How are the career development opportunities at Canonical?

A name to put in your cv that shows you have good guts and, depending on what your role was, good hard skills.

Stressful environment, chaotic planning, presence of rude people seems accepted, absence of agility and good processes, lack of good people management and real career growth opportunities, CEO dependant environment, met some fearful employees and many others. As a personal opinion, it was a toxic environment that didn't justify the potential benefits. You can be left home anytime and with no apparent reason, as it happened to some people I directly worked with.

Some bright colleagues, some flexibility

The C-suite fundamentally distrusts employees and operates with outdated, command-and-control management. The CEO runs the company unilaterally; disagreement isn’t tolerated and usually results in people leaving. The layer below consists largely of yes-men focused on self-preservation rather than leadership. Toxic behavior is normalized and effectively rewarded. The culture is competitive in the worst way—people succeed at others’ expense, dissent is punished, and setting boundaries is career-limiting. Retention is extremely poor, especially for anyone working closely with the CEO. Typical tenure is 12–18 months, reinforcing the sense that people are expendable. Product and engineering are heavily micromanaged by the CEO/CTO. There is no meaningful ownership of roadmaps, no ability to drive change, and no space for innovation beyond leadership’s personal ideas. Organizational dysfunction. Product managers are reduced to content writers with no teams or authority—overworked, isolated, and unable to influence anything. Product direction lacks a coherent narrative. Offerings are built for mass-market individual users, with enterprise needs treated as an afterthought or not supported at all. Disconnected go-to-market teams. Marketing operates in a self-delusional bubble with unrealistic goals and constant blame-shifting. Sales often have no real understanding of what they’re selling and receive little to no enablement. Engineers are pushed to deliver unrealistic or nonsensical work to please leadership. Sprint reviews are performative, and teams often know what they’re building won’t work but have no choice. The company is effectively run as the CEO’s personal project, detached from market feedback. Teams build products the market has already rejected or over-engineered R&D that never ships. Employee expertise and external perspective are ignored unless they align with the CEO’s views. Fear-based performance system. Twice a year, a forced “bottom 10%” is placed on PIPs with impossible goals. Peer ranking turns into a popularity contest. Everyone is labeled a “peak performer,” yet people are still fired to satisfy the quota. HR admits the system is broken but is powerless to change it. Opaque career progression. Promotions, pay, and career growth depend on a closed, black-box “360” system—an odd contradiction for a company that claims to value transparency. No strategy or focus. Teams are constantly spread thin, pulled in too many directions, and reacting rather than executing against any real plan. Mandatory, leadership-driven leave. Company-wide leave is enforced when the CEO is on vacation (December and August). Personal flexibility is minimal and, in some regions, legally questionable—some teams have pushed back successfully, others haven’t.

I had the opportunity to work with some incredibly smart, well-education, and interesting coworkers, which was one of the major highlights of my experience. The company also offers great opportunities for international travel, which can be a plus for those looking to expand their global experience. Additionally, the brand is well-known in the developer world, which can be a significant boost for your resume.

For a company that positions itself as technical, the work was surprisingly lacking in technical depth. The environment is neither psychologically safe nor inclusive, with management showing little trust in its employees. Performance management is driven by tighter and tighter margins, leading to a high-pressure atmosphere that takes a toll on morale. Success often hinges more on navigating office politics than on actual performance, which makes the workplace more stressful and undermines meritocracy. Despite being an open-source company, it operates with a rigid, corporate structure that contradicts the collaborative and transparent values typically associated with open-source culture.

High level of autonomy and trust, with zero micromanagement (at least in the SBDR team). Strong sense of impact on processes, methodology, and how work is actually done, even within a large organization. Exposure to first-class minds in the tech and open source world, with colleagues who are genuinely collaborative and generous with their time. Opportunity to contribute to a company that actively shapes the future of open source and sets long-term industry direction, rather than just following trends. Fully remote environment that still feels highly connected: collaboration is easy, communication is open, and people are willing to engage deeply. A rigorous and demanding interview process that is intentionally designed to minimize bias and ensure strong alignment with company values, which shows in the quality of people hired.

Interview process is long - and this goes both in pros and cons. For the interviewed standpoint, it's a "cons" because it means investing a lot of time and energy into something that you don't know if it will pay back. From the team standpoint, it's a way to fully evaluate with the minimum bias people the fit the company value set. The job can be demanding in terms of energy and time, especially in periods of high growth, even though there is flexibility and no strict hour tracking. As a fast-growing company with double-digit revenue growth year-to-year, processes can evolve frequently, which sometimes creates friction or requires constant adaptation. Career paths are flexible and open, but not always immediately clear or linear, requiring a proactive mindset to navigate opportunities.

