HubSpot

• Ownership
• Great tech stack
• Smart people

I'll preface this by saying my opinions are strongly biased based on the team I worked with. So you could definitely get lucky and find yourself on a better team and have a great experience at Hubspot.

Mentorship: Going into this internship with previous mentors at other internships, I expected much more mentorship. Here, I barely talked to my mentor for multiple reasons:

• He was busy all the time.
• He encouraged asking fewer questions.
• Little to no feedback throughout the internship. At the very end, I was given feedback that contradicted earlier feedback. Mid-way through, I was told I asked great questions, then at the very end was told I didn't ask good enough questions, so they didn't want to give me an offer.
• He'd opt to Slack instead of talk in person (perhaps the downside of a large, open office).

Culture: They really stress how good the culture is at Hubspot, but really, the place is pretty average.

• They don't like to hold many events for employees. I got a total of two expensed meals my entire 3 months there (and no, I'm not counting the bad pizza at the end of each month), which might seem petty, but it seems unnatural that I can get many more free meals at a small startup.
• They say you're treated like a full-time employee, but you're not. You have to log hours unlike normal employees, leaving a feeling of unfairness when you see team members leaving earlier than you.
• It's pretty lonely when everyone in the office is heads down and headphones on, unless you happen to make some friends. For the first month, it'll really suck to see your team leave for lunch without you.
• Made me realize that just because a company gets a ton of "culture awards," that might just mean they spend a lot of time and effort into getting and promoting those awards instead of working on their culture.

Autonomy: Autonomy is a big thing stressed by people there, but I personally didn't like it. It makes it hard to ask some questions, especially as a relatively new software engineer. There are certainly some people very willing to help, which I was very thankful for, but certainly not everyone. Every time I asked my mentor for help, there was a lot of friction, so I'd spend a lot of time/hours/days looking through the codebase and documentation for answers, sometimes to no avail, for fear of looking stupid. And then when I would finally ask, having such little communication between us led him to believe I didn't try very hard to find the answer.

Communication: My entire team didn't talk with me in person most of the time, so it really didn't make sense for me to be there in the office at all. Also, talking over Slack most of the time just makes it harder to read people's emotions, so really, more face-to-face time would have helped. This wasn't a problem unique to me. I knew a coworker who worked hard and long hours and was told at a certain point that he wasn't working hard enough. There are other stories of terrible communication, such as being lied to by recruiters; I'll save for someone else to write. As I mentioned before, I was told I asked good questions in the middle of the summer, but was given feedback at the end of the summer saying I asked too many questions and bad questions at that, to which you might imagine my surprise, given I probably asked my mentor an average of 1 question a week during the latter half.

Learning: The most I learned at this internship was probably from a book I read after work. I was stuck doing "intern projects" that felt small for the most part. Not only that, it was hard to get code reviewed since my team was busy most of the time, so there were many times I would be stuck unable to do work. I mentioned this to my TL a couple of times, but nothing changed. There was clearly a lack of planning for what I was supposed to do on my team. There were probably 2 or 3 projects where I was told it would take me through the end of the summer, but I finished them much earlier. Additionally, it was hard to benchmark my work against others, given the lack of feedback and project deadlines.

Conclusion: Given their relatively flat structure, it must be hard for them to tell who makes for a good mentor/manager, so the quality of mentorship you'll get could be good or bad or somewhere in between. I learned much more elsewhere, but it definitely depends on the team you get placed on (it's very hard to switch teams if you don't like one, though). As an intern looking for as much experience as possible, I don't think this is the right place to go.