Great vision, poor execution - Anonymous employee Canonical Employee Review

3.0
Apr 22, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good if you are an autonomous person who doesn't need direction from immediate management. Very flexible environment although it can be extremely demanding at times if you work for the business side of the company. International travel to many interesting destinations as the company doesn't operate regionally yet. Great place to learn fast and work with the best engineers in the industry.

Cons

No benefits such as laptop or private health insurance. Lots of very skilled people leaving all the time, the company lacks an employee retention strategy. Senior management doesn't have a long term strategy and things may change any minute. Acting as a start-up in many ways but limited hiring also limits the execution ability of the current teams and burns out most people trying deliver quality, especially those coming from more mature companies used to have resources to do their job. Depending on the internal organisation you work for, the work-life balance can be inexistent, one must be ready to leave everything aside and just work for Canonical. It can be very frustrating to see how great potential and great opportunities can't be executed properly because lack of resources. In general, the feeling is a permanent chaos which doesn't seem to get better any time soon.

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.

29
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All