SWE Intern • Current Employee
Pros: I was thrilled to secure a summer internship at HubSpot earlier this year as a final-year student, with hopes of converting it into a full-time offer.
The experience itself was largely positive—the office environment was fantastic, and my teammates were incredibly supportive. I received great feedback from senior engineers and my tech lead.
However, one downside was that my manager was on sick leave during my entire internship.
Cons: When it came time to discuss a full-time offer, the decision fell to my senior manager (let's call her Karen), someone I had never interacted with directly. Karen's feedback was that my contribution, based on the number of lines of code I had committed to Git, wasn’t enough.
First of all, how is that even a valid measure of performance? Secondly, as an intern, how could I control the type and amount of work assigned to me? I was completing all the tasks I was given well before each sprint ended and even took additional work from the backlog. Just a week before my meeting with Karen, I found an issue with a cron job, proposed a solution, and successfully implemented it. Yet, she still said my work wasn’t sufficient.
HubSpot is a great company, but this experience showed me that even the best companies can suffer from unnecessary bureaucracy and poor management. Fortunately, I was able to secure a job at a FAANG company afterward, but this situation still left a bad taste.