What is the salary like at Canonical?

Competitive salary, high traveling opportunity if recruited in the right team.

Retainment is dependent on half yearly review which is a flawed system with zero transparency

Working for an open source company meant lots of like minded employees. Amazing Web&Design team culture. Fun week long sprints.

Significant pay rises are impossible to get. Gender based inequality in salaries due to women generally not negotiating as high a salary to start with and then impossible to get a rise more than 5%. No salary bands, which causes more inequality in pay. All decisions pretty much still made by the CEO, he doesn't care what the managers of teams have to say about what their team members deserve.

- Travel - Good salary and pay ranges - Flexibility

- Owner is very sharp with employees

Good pay for someone in berlin

None that I can think of

decent pay, well recognized software, plenty of autonomy

not much training, ridiculous control and continued poor decision-making by the CEO

Good company + good salary

Application process is too long

- Good salary for most parts of the world - Freedom - Get to travel to different places

- Not very well organized - A lot of initiatives are done for personal promotion and are not very well thought out

-There are truly smart and talented people here, although they aren’t placed in positions where they can succeed. -The salary is above average, though it doesn’t compensate for the stress and expectations. -Some interesting products, though many are failures or internal-only.

I Wanted So Much to Love This Company, but I Can Only Be Disappointed -Toxic Leadership: Management, especially at the top, creates a fear-based culture. People get fired regularly, often for unclear reasons. Decisions revolve solely around the CEO’s opinions, rendering teams powerless. -Lack of Transparency: Despite being an "open-source" company, decisions and projects are often shrouded in secrecy. Employees are rarely informed of plans or progress. Even "confidential" projects often lack direction and waste years of resources. -No Work-Life Balance: Mandatory events (like sprints, 360 reviews, CBR/DBRs) consistently interfere with holidays, family time, and PTO. The illusion of flexibility in this "remote" company is shattered by excessive travel, endless meetings, and bans on holidays during critical business weeks. -Promotion Process is a Farce: Career progression depends solely on the CEO’s subjective opinion. Even exceptional employees with perfect feedback can be denied promotions for arbitrary reasons. Talented people hit the "glass ceiling" early. -Stressful, Useless Processes: Processes exist to monitor employees rather than enable success. Meetings are frequent, unproductive, and costly, often more about tracking work than making decisions. -Toxic Work Environment: People are thrown under the bus, humiliation is tolerated, and the culture rewards "teeth" over teamwork. Toxic behaviors are ignored or rewarded. If you don’t align with leadership preferences, you’re expendable. -Zero Recognition and Support: Hard work, long hours, and sacrifices go unnoticed. Nights, weekends, and holidays are fair game for work expectations. Even meeting KPIs doesn’t guarantee job security. -Poor Strategy and Vision: The CEO’s pet projects drain company resources and employees' time, yet many end up as failures. The so-called "vision" is rarely clear, leaving teams guessing. -The IPO That Never Happens: Leadership has dangled the promise of an IPO for over 20 years, but it’s clear this is just empty talk to keep employees motivated. Don’t hold your breath; this is unlikely to ever materialize. -Diversity Issues: Leadership lacks diversity, with excuses like "no qualified candidates." The result? A homogeneous group of white, bald (or white-haired) men making all decisions. -Bottom Line: This company is emotionally draining, unappreciative, and directionless. Leadership's inability to self-reflect, combined with high turnover and false promises of growth or an IPO, creates an unstable future. Talented people quickly become disillusioned and start looking for jobs elsewhere.

Good salary (because I negotiated it before the company moved to country-based compensation)

Toxic CEO, transparent VP's (they do what the CEO wants), constantly pushing forward the expectations about the employees. Getting promoted is harder every day.

- 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