Hulu Reviews

Pros

This review is from the perspective of a backend software engineer. - Work life balance is usually good. If there's no projects that are "on fire" you're encouraged to not work long hours. If a critical project is going badly, I have heard of people voluntarily working weekends, or from 9am to midnight in extreme cases. - Hulu is at the high end of compensation for software engineers in Los Angeles. - Company is doing well, so bonus pools have been well funded recently. - People are pretty cool. None of my teams have been in the habit of getting lunch together though. - Inclusion is important to Hulu, and it has a fairly diverse workforce. There's room for improvement, but Hulu's ahead of the pack here. - There's lots to do near headquarters in Santa Monica. - Managers are highly technical, and contribute to code and pull requests on a regular basis. - I've liked most of my managers. - Internal transfers are pretty easy if you're on good terms with your manager. - Company parties are fun, and Huluween is amazing. :)

Cons

- There's technical debt at every tech company, but there's a *lot* of technical debt at Hulu. Some super-critical services were poorly documented by the engineer who wrote them, who has since left the company. Those services have poor test coverage, but still need to be modified often. Big changes involve crossing your fingers and being ready to rollback. - Hulu is a very business focused company, and engineers have limited influence. Some things on the backend are held together by bubblegum and duct tape, but if there's no business reason to fix them, it probably won't happen. - Hulu tends to avoid big technical challenges, preferring to borrow open source or buy solutions if it's a viable option. If you're an engineer who wants to work on hard problems, this can be frustrating. Things may be different on the client teams, who seem to get a more attention on the tech blog (Android, iOS, living room devices, etc). - I may be being too harsh, oversimplifying, or ranting, but sometimes it feels like feedback from developers is ignored. I can think of two instances where developers expressed concerns with timelines or features early on, and to my knowledge those concerns were discarded by higher-ups. The projects did not go well, as the developers predicted, but I don't feel any lessons have been learned. - Being on-call 1 week out of every 4 or 5 weeks is typical. Sometimes you will get paged at 3am by a false positive, or by some piece of tech debt that still hasn't been fixed. Sometimes you will get paged for real production issues. - Promotions are rare. Hulu's tech ladder is IC2 (junior dev), IC3 (dev), IC4 (senior dev), IC5 (principal dev). Promotions from IC2 to IC3 are common. Promotions from IC3 to IC4 are rare, and IC4 to IC5 is almost unheard of. I'm an IC3. When filling an IC4 role, management looks to hire externally, not promote people. Engineers get stuck at IC3 for several years, unless they lead a critical project with huge impact. One of my managers said "The IC3 level is very wide, I think of people at three different levels within IC3." Moving between those pretend levels within IC3 will get you appreciation and respect, but no tangible promotion. One advantage is that since promotions are rare there's not much competitive pressure. - The rate of engineers leaving the company isn't high, but it isn't low either. This has pros and cons: when your team's IC4 leaves it gives you opportunities to take more responsibility, but means you have one less potential mentor. The IC4 role will be backfilled with a new hire, and the IC3s on their team will onboard them. - Many of the 'harder' engineering problems go to the Beijing engineering/research teams, which focuses less on business priorities and more on doing cool tech stuff. This can be limiting if you're an engineer in Santa Monica who wants to do cool tech stuff. For instance, the only machine learning opportunities are in Beijing, or on the Data Science team (who I've heard have to deal with significant politics and may rely on Beijing for some implementation tasks). - Hulu dev teams are relatively siloed, but this may be typical at larger tech companies. Dev teams collaborate on cross-team initiatives, but since everyone's pretty busy you can't expect other teams to do you a favor, and sometimes have to add hacks to avoid asking for one. Hulu is gradually shifting toward a bunch of little kingdoms rather than #OneTeam. - Disney has taken full operational control of Hulu, so I expect things to get worse. Hulu used to be *so* much flatter a few years ago, but those days are gone. You can't negotiate with the immense corporate hierarchy of Disney.

Pros

Amazing compensation and benefits, great parties, product that is enjoyed by many. Company is doing really well in a competitive space

Cons

Prior to and since the Disney acquisition, you can really feel the company has changed from a post startup, collaborative and fun vibe to one of a large corporate company. Employees are overworked, the energy is down, and Disney have made some huge decisions that have negatively impacted the company.

Pros

- I really enjoy my team. We can easily joke around and keep the mood light. - People are very smart and capable. - On my team we are given tasks and not hand held. This is a pro to me because at my last place I felt like I was constantly shown how to code or do something. There's a lot more fun in being presented with the problem and having to track down the right people, learn the right APIs, and think about the most efficient way to solve a problem. I enjoy that aspect mostly because it gives me a sense of trust from everyone else that I am capable to do my job. - Great pay

Cons

- Like I said above, I enjoy my team, but this varies from team to team. I'm lucky but I know other teams are not as social. Other teams may have worse managers etc. Just know that if you want to interview you can always move inside the company to a different team after a year or so. - Long hours sometimes - Did not experience this with my team but there have been many long and hard projects that were tossed last minute after being code completed.