Good colleagues, terrible performance management process - Software Engineer I Canonical Employee Review

2.0
Apr 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great and supportive teammates - Decent base salary -Twice yearly week-long "sprints" with team outings in cool cities

Cons

The performance management is the worst of all worlds: completely opaque, determined by a selection of colleagues picking a single ambiguous statement from each of six categories which somehow gets transformed into a percentile ranking, and stack ranking where the bottom 10% are automatically placed on a PIP with the expectation that they will fail out. It's nearly impossible to extract actionable improvements from the system so you just sort of have to guess why you received the ranking you're given and what you can improve.

Explore other reviews about Canonical

5.0
Apr 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

very good. happy so far

Cons

could be better, like the time of application to final round

2.0
Jan 5, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

> Highly visible open source company > O.K. pay and benefits > Twice yearly trips to interesting locations > Intelligent and mostly caring colleagues > Getting to put Canonical on your resume will help your career

Cons

> Toxic leadership style trickles down to the middle management. They're ruthless and single-minded (and extremely intelligent) at the top, and those seem to be the traits that get people promoted. The promotion process is also hilariously involved, and if you don't perform they'll demote you. > Insane interview process - mine took something like four months to complete, represented like 40+ hours of my time, and was considered average. > Twice yearly trips for grueling weeklong sprints. > The company only hires the best so, if you're used to being very good at your job, here you'll only be average at best. > Stack ranking - bottom X% of employees after each biannual review are placed on a PIP. > From what I saw, there are no "personality hires". Morale is expected to be derived solely from the company-paid work trips and the experience of getting paid to create open source software. Maybe this is unavoidable for full-remote companies, but it gets gloomy. > The video-on calls with your team and other teams will take up several hours of every single day, good luck finding time to actually get your work done during the day.

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