Great tech, poor culture - Engineering Manager Canonical Employee Review

2.0
19 Mar 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- 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.

Cons

- 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 - Aspects of the hiring process are terribly outdated: IQ-like tests, inquiries re: high school GPA.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.

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Canonical Response
2y
Thank you for highlighting so many pro points on our culture. We work hard to select the most skilled and talented people from across the globe which is how we achieve this reputation. On joining our organisation we invite all our new people to attend an induction sprint in person. These are hugely exciting events for us, enabling in-person sessions to learn about the business as a whole with some fun mixed in too! This year we are holding 3 induction sprints across the year to allow for our pace of hiring and to help on-board and welcome our new joiners quickly. To clarify, our hiring process does not include any IQ test. We do however have an expectation of both strong academic performance from early years and a high standard of mental agility as our basic requirements. Our approach has allowed us to hire the exceptional since introducing this process. We also see the market adopting more robust hiring processes too. In May 2024 we were a Gold Sponsor of the WomenTech conference for the second year running. We are committed to championing career opportunities for females in the tech industry. The industry as a whole suffers from a lack of diversity here but we are proud that our female population is increasing year on year due to this commitment.

Explore other reviews about Canonical

5.0
18 Apr 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
23 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Met some interesting people, had some interesting conversations.

Cons

Was constantly hearing bad stories about upper management. I only experienced the CEO expressing minor annoyance and paranoia a couple of times. My line manager always seemed to be treading water, fixated on dev-ops ceremonies, and didn't respect the opinions of his peers. The guy who was the "expert" for my field practised management by spreadsheet and was completely out of his depth, always obsessing about his approach to the work and inflicting his opinion on everyone else. Spent too much time having to plan for travel or hear about everyone's travel plans. Wasted so much time in the company's ongoing recruitment drive which pushes most of the work of interviewing and filtering candidates onto regular employees.

3
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