Pros
- Truly committed to the remote model, well before COVID, and they provide a lot of flexibility alongside that. - Many brilliant engineers, covering a wide range of technological areas - Interesting and genuinely useful product - Open source ethos throughout - Real opportunities to work on exciting new technology and learn from great people - Mostly (see Cons) good and ambitious plans for future directions.
Cons
- Terrible team diversity. The team in general (with 1 caveat - see below) are lovely and supportive people, and they're *culturally* very diverse with members literally all over the world, but they're still almost exclusively white men. The full Team listing was removed from the website (compare the resin.io and balena.io team pages on wayback machine) because people kept pointing this out. - The CEO is very difficult to work with, and simultaneously extremely interested in micromanaging everything. He has real vision for the product and company, but has an abrasive style in practice, and demands structured debate to justify every minor decision, but many of his own arguments (imo) are poorly justified and often wrong, basically cargo culting from his own 'axioms' that cannot be disputed. Throws claims of bad faith as soon as he disagrees with others and generally distrusts expertise other than his own. He's published long diatribes against consensus decisions as a concept. *No* decisions can be made outside of biweekly architecture and product meetings, where *every* decision must be made, by him, in rapid succession. Wasn't so bad when I started, but became steadily worse as the company and team expanded. This has since continued to the point that the CTO/cofounder and other department heads and senior engineers recently left the company en masse due to these interactions. - Average pay at best, if you're coming from Europe, and outright bad pay for the US. Great pay for the rest of the world though! A downside of recruiting globally, not unreasonable imo, but important to be aware of. - Lack of product focus. CEO is very interested in optimizing the company processes (a good goal, in general) but to the point of enormous NIH syndrome, which means the company was at times serious investing in building its own knowledge base platform, its own slack alternative, and its own customer support platform/CRM, all from scratch. Needless to say, as a growing startup this was a huge distraction from the core products, and over the years I only ever saw it create extra friction and waste valuable engineering time with no serious benefits (compared to tweaking off the shelf products).