Pros: - Some good technical people. - OK opportunities and a structured career path if you're a recent graduate. - Nice perks if you're willing to come into the office. - In terms of impact, given the friction and dysfunction within the org, the measurable delta between trying your best and not trying at all is so small. You can achieve nothing and, provided you don't actively point it out, nobody will pick you up on it for years (good work-life balance).

Cons: The business side of the org is riddled with unqualified yes-people and virtue-signallers. When the COO makes one of his many cringe-worthy, internal pronouncements on Slack, you only need to see the explosion of uniformly positive reaction emojis to realize there is a deeply unhealthy dynamic being cultivated from within. Very slow-moving environment with lots of friction to getting features shipped. There are plenty of sacred cows, and management appears to be disinterested in addressing systemic productivity issues outside of making it a failing at an individual/moral level (i.e., work harder). This undermines meaningful discussion of how productivity could be improved and indicates a lack of understanding of the actual issues that product teams face. "Coaching" is just "performance management." Your coach may not be on your team, may be junior to you, or not even of the same specialty, so there's a real limit to the material assistance they can provide you in your day-to-day work. There is no feedback mechanism in place if your coach is abusing their position, or, for that matter, for literally any other issue you might have (they do look at Glassdoor reviews, however). Fully vested employees (4-year+ tenure) are often absent in one way or another, or (understandably) refuse to engage with the questionable organization and coaching structures that have been set up. This leads to onboarding, beyond a superficial level, just not being done in many pockets of the organization. Poor remuneration and, depending on who your coach is and what part of the organization you're in, little opportunity for career advancement.

Pros: Flexible hours, in-house chefs and drinks, not a bad salary, very pet friendly as long as you pick up after them, other allowances to help you skill up, and a remote work environment.

Cons: Questionable diversity efforts: When I look at other countries worldwide, the way they approach diversity is by hiring based on a diversity of merit lens, which by itself is racially very diverse. Secondly, they hire based on an equity lens to make way for those disenfranchised. In Canva, I felt that white women were given priority through the equity lens, and there was no equality of opportunity for racial minorities to make their mark. In a country where a homogenous immigration policy was only removed in the 70s, and a right-wing Murdoch media that overtly represents white people, Australia has a pretty long way to go before it even gets to parity with the racial merit-based diversity of other countries like the United States or the UK. To directly move to equity-based diversity without addressing why merit-based diversity is not working to yield similar racial diversity is disingenuous. It creates a diversity profile that is mostly focused on diversity between white men and white women. Canva is very anti-dark skin within the company. People who are not perceived as white are not given opportunities based on their output or productivity and are treated like second-class citizens. Even while writing blogs or announcing achievements in public channels, if you are white, there will be lots of emojis and commendations. If not, not much. This institutional racism is heavily reinforced by both white men and white women. Calling this out tends to disrupt their worldview, and they get very defensive about protecting their White Australia demographic. Coworkers were extremely afraid to talk about racial inequality when it comes to the workplace. A slight disruption of their worldview makes them very uncomfortable when racial inequalities are openly spoken about. This "great white silence" prevents any racial diversity movement from making big strides in Canva. Further questioning on racial diversity creates a big backlash and could come at a serious cost to your career, so people are very afraid to talk about it. This deep entrenchment of silent culture around race creates a system that is very unsafe for minorities, especially if you are perceived as non-white. Nothing will be done to improve your experience, and there is no avenue to talk about it. What this ends up doing is architecting a diversity system that promotes white men and white women for higher leadership positions, where the non-white minorities end up working three or four times harder to even get noticed. The result of all this is a diversity footprint that doesn't represent the cross-section of the Australian population, especially at leadership levels. Very intolerant and arrogant group of people in my opinion. Questionable promotions: The growth and development framework is a set of policies that dictates who gets a promotion. From my chats with other coworkers, quite a bit of employees have been given special deals and incentives to stay. Yet, when I went to my manager and asked them to recognize me for a raise after delivering an insane amount of work, they said, “I’m being too pushy.” They were absent for the last two years without much repercussion, and their manager was too busy to even have a word with me about career growth. Questions about career growth were met with, “The raise is not too much, so it's not worth going up; you have to meet the expectations; it's just a title; you can add any title you want on LinkedIn because we don't have titles; your tone is a bit strong,” etc. This was at a time when I was hitting one level above my role profile in the GDF. Meanwhile, admins and project coordinators have been promoted to Heads overnight, bypassing the GDF. All around me, I’ve seen white men and white women given the golden opportunities, and they were promoted quickly to group leads for contributions that were clearly lesser than mine. Exclusionary power cliques: I’ve never felt so unwelcome in any office gathering. Canva says it seeks to add culture into the company. I’ve never felt Canva was multicultural. Everything from their photoshoots, to who gets the leadership positions, and who hangs out together on Friday nights, to who makes the big decisions, are all euro-centric without a shred of multiculturalism in place. There are many inner circles of power that never allow any outsiders to be a part of their conversations. Even when I accomplished something big and posted an update about it, I never felt appreciated by my coach or their manager. People who were popular received a ton of attention when they posted an update on something small. But dark-skinned minorities were never appreciated in my observation, no matter how much they accomplished. One of the heads left Canva and started their own company; you could see the pictures when they opened their office, there were literally zero non-white people there. That’s how covert social exclusion works in Australia. No one is willing to talk about it, yet it's extremely perverse, insidious, and exclusionary. Microaggressions: I’ve never felt my voice was heard for all the contributions that I’d done. Some elements of leadership were openly racist, and nothing was done about it. Accent discrimination is very real. A senior leader once barred someone from interviewing candidates because “their accent was too strong.” I was personally told by a coworker that my culture is not a culture that is accepted in Australia. In all PR, photos, videos, season openers, it looks like there are strict implicit rules to exclude non-white or non-perceived white persons. While in the rest of the Western world, non-white humans will be included almost to a fault to foster diversity and reduce bias, at Canva, it is the complete opposite. The covert racism against dark-skinned people is clearly very strong here. They expect people who are immigrants to fall into a white caricature and behave accordingly, succumbing and supporting all the narratives they espouse. Essentially, to know your place as an immigrant. Many non-white people code-switch to Euro-white behaviors to blend in, shedding their culture.

Pros: Good technical structure in general, with lots of learning in high-level architecting. Good work-life balance compared to local companies. Hybrid by default, and remote work is possible under certain circumstances.

Cons: There might be some overheads in different kinds of processes. The direction/vision might not be clear, depending on the team you work on.