What it's like to work at Canonical

Paul Graham recently wrote an essay titled What Business Can Learn from Open Source. One of things he talks about is how traditional "professionalism" is actually quite harmful, and advocates decentralised work. As an employee of Canonical, the company that created Ubuntu and is developing Launchpad and Bazaar, I almost felt like this essay was talking about me. Working at Canonical is quite a lot like what Paul Graham describes.

The company has little in the way of actual office space. The development is done by people scattered over four continents, most of them working at home. Developers are recruited in the libre software community based on their current and past activities, the basic hiring philosophy of the company is to get people to work on what they would do for free. Of course, a paycheck always comes with some associated tedium, and sometimes one has to work on totally boring things.

Canonical is an interesting company to work for, if only because the way work actually gets done is quite similar to the way a community project would work. The main communication tools are (in no specific order) e-mail, IRC chat, wikis, and a decentralised version control system. Some people in the company like to say that we work "pants free". After all, when your office is next door to your bedroom, there is little use for suits and ties.

Even though "on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog" I can confidently assert that all the Canonical staff at least looks and sounds somewhat human. The whole company congregates at least three times a year, for the Ubuntu developers summit, and specific development groups attend additional "sprints" as needed. Every time, the interesting question is "where?". The whole-company meetings I have attended were held in Oxford, Mataró and Sydney and I have attended sprints in London (at Mark's flat) and Brazil (at Async offices), while others had sprints in Cape Town, Montreal, and probably a few other places.

Another fun thing in working for Canonical, is that it tends to elicit "Wow!" reactions from some people, but the real nice thing is the people you get to work with. That is really an elite company, with a lot of very bright hackers and quite a few with excellent communication skills. Most people there also tend to have quite interesting personalities or backgrounds. And also, we get to go to night clubs with Mark Shuttleworth at the end of Ubuntu summits, and sometimes we fly on his plane on our way to one conference or another.

13 Aug. 2005 — What it's like to work at Canonical (2 comments)