Spotify

Great relocation and benefits, especially for parents.

Parts of the company are working hard on improving diversity, inclusion, belonging, and physical and mental health.

The tech, especially in Consumer BU, is full of custom-built, locally optimized, legacy decisions.

Spotify can't get ahead of its legacy tech because decisions made today are still short-sighted, immature, and unscalable. This is a result of two historical facets that haven't changed enough as the company grew:

1. Cross-functional autonomous teams: These teams are supposed to be self-sufficient units and are bound to become silos that make technology decisions that only suit themselves. Spotify's products reflect the org structure. The inconsistencies in the consumer experience across the various apps is unparalleled in consumer tech – you even get different search results for the same query on different apps. Each of these apps might as well have been made by different companies. This has historically prevented platform-thinking. Every app is an unnecessarily different clone of the same functionality, even if it could have been built using the same reusable technologies. This is unfortunately not improving either.

2. Chapter Leads: To promote cross-team collaboration and alignment, Spotify had Chapter Leads – people managers with reports from different teams. In reality, this created a gaping hole in technical leadership that could have prevented the misguided decision-making. The focus on leadership at Spotify is disproportionately on people management and woolly leadership qualities versus technical expertise, systems thinking, and delivery management. This hasn't changed even as the company has moved toward replacing Chapter Leads with Engineering Managers.

While you will hear a lot of harp about diversity, inclusion, and belonging, a lot of the leadership actually enforces conformism to vague ideals and behaviors while acting like a cool boys club. Many business decisions are taken over after-hours private conversations between old-timer, white, often Swedish males, and then dictated top-down. Every so often, a mail forwarded from leadership is in Swedish. While these can be easily translated, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem.

The conformism wipes out any diversity of thought or ideas. It has often been witnessed that radical ideas (like building reusable, scalable platforms) are suppressed until the cool boys club sees merit in them, and then they are dictated top-down without any credit to the people who had been harping about it for so long. Most of the constructive or critical feedback you'll get is about how to conform, not about your technical solutions, productivity, or impact. Unless you're at the beginning of your career, you'll learn very little from your manager and peers. For the years I've been here, I've never been able to shake off the feeling of being an outsider.

Because things aren't built to plug into a larger system and be reusable across products, reinvention of the wheel has become an internal joke.

There's a serious lack of a Spotify-wide aspirational, long-term technical vision. A lot of the tech is directionless.

Build systems and platforms, not apps and clients.

Take inclusion and belonging seriously. Appreciate and pay attention to diverse thinking. People bring strong experiences and expertise; it's so often wasted at Spotify.