In college, my Information Systems professor told my class about a career path that sounded perfect. It involved working with technology, making strategic business decisions, problem-solving, collaborating across teams, and a whole lot of responsibility. It was a position that seemed so general in scope that any smart, willing person (that was me!) could do it. As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in feeling that way about a job in product management - and now it seems like everyone these days is thinking about starting a career as a product manager.

There’s a lot less written about killing features than about building them. That’s because building features is fun. It’s easy. It’s exciting. You get to go out into the world and say, “Behold! Here’s the feature that will solve all your problems, forever.” And if there’s one thing customers love, it’s having all their problems solved, forever.

Balance is an integral part of every job. We have to balance our priorities at work and our lives outside of work. We need to balance the time we spend building with the time we spend maintaining. We need to balance the needs of our teams with the varied needs of the rest of the organization. And that’s just the start of it.

Never does this become more apparent than for new tech leads - we see it all the time at HubSpot. When they step into the role, they usually find themselves with new (sometimes competing) priorities. I often hear that they're not sure if they're spending their time as well as they could. And when new tech leads lack balance, they might end up losing sight of what success for themselves and their teams should look like.

ReactJS Dublin is a quarterly meetup that I, along with a few other dedicated HubSpotters, run. We’ve been running it for almost two years - since November of 2015. In that time it’s grown from roughly 30 attendees sitting in a rented hotel room to 150 React enthusiasts at our most recent meetup, which booked out in fewer than nine hours. We have over 1,200 ‘Reactors’ at the time of writing and we’ve hosted twenty talks.

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There are some companies that have special co-op and internship projects that are separate from their normal stream of product development. Often, the work of co-ops and interns never sees the light of day, or at least not while they're at the company.

We fundamentally do not believe in this approach. We believe that the best way to learn is by doing, and therefore, the best way to learn how to be a software engineer is to do what a software engineer does.