Spotify

• Great salary
• Nice compensation package
• Work from anywhere

Management has progressively been getting more top-down, with few ways to offer your opinion, and it won't get listened to anyway.

Related to the above, all the AI talk in the media comes from management. We are mandated to use Claude Code; people pushing for AI in coding got promoted to staff and principal over that, with no actual effort to evaluate it as a tool. They even started measuring the number of PRs people open and how long it takes to review a PR as a metric, something the industry knew is a terrible metric since the 80s. It used to be that teams had autonomy in deciding which tools to use, but there were guides, recommendations, and approved tooling from a security perspective.

Slack history is deleted because management got pissy about leaks. Given how important Slack is to everyday work, this was a massive loss of the company knowledge base. It was apparent before that management has no idea what the day-to-day of an average worker looks like with how much they were pushing Workplace, which was before Meta killed it, while having little to no Slack presence.

If upper management reports a bug with the app, you have to drop everything to fix it. It is insanely disruptive, with no changes to the behavior after many, many complaints through different formats about it.

They used to claim transparency and "no office politics" as part of the culture, but then studios get killed over office politics and any transparency efforts are curbed by all the other policies.

There are stealth layoffs. They got smarter after the first big round of layoffs where 10% of the company got fired and morale fell. Now they do a bunch of smaller layoffs and reorgs in different areas to make it less obvious.

Engage with employee feedback. The disconnect between what the upper management thinks an average workday looks like and what it actually is grows by the day. Tools that we actually use are ignored, and we are pushed to use tools that many dislike.

We are not an AI company. We are just the consumers of AI products. We won't get any more efficient using AI tools as our bottlenecks are in different areas. Promoting sycophants will backfire.

We are also a company whose two main competitors have a massive tech advantage over us and also have in-house AI tools. This is not a race that we should be engaging in the first place, and we are in a great position to wait and see what the future of AI looks like.