HubSpot

At HubSpot, you will work with some of the brightest, empathetic, and intelligent people you will ever be fortunate enough to meet. I did truly love my time here, and the problems I list did all occur, but the people were so good that I was very sad to go. I would work with any of these people again, even if it meant working here and giving it my all again. There are some good benefits, a decent pay package, and a lot of freedom in certain areas to get work done. They preach HEART at this company and truly many people embody this. If you have the opportunity to work here, this is not necessarily meant to be a deterrent, only an honest accounting.

While HubSpot had a 7% reduction in workforce, I won't go deep on that here, since I was affected by these layoffs. While I believe this was the wrong decision on its face, that has little to do with this review. I will say though, some praise you might hear for the "empathy" in which these layoffs were conducted is overstated. Layoffs are layoffs; they lead to ruined lives, suicide, depression, etc. We do not talk about these things enough, and executives making millions of dollars should not be let off the hook for their poor decision-making because of nicely worded letters when they fire you. There is zero accountability for senior leadership for their bad decisions. None. There is literally no effective mechanism to give adequate feedback when senior leadership needs it. This leads to a situation where leadership can constantly make terrible decisions in planning, team allocation, priority of work, etc., while always passing whatever fallout comes from their lack of foresight onto their direct reports. You will run into both senior and director-level leadership that essentially has no idea what is going on at the ground level and will not bother to find out. There is an expectation to "make good decisions" and "work well with vague" requirements. This is great when it works; when the problem is not messy or too hard, and everyone celebrates. However, if things need to be changed quickly, or if something goes wrong, they have the perfect environment to allow them to never take responsibility while passing it all to their direct reports. This might be why they planned for constant double-digit % employee growth until... when? Let's hope that going forward, better decisions are made and some accountability is seen at the top, instead of the pain only being with regular workers.

Give employees a consistent mechanism to deliver actionable feedback to management, or nothing will change. When feedback is actually pushed to you, try and actually do something about it; acknowledge it at the very least. Do not make it a fearful or anxiety-ridden process, and it will raise the accountability level for everyone involved.