Pros: The company is a great place to kickstart your career, as it has a good brand and a product that people love. It provides a good package for people who are building their families (paternity and maternity leaves are excellent for American standards). Engineers are not expected to work too much in general; therefore, the company offers a good work-life balance.

Cons: Spotify leaves a lot to be desired in a few areas: * HR is highly inefficient. Despite its supposedly progressive policies, it rarely aligns with the interest of allowing people to do the best of their work and mostly serves the purpose of protecting the management of the organization. On the other hand, as far as you never have to deal with HR, they won't get in your way. * Interviewing with the company is a true nightmare, both for interviewees and interviewers. Nobody seems to believe the way we interview and handle candidates is efficient at all, but we keep doing the same, while losing good people in the process. * The company is surprisingly vertical and hierarchical. Too much power is given to leads and middle managers, to the point that entire structures depend on single managers to exist. When they leave the company, which happens quite often, their organizations fall apart, leaving dozens of people in limbo. * Managers are usually not experienced, being managers for the first or second time in their careers. The incentive for them to be managers is related to the pay grade and visibility, as opposed to what they are actually looking for to grow professionally. * Most product owners are failed technical people who want to grow their careers by going vertical, incentivized by the low pay in the engineering side. They frequently believe that they are managers of some sort and don't really understand what it takes to implement products. * It doesn't pay well, scoring in the 70-80% of the market average. This is a major hurdle and stops experienced people from either coming or staying in the organization. Engineers only afford to be underpaid for a couple of years before leaving. The ones who stay only do so because they are not competitive in the market, or because they are locked in due to stock options or visa constraints. Pay reviews can only happen once a year, through a process that is arbitrary and disconnected from actual performance and workers' market value, as pay raises are capped by HR. * From the moment you enter the organization until the day you leave it, you are going to be dragged into a seemingly infinite amount of pointless meetings that will consume at least 50% of your time. That seems to be a fundamental part of the culture in the organization, in which everything has to be agreed and communicated on; except that this is rarely the case, as managers keep to themselves what's truly important, and collective decisions are just a way to rubber-stamp decisions that have already been made. Engineers keep pointing out that this is a major issue productivity-wise, but management does nothing to stop it. * Engineers are incentivized to prioritize work outside of their teams instead of delivering for their teams due to the way levels and promotions work. This contributes to more meetings, documents, politics, and perception-based work as opposed to technical innovation. * Do not expect to grow your career at Spotify. You'll stick to your role, level, and salary during your stay there. The company truly prefers to hire new people to fill positions, even though most of the time those people have no better experience than existing employees, as opposed to promoting their own people. You only have a chance to get somewhere in the organization if you start doing politics from the day you start.

Pros: Great WLB and benefits. Working from anywhere is great for people with family and living far from the office.

Cons: Everything moves too slowly, and there is a lot of cross-org chasm that makes it impossible to collaborate efficiently. Many EMs are average and don't know much about engineering. It is fascinating to see a room full of EMs who never take a look at the codebase, discussing H1 planning and timelines. Engineers have to produce design docs (RFCs) for visibility. No one really reads them, but you still have to write them and share them widely to get comments and claim contribution. Many RFCs are useless and of low quality. Engineers have little influence over project priorities and are not empowered. It is pretty much a top-down chain of command. Good luck to any self-motivated engineer who wants to initiate a project bottom-up. Better follow the EM's orders.

Pros: Spotify feels motivated, yet more casual than other similar companies I've worked at. I consider my coworkers my friends, and there's a great work-life balance. There's opportunity for technical growth and leadership if you're assertive. In my experience, hack weeks and days are actually real and not too hard to schedule in.

Cons: Mediocre benefits compared to competitors. Mediocre technical stack with a lot of technical debt, although we are improving in this area. Highly autonomous teams can lead to poor design. Performance and compensation review process is poorly defined and hard to fathom. A lot of the less experienced technical staff drink the company Kool-Aid and do not see its shortcomings.