Babylon Health Reviews

Pros

Babylon health has a great mission of helping as many people as possible get affordable healthcare. If you can’t get behind that I don’t know what to tell you. Especially when you consider the fact we’re still in the grips of a worldwide pandemic as of the time of this writing. The company has had some significant bumps in the road over the past year or so but we’re still here and we’re still going strong as ever.

Cons

It’s a great environment but undeniably chaotic.

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

- Good work life balance - Inspiring mission - Great people

Cons

- Product team could be improved - Hiring bar needs to be raised