Pros: All the cultural pros have been covered by everyone else; this place is amazing, and the people are awesome. As a backend SWE straight out of college, working for HubSpot for about 8 months now, I want to point out my most important pros so far so I can help other college students make an informed decision. 1. You will learn, and you will learn a lot. HubSpot doesn't just have a great culture; it has an advanced technology stack. The codebase is very new (even at its oldest points), and we utilize a vast array of technology. Your resume will be very impressive after being here for just a year. Your bosses are very supportive and will make sure you are learning from every pull request and every mistake. You're encouraged to take your time and develop your skills. I have never felt like I wasn't being supported by my team during my ramp-up process. Everyone around you is very intelligent, and you're able to just absorb information and knowledge. You'll get a bunch of different opinions (HubSpot engineers are very passionate), and it'll be up to you to draw conclusions and decide what the best path forward is. You learn by doing, and you do a lot here. 2. The infrastructure is state-of-the-art. Unless you're on the dev ops/infra team (bless them), you won't have to worry about deploying, scaling, or monitoring your team's service; it just happens automatically. Your team has a mission that is well-defined, and you will pretty much only be writing code that adds direct value to that mission. This allows teams to iterate very quickly and is honestly one of my favorite things about working here. 3. Autonomy. You will absolutely not be micromanaged. Do you think this new technology that just came out will help the team? You have the freedom to pursue that. There is no set work schedule, nobody to track your hours. If you're executing and doing your work effectively, how you manage your time is up to you (meetings are generally from 11 AM - 3 PM, from what I've seen). 4. The relationships between product managers and software engineers is absolutely phenomenal. All product managers I've worked with are surprisingly technical and understand that what may seem simple to the layman may actually not be quite so simple, and will respect our estimates and feedback. The product managers also do a great job communicating what the customer pains are and are a great bridge between us and the customers. I always feel like the work I'm doing has a purpose and is directly adding value to the company, and this is largely thanks to the wonderful PMs we have. 5. Wide variety of roles. We have backend/frontend teams. Within those teams, we have dev ops, infrastructure, platform teams, etc., etc. You have the freedom to pursue what you're most interested in, and where you take your career is really up to you.

Cons: Experiences may vary from team to team. Sometimes the infrastructure is too "magical," meaning it can be tricky to grasp and understand.

Pros: Some cool people and cool projects. Fantastic comp for as long as you can last. It was pretty great up until 2023. PEER week and time off, super fun.

Cons: - Great performers on PIPs, being managed out. - In-crowd, old guard, bro mentality. If you're not in the in-crowd, you'll be out soon. - Obsession with vanity metrics like PR count & lines of code, rather than actual impact.

Pros: - The people are smart and care a lot about the product. - The in-house tooling and infrastructure for engineering teams is incredible. It makes the day-to-day development process truly enjoyable. - You're not micromanaged; people trust you to get your work done. - Leadership honestly wants you to take advantage of the unlimited vacation. - Leaders—from lower-level managers to the executives—are passionate and thoughtful. They work hard to make employees feel supported, and diversity, inclusion, and belonging efforts are a top priority for seemingly all people managers. - Very competitive salary for the Boston area. - (For whenever it opens back up) The office is beautiful.

Cons: The high amount of autonomy could leave some feeling like the work cadence is a bit unstructured. Promotion criteria is a bit vague, depending on your position. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but again, it could leave some feeling lacking in structure.