HubSpot

Genuine focus on diversity, inclusion & belonging (DI&B) at all levels. Solid platform infrastructure; most teams can focus on delivering customer value, not writing k8s manifests or how to deploy JVMs. Generally friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful engineering community. Solid growth opportunities for early career engineers.

The culture has taken a nose dive since the pandemic started. This is less about events (product experience has done a good job here) and more that people seem to forget there's a human being on the other side of the Zoom call. Every interaction is transactional and cold. HEART has disappeared at HubSpot.

The company is growing fast and failing to scale. Leadership pushes complex initiatives onto teams without considering all the implications. It feels like they're just trying to pump up the stock price, which obviously isn't sustainable in the long term.

Burnout continues to be a problem. There's more discussion about it but very little concrete action beyond "no meeting Fridays" and the extra week of rest. Executive leadership encourages us to talk about burnout openly with our managers, but since doing so, I've started receiving critical feedback.

Pockets of middle management in engineering lack management and people skills but are exceptionally skilled at gaslighting.

There's been an exodus of senior talent in engineering. Leadership doesn't appear to want to retain them, even dismissing the idea that we're seeing increased attrition.

The hiring bar in product and engineering has been lowered. In an attempt to get more people in the door, we're not assessing technical ability as closely or screening as thoroughly for culture-add. We've hired some toxic people recently simply because they had impressive company names on their resume.

Politics runs rampant. The best ideas don't win anymore, and promotions are handed out to the most visible and connected individuals, not the ones who are most qualified.

The Tech Lead role is a trap. On paper, there is upward mobility to Engineering Lead, but the fact is you'll be so overworked that you'll never develop skills and meet the bar for promotion. There is no mentorship available for Tech Leads.

Take a critical look at the people we have in engineering middle management. Just because they got us from 3,000 to 6,000 employees, does that mean they're equipped to get us from 6,000 to 12,000 employees?

Are they actually supporting their direct reports? Helping them grow?