• High performance culture has only gotten more intense over time
• Widely unpopular productivity metrics that track weekly PR count, Slack channel support requests resolved, individual vs. team velocity
• Management model of tech lead + EM means the person actually responsible for performance and compensation reviews barely interacts with their engineers on a daily basis (especially when fully remote)
• On-call load can get horrendous between PagerDuty alerts and support channel questions
• Campy, inauthentic top level leadership trying to run a large, mature public company like a 2010s era Silicon Valley startup
HubSpot has become obsessed with squeezing higher productivity out of their software engineers, going from literal "green squares" tracking on GitHub to a set of manufactured velocity metrics on an internal dashboard where managers can compare individual performance to that of other members of the team.
Look around at the other reviews on here and peer online company discussion platforms. Talented and hard working engineers are being PIPed and let go with poor justification of not meeting delivery expectations based on highly subjective interpretation of contribution metrics. The competitive environment breeds manufactured stress and discontent within the engineering org due to the constant push for development speed at all costs.
The caveat here is, while all engineering teams are tracked by the same performance metrics, it's largely up to your relationship with your tech lead and your manager to bring context to those numbers when it comes time to evaluating individual contributor performance. There are pockets of HubSpot engineering that, while maybe not "chill", are at least more supportive or have better team collaboration dynamics that can make it possible to thrive within the system.
