Consistent lack of accountability from leadership - Lead Software Engineer HubSpot Employee Review

2.0
2 Feb 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

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, decent pay package, and a lot of freedom in certain areas to get work done. They preach HEART at this company and truly man people embody this. If you have the opportunity to work here this is not necessarily meant to be a deterrent, only an honest accounting.

Cons

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 it's 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 to 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.

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5.0
4 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Work life balance Lovely colleagues Good salary pay out

Cons

Disruptions of ai - Saaspocalypse How the company pivot in the next 1-2 years will be crucial

2.0
22 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The teams you work with are phenomenal. The knowledge combination between an internal customer facing teams, engineering product development teams, and Sales are unmatched.

Cons

Excessive use of PIPs to oust employees after multiple high revenue launches, with no explanation, actual documentation, or factual data. Reviews have been adjusted to allow for terminations post pre-approved leaves. Salaries are a joke. You are always in a cover yourself mode 24/7. Management reviews are consistently a 2 or 3 out of 5 no matter what. If a team decides you aren’t in the group, management will put you on a “unofficial” PIP without telling you, in order to surprise you at a later date. Even if they are unfounded. Beware of possibility of negative backlash post launches. They will feel the need to assign blame ( such as for timelines or issues related to bugs). Regardless of performance or level of involvement. This is an enormous company with many large paths for career advancement. But micro management is rampant, leaving little room for doing the daily expectations of your actual role. This degrades your opportunities for career advancement.

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