Awful experience for those on the business side - Sales Canonical Employee Review

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.

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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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