balena reviews

Pretty much all is bad. The entire C-level suit left in 2022, and was replaced by a mid level management who basically got there echoing the ex-CEO unorthodox views without any discussion. As soon as they took over, they started blaming that the previous approachm, they had championed and been the voice of, for the poor state the company is in. Noone in C-level had any experience running anything before, and it shows (e.g. they spend huge amount of money of a lavish company summit including paying for family members of the staff to join; just to start laying off people a month after as "we did not know how much money is in the account". They are not adapt to inflict any change to the company or the prodcut and keep laying people off (40-50% in the last 3 months) each time saying it is the last round. What is said one week as a motto, is discouraged the next week and a completed opposite stance is taken with n with 0 discussion. They are aware of their incompetence and basically trying to save their positions hoping for something to happen as the company has pretty much stumbled since it was founded and spending investment money. Things like "we don't have any real competitors", "we don't need to find the biggest potential customers -- we are so good they will find us" are commonly repeated without any real justification. Technology is extremely siloed and there are too many gatekeepers (in a flat structure of the company) which makes any change ridiculously hard to push. This leads to parts of the system completely paralysed as the stack does not allow for much extension. The worse part is the deceiving HR practices, although they claim everyone is treated as an employee; for contractors anything that is not in the contract is not horned even if it is in the policies. The policies are also changed in secret with out any discussion taking people's wages, benefits, and PTO away. This led to several law suits, and a very high turnover rate. The whole attitude is like balena is the only company in the world that has ever worked remotely and that has a "flat" structure (although the balena's flat structure looks more like a dysfunctional large corporation filled with nepotism, blame shifting, and similar stuff).