Not a great company for a designer - Anonymous employee Canonical Employee Review

2.0
Mar 30, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

+ Working on great projects: the Ubuntu Phone is a great & interesting project to be working on, same goes for the web projects (Juju, Maas, etc) + Salaries higher than average market standards

Cons

-- Bad management. Sadly, the whole Design team is subject to the Founder whims. He has a mercurial and draconian attitude and in some instances even abusive behaviour. He does not delegate and often tries to micromanage every single aspect of the design team work. - Poor planning; people are often left to their own with very little guidance or supervision from the middle management.

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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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