- Smart engineers to work with - Decent starting pay - Good work-life balance (but this varies depending on the team and really bad for some teams) - Company-paid travel for twice a year

- CEO micromanages every employee (yes, *every* employee to extent it's physically possible) - Rest of the management are sycophants who'll say 'yes' to anything & everything the CEO says and have no backbone - CEO operates in binary. Either you *love* everything about Canonical or you shouldn't be working for canonical at all. You're expected to resign if you disagree with anything - The recruitment process is ridiculous. Except a few, everyone knows it's long-winded and isn't any better than the rest of the industry. Not only that, it's clearly a discriminatory in nature (disabled, non-native English speakers, women, etc will find it tougher to succeed in both the interviews and the company) and is designed to target upper-middle class white men who "fit the culture" - There's push to kick out older employees and hire mostly graduates/associates so that they can hire more for less - Pay raises are non-existent, so negotiate well when/if joining - Too many "managers" in the company now. They each try to do some weird stuff because they need to justify their existence - Little to no chance for career progression - Very high attrition rate and the CEO actually likes it so that he can hire cheap labour

Growth-oriented not just in business but in personal career growth. Great team, very good at keeping strong connections across time zones. Good controlled growth - hiring is deliberate and well-considered.

If you're not used to a global work environment, it might take some time to settle in. Hiring process can be long, but with good reason.

- Travel, every 6 months, somewhere in Europe (if you're European, this should go in "Cons") for 1-2 weeks. - Good employees

- Toxic upper-management - Interview system is preposterous! Don't waste time honestly. - Laughable 360 review system, and if you get average rating for 2 consecutive terms, you'll be terminated. - Stack ranking and don't get hired as Grad or Associate. - Career progression is a big no-no. Seen people with double digit experience being SDE-1 and SDE-2

Opportunity to work on opensource projects Fully remote

* Spineless management - managers, directors, VPs...none of them have any real power to do anything, and they're solely focused on keeping their job/salary intact; they will let the CEO and HR destroy and humiliate their teams and won't stand up for their teams no matter how unfair their teams are treated * CEO's approval is required for even for the tiniest of the decisions - the company is essentially his toy * No real pay raises - even talk of it is seen as a Bad Thing (otherwise would be stamped as "cultural misfit", lack of "passion" for the job, and so on) * Stack-ranking of employees twice a year, which is nothing but a popularity contest and pseudoscience at best; the bottom ~10% will be PIPed out; bottom 20% won't get any bonus/payraise (but even higher rating wouldn't get anything meaningful) * Graduates and Associates will be fired if they fail promotion within a year * HR operate with an iron-fist - no disagreements are allowed (either will be ignored completely or fired silently) * Zero career progression - management will use any excuse to reject promotion (because "we are better than everyone else, and know better than everyone else in the world") * The company encourages and rewards "heroes" who become bottlenecks, dominate decision-making and take-over every meeting * Very high attrition rate circa 20-30% (due to toxic work environment, high workload, 10% PIP+termination every 6 months, random firing, and so on) * Insane hiring process - takes months, only the very desperate put up with that as good ones typically get better offers elsewhere & quickly too * Long hours, high pressure & toxic work environment which can't be fixed with a couple "well-being webinars" they organise - it's as if the company hates its employees! * Involuntary time-off twice a year (one in Aug and one in Dec, 10 days each, 20 days of PTOs prebooked per year!) * Employees spend considerable time in the recruitment process for which there's no benefit (not counted towards 360) and as such the regular work suffers and had to be completed overnight or weekends * CEO surrounds himself with yes-men. He thinks those leave Canonical are those not "aligned" with his vision, and those stay share his vision. But the reality is, the vast majority of the senior management who stay are sycophants who always "support" and praise him so that they can get by comfortably and stay out of friction for their job/pay and mental health It used to be a benevolent opensource company, but there's nothing "Ubuntu" about Canonical today. It's a ruthless Corporation which milks the opensource Community and FOSS while contributing barely anything back and treat employees with complete mistrust and like slaves. A toxic culture driven by fear, PIPs, threats and passive-aggression (HR head is from Amazon!).

- Packed with kind, skilled, and talented engineers working on impactful challenges and building a best-in-class open-source tech stack. - It's Ubuntu! That in itself is worth a lot. - Reasonable compensation. - Lots of opportunities to make an impact and grow, both your career and the company / tech stack direction. - Solid work-life balance. - Truly & fully remote work.

- Unkind, aggressive, and hostile communications tone in many leadership forums, especially unwelcoming of newcomers. - Very limited autonomy / empowerment for engineering managers and directors since the direction is set almost exclusively by the CEO. - The CEO is overly-involved in execution, while not doing enough to provide and communicate a strong, truly believable vision. - Aspects of the hiring process are terribly outdated: IQ-like tests, inquiries re: high school GPA. - Strongly male-dominated. - Lack of transparency on compensation policy beyond base salary, everything related to compensation seems to be per-case and not principled.

Lots of opportunities to shine

You must constantly reinvent yourself, which can be a Pro if you look at it from that angle.