HubSpot

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.

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.

Fix your management structure. Too many managers are busy playing politics.