairly high salaries to find people

Cons

The company is sinking and still unprofitable after a decade. Internally it's a completely mess. It has a very bad reputation in the Open Source community, and it lacks any sort of company culture. The rotation is way too high. Also, UDSes were a useless play, and a pain in the arse to say the least. Oh, and everything the company has developed in the last few years have failed badly: Bazaar, Launchpad, UbuntuONE, Software Centre, TV, Phone/Tablet, Ubuntu for Android, Mir, etc.

Viewing 427 - 429 of 440 Reviews

Glassdoor has 510 Canonical reviews submitted anonymously by Canonical employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Canonical is right for you.