Pros: - Amazing culture with some of the brightest engineers I've ever worked with... and we get to play with music data! - Minimal politics and autonomous teams means engineers actually shape the product features. - Great relationship between product and engineering. - Bands regularly come by and give in-office performances. - Fully stocked kitchen and open office layout. - MUSIC!

Cons: Management is a bit lacking. There are some managers that have management positions because they've been with the company the longest, not because they are the most capable or qualified.

Pros: Office views Food options are plentiful and healthy. Work-life balance. CEO isn't Mark Zuckerberg. Very transparent.

Cons: I've had 4 managers within 2 years. One left for greener pastures, and the other 3 came from reorganizations. Countless reorganizations that lead to endless meetings on redefining strategy, manager chains, etc. Very rare to find a manager that cares about your personal career growth. It's 100% on you to manage it, which is fine so long as there is proper training, opportunities, and guidance as to how to do that. How do you drive your own development here when managers are hesitant to let you embed and your team's work/culture is slow, unexciting, and lacking any real technical challenge?

Pros: Amazing culture - transparent and friendly, which is very different from many US companies. Trust and knowledge sharing are highly valued. Culture fit is verified during the hiring process, which establishes a healthy office environment. The management structure is very flat. Some people may not like it, though. The benefits are generous and the work/life balance is ideal. There's a great amount of autonomy for the engineers with a potential for growth and a startup-like sense of ownership, if you land on the team that fits (needless to say that changing teams is allowed). On-call policy makes sense. The engineering ecosystem is quite mature and standardized (both data and backend).

Cons: It's amazing how Spotify grew during the last two years. There are still a lot of fun and passionate people around, but some are leaving. At some point, there was a deficit of senior engineers, and a lot of teams were in need of guidance and a sense of direction from management. The problem seems to be fixing itself slowly, yet some services that were "hacked together" still exist and do need maintenance. Engineering used to be more innovative and less leaning on out-of-the-box solutions, such as the GCP stack. It makes sense from the operational point of view, but I feel like Spotify's own R&D has the capacity to generate more value by building amazing things in-house.