Tragic disaster of an organization, just stuck in a slow downward spiral. - Anonymous employee Canonical Employee Review

1.0
Dec 17, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Remote working commonplace across the organisation, considerable flexibility in locations and timezones. Pretty good undelrying infrastructure, VOIP services, hangouts, gmail, irc, travel booking service. Morale slightly better on engineering side of the organization, below average in design, terrible in sales and support. Pays fairly well, but has to in order to secure candidates in the first place. There are still some excellent people there, despite lots of good ones having left over the last few years, a trend which seems to be accellerating. However I've made some excellent friends for life. If you get one of the few good managers who shields you from the worst of the insanity, Canonical can be a mostly enjoyable place to work, however watch out if that manager moves on.

Cons

Where to start... Ineffectual senior and middle management, driven by a neurotic and in some cases borderline insane dictator of a founder, to the point of being abusive both in person, verbally and on calls/emails. Near to zero benifits apart from salary, pay for your own laptop (token bonus after 3 years service for refresh), no healthcare, bare basic pension, no stock options. Organization spends a lot of time and energy recruiting but not growing due to the almost continual revolving door of people exiting. Staff turnover is frightening. Up to 25% of the company hired within any given 3-4 month period. By my estimates at least a third of the organization is looking to leave or interviewing for external roles at any given time. Many are only kept there due to it being difficult to match Canonical salaries. No clear, cohesive strategy. The organization spins up in new directions as if it can't decide what to do, just as something begins to get traction it's often droped and some other hairbrained scheme is handed down from on high. Very few things are really developed to a finished, complete standard, leaving the organization and their customers with technology that rarely feels finished. Such an immense pressure on a tiny support team to patch up work that engineering should have been given the time and resources to bring to completion in the first place. From the inside the company just feels like the founders pet project, not a real company, and that's such a shame because it could be so much more.

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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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