Would not recommend working at Canonical. The CTO is incompetent, and bullies people out of the company if they disagree with him. Suggesting that the hiring process might be discriminatory may get you told that you "must live on fairy island" from where you should "send a postcard" on a company-wide email chain.
Please, please, please, find a new CTO. You've been led astray by the current one. Canonical has done amazing work building the foundation of large parts of the tech industry, but that is all despite, not because of, the current CTO. I'd love to continue recommending everything Canonical works on as best-in-class, but that sadly can't happen with the current technical leadership.
There are always lots of opinions about how to build a piece of software. Unlike a hundred yard dash, where the best performance is obvious to all, the risks and benefits of different engineering approaches remain a mystery until years after some work is done.
I've been around for those years :)
When we need something difficult and fundamental thought through very deeply, because it has to be precisely correct, I've learned to trust our CTO. Others usually want to go faster, or fix-it-later, or we-don't-need-a-spec-just-be-agile. That creates tension. But when I think it needs to be done very carefully and correctly, some tension is worthwhile.
I wish we had been more careful with some of the foundations for Unity, for example, because they would then have served others better even if the project itself failed.
People have different views of what matters, or how to do things. Whatever your views, there are going to be some people that agree with you, and some people that disagree.
Broadly speaking, when you lead something, the people who will step up to lead alongside you will be people who mostly agree with the position you take. Obviously. Why would they align and invest precious years in something they totally disagree with? It would be dysfunctional to have a leadership team in any organisation made up of people who have hugely different opinions about everything at a fundamental level.
Of course, that group has disagreements on stuff. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we disagree on, but we live with people we broadly agree with.
So from the outside it may look like the leadership team of any company are highly aligned. If you have been at Canonical, you know that in the leadership team we have lots of hard debates and discussions, all the time, in search of the best. You also know we are all working to the same goal, which is to help people consume open source cheaply and safely, at scale, across all kinds of compute.
So, here's how I interpret your comment. You saw a group of people that were broadly supportive of a position I hold, and which you disagree with. Sure, you disagree, and that's fine. Calling them sycophants is just finding a nasty word for people who happen to be aligned on something you disagree with.
