Shocking upper and middle management, no coherent business plan - Anonymous employee Canonical Employee Review

1.0
1 Dec 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Work from home, if you can hack it - Travel - Great technical colleagues, many of whom will become your friends

Cons

- Run into the ground by a bi-polar, psychopathic, megalomaniac founder who has no coherent strategy to make money, and surrounds himself with like-minded yes men. - Middle management has no clue how to run its engineering teams, with many spineless people who only look out for themselves and are happy to stab others in the back - Upper management are the founder's puppets who say one thing and then do another Canonical used to be a fun place to work with an exciting future. After over 10 years in existence, it's still not profitable, and the founder is so desperate to succeed that he rules with an iron fist and micromanages every aspect of the business. At company meetings, he has each team march into his Principal's Office to explain themselves, while he rips people apart for not knowing obscure facts.

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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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