Babylon Health Reviews

Pros

It is a fairly fast pace place, People are genuinely nice and tones of opportunity to show your skills.

Cons

Lack of relevant experience in some positions.

Pros

Will try to be as neutral as possbile and skip the Cons part and write everything up here. Criteria I will use: Mission, People, Culture, Management, Product, Company Outlook - Mission: without a doubt amazing - People: I'd say lower average bound. Worked with a few really smart engineers, but a lot are just bad/incopetent/slow/unmotivated/political (yes political engineers..) - Culture: relaxed, but I guess depends on the team you're in and how high up in the ranks you exist. Working hour wise, again depends on the team, but really anything goes. I've seen people doing 9-4.30pm without any complaints and those people weren't great performers either - Management: again, depends.. I've seen both, good and bad. I have seen some tech leads that should have been junior/senior engineers and of course the other way around. Same with engineering managers and engineering directors. - Product: I am a bit more opinionated on this topic. I think if all the products were spun up to separate startups only GP at hand would survive, everything else is just not working. Having said that the product suite overall has potential to be great, as it does collect data about your health journey in various stages, ie data collected when you're healthy (health check, monitor), data collected when you're sick (AI, GP at hand) , and with all this data better diagnostics and healthier lifestyle decisions can be made - Company Outlook: this is where I'm the most sceptical. I think Babylon has a valuation of a tech company (it raised 500mln recently) and is valued ~2bn. I would argue that it's not a tech company. First of all, the only product that is great (in my opinion) is GP at hand, which has a high cost base (doctors, support, engineers to support the system), AI/ML stuff just does not work, even though there are smart people working on this. Let's be honest, GP at hand is nothing new - it has been around in the US for some time, it does not change the healthcare experience much (you can get an appointment quicker, but the doctor consultation is also much more limited) thus there's nothing really exciting about the tech. So what we have is a great mission, average people, average culture, average management, weak product and hard times ahead. I cannot be anything, but sceptical about the future of the company. I hope it succeeds because the world needs a better/integrated health care system, will that be Babylon? Time will tell.

Cons

Check the Pros section as I like to create my own rules ;)

Pros

Flexible working hours Free breakfast and drinks

Cons

No career progression High turnover of management No working objectives No incentives Bad management communication Work not reflecting job description

Pros

- Great mission: "put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth" - Great engineers. The vast majority of engineers I've worked with are very smart and very good at their jobs - Great product, ux design, etc: there's a lot of beautiful collaboration between all the different parts of engineering - Some interesting technical problems with good space to grow technically - Good salaries on entry compared to average rates for London

Cons

- Mixed culture: some teams have a very good culture. Some don't. - Internal career reward and progression: compensation and benefits are good when you first join, but career reward and progression once you're inside are awful. There's no career ladder for engineers. The feedback process changes every 6 months or so. Feedback and pay aren't clearly linked. People go 1+ years without even incremental pay rises. People are often promoted without also being financial rewarded. - Tech-deaf senior management: We market ourselves as a tech start-up/scale-up, but we're not really tech-driven. Tech-enabled: yes. But not tech-driven. We're steadily moving towards a style of top-down, sales-led development that often ignores engineering concerns, including the concerns of product people on the ground. - Unpredictable CEO: other company directors disappear without warning or explanation. He often talks a very good talk, but he also often doesn't walk the walk. Transparency is an example that people often bring up: he talks a lot about it and tries it (we have weekly company stand-ups), but it's often missing when people need it the most.

Pros

Some interesting challenges. Had some fun and productive time for about a year.

Cons

Lots of politics and the more important you become the more of it you get, so stay low and don't perform your best if you want to be at peace, or make sure you play the political game at the same time. Cliques are common. Some managers create a hierarchy of incompetent "yes man" who don't know what they are doing and are faking it until they make it and they get away with it because they are someone's right hand men. There are friends of friends but some people don't disclose that fact and abuse it instead. Performance reviews are farcical. The attitude of some managers towards engineers is very unprofessional. CEO says nice things in a style reminiscent of Obama but doesn't follow up on them at all. I felt bullied by some managers: I felt like if I didn't agree with them I would be in trouble, and indeed I observed some people get into trouble cause they raised their voice and spoke their mind. I got a feeling of corruption from this place. But there are many teams and squads and tribes that seem to be doing well too, so I wouldn't be surprised to see other people enjoying it like I was until recently. PS: they mislead candidates by giving an impression that they will be doing AI by joining.

Pros

- The whole design team is really supportive and helps each other out - The misson is great—it's the reason most people are there

Cons

- Team resources and structures that were promised in my interview never ever materialised - "Chaos" is how I would describe my first impression when starting and it only slightly improved in the time I was there - The team I was in was in a forgotten limbo-state in every restructure of the org - Overpromising and then never delivering seemed to be part of the Babylon experience for me—though other people seemed to have the opposite of what I experienced - Any negative PR was swept under the carpet and never confronted internally (or publicly) by leadership

Pros

Great tech stack, you get to work with the latest technologies and concepts, everybody is very knowledgeable and nice and eager to help, you get to learn a lot from your peers. Management, at least for our team, was one of the best I ever had. One big pro is that adding this company to your profile manages to give you some cool points in the recruiting world, as Babylon used to be known at some point to hire only top talent.

Cons

I have read some of the other reviews here, I have somehow managed to shield myself from the toxicity, so I will not pass judgement on that in this review, I will refer strictly to personal experience. Really bad at organising work, I often found myself sitting on my hands and when I pointed that out was only told that yeah we'll look into it and that was it. There was an aggresive hiring campaign in our team at least that I think was completely unnecessary, we could have very well done what we had to with the people we had, if they'd have been managed better. Everything is wraped in buzzwords. People like to talk about work more than doing actual work. Priorities change often and sudden, no calrity to what you're supposed to do or to what end. Watching the CEO during the standups is a cringe worthy experience as all his speaches are a chain of buzzwords and in the everything is awesome style. All the talk about caring for their employees goes up in smoke when they just tell you hey you're not going to work anymore from tomorrow. Complete lack of transparency in this matter as well, people had to insist on getting details. Looking at how this company is bleeding talented people and money, and topped with the utter lack of consideration for it's employees, I don't see any valid reason why anyone would want to work here anymore.