Pros
Many amazing and kind people work at Balena and if you can seek them out and form relationships you will have a really solid network of fabulous engineers. Unfortunately they are largely unable to shape the culture or work at Balena so their impact to the actual workplace is minimal Because Balena is remote-first you get to work with people from many different cultures and backgrounds. It also has very flexible hours and is very supportive of people with families The product space is super cool and interesting. It seems to me that people who worked in the hack teams or developer advocacy really love their jobs and the communities they got to interact with
Cons
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
