Blink Health reviews

If you're suspicious of the disconnect between all the 1 and 5 star reviews, you should be. I personally witnessed the CEO (founder and a public face of the company) pressure managers to produce 5-star Glassdoor reviews at an internal "lunch with a leader" event. If you’re thinking of joining but don’t know what to believe, reach out to a few former employees on LinkedIn or do a quick Google search of the founders names. You are almost guaranteed to find a horror story. - - - Like many other employees, I joined Blink Health because I wanted to be part of the mission to make at least one part of healthcare more accessible to everyday Americans. I have never been so saddened and disillusioned by a company in my life. The leadership repeatedly invokes the company mission to manipulate employees into accepting their incompetence and intolerable behavior. During an all-hands only a few days before NYC’s COVID19 Pause order, the COO (a founder and public face of the company) strongly discouraged WFH while citing how “young and healthy” the employees are, how “there’s still people on the streets of Time Square so it can’t be that bad,” how Blink Health will “never be a remote company,” and then calling for a round of applause for the employees who commuted into the office despite the outbreak. These weren’t nurses, mind you, or any kind of frontline providers that needed to work from the office - they were software engineers who could easily do their jobs from home. This was the same day that news was circulating of Iran digging mass graves for COVID victims and there was absolutely no shortage of evidence of the destructiveness of the virus. All public health guidelines were crystal clear about the need to stop all non-essential commuting. Yet founders of Blink Health abdicated their responsibility as leaders of a healthcare company and instead encouraged non-essential employees to keep coming into the office as a “duty we have to our patients.” While other healthcare and tech companies were proactive in protecting their employees and the public at large by quickly moving to mandatory WFH, Blink Health's NYC office was kept open and had employees working from it right up until the Pause order on March 20th. In NYC alone, 14,000+ people have died from COVID since that all-hands. I will never forget watching a company founder smugly chide an entire office of healthcare workers that it’s “better for our patients” to ignore social distancing recommendations during the worst pandemic of our time. The company’s stated guiding principle, "Humans First," has become a running joke among employees because of how brazenly the leadership undermines it. From bullying employees to lying to patients, the founders never fail to take whatever short-sighted position looks most profitable at the moment, even if that means belligerently contributing to a historic death rate. Other truly awful leadership behavior I’ve witnessed at Blink Health: - A rash of sexual misconduct by managers, up to and including stalking. Even some of the “good” managers have alarming instances of unwanted sexual touching of employees with less power. Given the hostile relationship between HR and employees it’s especially difficult for victims to come forward. The ones that do tend to leave the company shortly after. - Bald-faced lying to customers: engineers were pressured to add language that shipment times for mail order medications would be 2 days. When data came back that it was taking close to 10 or 12 days for patients to get their meds, engineers were blocked - by the founders of the company - from removing or changing the language to be accurate. Perhaps with another product this wouldn’t be so heinous, but deliberately lying to patients about when their heart medications will arrive, in order to artificially inflate adoption and impress investors, is yet another example of how carelessly the leadership treats their customers. - The product is an incoherent, fragmented mess. The same features are built multiple times, in a rush, and can barely be maintained. Rather than improving the product for the large base of existing customers, all resources are devoted to standing up Hail Mary integrations with business partners representing several dozen orders a week. The CEO loves sharing wisdom from business books he’s read, including how important it is to do fewer things well than a lot of things poorly - but none of this philosophy is actually reflected in how product decisions are made. Which is to say, product decisions are made with zero research based on the COO’s (brother to the CEO) whims. When I joined there were few competitors in the space; Blink Health has wasted their lead and now the customer experience trails dismally compared to similar products. - The cofounders adore anyone who tells them what they want to hear, so they are frequently adding new "senior leadership" members who are hailed as a savior until their inevitable exit six months to a year later. A thick layer of these middle managers was added in 2019. Occasionally one of these leaders is worth their paycheck, but usually they are completely unable to wrangle the compacted dysfunction of the environment and end up worsening the quagmire. No effort is made to promote existing employees into leadership positions from within the company; you should not expect to grow your career here. Ineffectual, big salary managers are brought on while non-management employees are told that the career ladders are “still being worked on,” a convenient excuse used across multiple years. - Layoffs have become a quarterly routine at Blink Health and over 50+ employees have been laid off in about 4 months. The relationship between the people team and the rest of the company is extremely contentious: the Chief People Officer (top HR executive and public face of the company) continuously gaslights employees by declaring how much the leadership values feedback, but any sort of critical feedback puts you on the fast track for the next round of layoffs. Of the last round, over 50% of let-go employees had engaged in discussion about the company's poor response to COVID. Severance terms are paltry and include no extension of healthcare coverage despite the pandemic, and as a symbol of Blink's style of gratitude employees with multiple years of tenure are given the same severance as employees who were with the company for a couple months. After the last big round of layoffs the HR team vigorously assured everyone that none of these layoffs were performance related, and yet the very next day the Chief People Officer encouraged remaining employees to share with their LinkedIn networks that Blink Health is hiring - for the roles they had just eliminated. Even now Glassdoor reports that Blink Health is having a “hiring surge,” which is bitterly ironic given that every recent review (both good and bad) mentions the layoffs. The trend is to lay off employees in NYC and then hire for those same roles in Kirkland, presumably to cozy up to Amazon. Unless you are an ex-Amazon employee (none of whom have been impacted by layoffs) your job is not safe, regardless of how hard you work or how valuable your work is to the company. - As you can imagine, this all leads to a miserable work experience. The average tenure for an engineer is around 6 months, and less for product managers. There is only 1 engineer who has been at the six year old company longer than two years. The loss of institutional knowledge is staggering and regularly impacts day to day operations, preventing customers from being able to get their medications. New hires are brought on with promises of fixing the system, maybe even doing greenfield work, but immediately encounter the intractable mess created by cutting corners for half a decade. Employees - current and former alike - are demoralized and disgusted by this company. Do not join Blink Health if you want stable employment or to feel proud about where you work. Fortunately there are a sea of competitors in the healthcare space whose leaders really do care about their customers and employees: for your own sake you should consider joining one of those rather than wasting your time and talents keeping this overcapitalized, ethical nightmare afloat. * Note: All individuals mentioned above are listed on Blink Health’s own “executive team” page and are public faces of the company. Glassdoor, please don’t let them take this one down. :)