Shocking upper and middle management, no coherent business plan - Anonymous employee Canonical Employee Review

1.0
Dec 1, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Work from home, if you can hack it - Travel - Great technical colleagues, many of whom will become your friends

Cons

- Run into the ground by a bi-polar, psychopathic, megalomaniac founder who has no coherent strategy to make money, and surrounds himself with like-minded yes men. - Middle management has no clue how to run its engineering teams, with many spineless people who only look out for themselves and are happy to stab others in the back - Upper management are the founder's puppets who say one thing and then do another Canonical used to be a fun place to work with an exciting future. After over 10 years in existence, it's still not profitable, and the founder is so desperate to succeed that he rules with an iron fist and micromanages every aspect of the business. At company meetings, he has each team march into his Principal's Office to explain themselves, while he rips people apart for not knowing obscure facts.

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5.0
Apr 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

very good. happy so far

Cons

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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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