- Your experience will depend a lot on the team and manager. In HubSpot I met both the best and worst managers in my entire career.
The standard for hiring is very high for individual contributors, but unfortunately not the same for managers. HubSpot became a breeding ground for some sub-par, political manages recently.
- Although you can potentially look at lateral movements, things are slower and much more political than you'd think. For example, we had a BDR colleague excelling at her job, with a solid track record for 3+ years with 0 chances in the foreseeable future to move to an AE role
- Political BS became a thing - in the past year and a half I started hearing things like: watch your back, add "subject to approval" to any commercial offer you send out, be careful what you say etc
- Toxic positivity - be ready to keep your opinions and questions to yourself, unless they're raving praises. Anything else will get labelled as "not having the right attitude" and "not being positive", regardless of the data you bring to the conversation
- Targets are considerable and becoming bigger and bigger every 6 months. You'll be expected to bring over 1 million $ ARR/year but as soon as you trailing performance (for 6/9/12 months according to segment) drops below 70%, you'll be automatically put on a PIP. If you don't get off PIP in 2 months (100% attainment), you're automatically sacked, as per your contract. Don't expect too much investment either for this - we had 1 BDR for 4-6 reps
- For some reason, managers have very different targets and there were months where nobody on the team hit their targets but our manager was celebrating hitting the team number 😕
- Historical low morale and trust in senior executives. After the sudden layoffs announced in a bleak email, an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion became the norm
- Business decisions are often taken in the US with no consideration of what's actually happening in a certain region/market. For example, because the region I was in was doing relatively ok, they decided to increase on a company level targets (considerable double digit increase in a very tough year - 2022), doubled the headcount, and even of we lost 33% of BDRs, had 0 investment in marketing for the region, QLs dropped by 40%, lost 5% of the total book of business (and now divided between more reps), hired a brand new manager to CRMs, they kept hiring, basically condemning a team which struggled so much to get to a healthy level, to an inevitable underperformance track. Truly sad and demotivating. When asked why are targets still being increased if we're all struggling, we were told to just suck it up. Even CK mentioned in a Wiki post that this maintains a culture of performance...
- HR is not your friend. Spare yourself the trouble and don't bother reporting anything to HR as you'll became a walking target from that point on. If you have any concerns, keep them to yourself or just leave the team/company. Retaliation was very swift and HR avoided to talk about this for months, even if I begged them to facilitate a conversation.
Same manager received several other HR complaints from other people on the team (all top performers, funny enough) but that never got addressed. So if you have matters you need to solve, don't expect HubSpot to actually care or address it.
