HubSpot

I have been at HubSpot for a long time, and at this point, there is probably a 25% chance you have a Tech Lead who takes ownership for their role and team and is invested in the development and coaching of their individual contributors.

If you get one of these Tech Leads, you can feel confident you will be in good hands and receive actionable and valuable feedback.

There are strong mentors and empathetic people at HubSpot, but in 2023, those in management roles are rare. If you're on a good team with a good TL, it's possible you won't know how bad it is on other teams.

Tech leads have no ownership or responsibility for their team.

Problems that occur are treated as the fault of individual contributors and not the tech lead responsible for training them.

Tech leads do not know how to be invested in the growth of their engineers. I wish I could share some of the feedback and reasons for termination I've seen peers be given.

People are being humiliated in public Slack channels, and their feedback/reasons for termination are lists of pedantic communication points with no proof the tech lead ever tried to coach or help them.

These tech leads are often strong engineers who were put in the tech lead role out of necessity and treat the role as a boost to their own ego. Many lack empathy, patience, and grit to be a people manager or coach.

There should be a reason these roles are paid what they are, but many of these TLs are failing in their role.

I do many interviews and have long been a promoter of HubSpot. I have been grateful for how HubSpot has helped me grow myself.

But what I have seen in public channels and behind the scenes to colleagues shows that this is not an environment in which people will be invested in. Your growth is not important here - only for other engineers to inflate their own egos.

I've become embarrassed to work here, and I think it's not long before this is the reputation of HubSpot as a whole in the tech sphere.

Tech leads need to be trained and taught how to invest in the growth of their individual contributors.

Tech leads need to take responsibility for training their ICs. If an engineer is being let go, it should be considered that it is possible that a tech lead grotesquely failed in their responsibilities to train that engineer.

"Person X was let go because by Y months they should know Z." Did you ever train the person on how things work? This is a failing of the mentors!

In the past, I have seen HubSpot successfully invest in underperforming engineers who grew to reach leadership roles. It is possible if you have strong mentors and coaches. But these days, it doesn't happen much or at all.

Immature tech leads are failing to train and teach ICs, and it is the ICs who are held accountable. Look at the Slack communications of some of these tech leads. I am seeing poorer communication from TLs than from the ICs they are criticizing.

Tech leads treat their role as if ICs are merely a game to find a list of problems, then report those issues to upper management and get them terminated. This clearly indicates a failure of upper management as well!

How are you holding tech leads accountable to what their role should be? People should not be put in management roles just because they are strong engineers. This is a huge issue right now in engineering, and individual people, teams, and ultimately our customers are suffering as a result.