balena Reviews

- 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).

Balena is run and shaped by a number of individuals with big egos and really poor people skills. There is an expectation that those who join the company will adapt completely to their way of working which is disorganised, ego driven, and lacking in basic common sense. They use double-speak phrases such as “you need to unlearn everything you previously knew” to explain away which is essentially just a top-down, change-resistant culture. Feedback is often sort and then rejected, sometimes aggressively by the execs. It’s not uncommon for those who offer constructive criticism to be pulled into meetings with the CEO so that he can yell at them. Personally I found it hugely emotionally draining to exist in a company that states constantly that it believes in “radical candor” and asks directly to be challenged only to systematically reject, deny, and squash any form of dissenting views. It lead to a lot of sleepless nights and other symptoms of constant-low level stress. Getting anything done at Balena seems to be completely impossible. The code is a mess and the infrastructure massively over-engineered. Simple changes lead you down rabbit holes to technical debt and getting a PR merged can take weeks or even months. There are no sprints, job boards, or any form of process that involves collaboration. The only way that Balena knows how to work is to assign an epic of work to one person and leave them to it with no guidance or proper check-ins. Most projects are paused before they are can be completed so that new work can be taken up instead. This is usually in response to some new philosophy or whim from the CEO about the direction of Balena. At least half of the team are deeply unhappy and seeking other opportunities. Staff turnover is really high and the product is going nowhere. The people who made the things you know and love from Balena have all burned out and left. Even these glass door reviews have been rejected as emotionally-charged responses from square pegs who couldn’t adapt themselves to a different environment. But people don’t like to fail in any environment and do not take leaving a job lightly. I spent a long time attempting different ways to work at Balena before concluding that there was just no possible way to be successful in this environment