Spotify

Basically all you can read here is true:

• Nice-ish offices, although the old one is not as nice.
• Lots of free food; I have lost weight since leaving.
• Smart and friendly co-workers.
• Several learning/training opportunities.
• CV Booster: Everyone is excited to hear you worked at Spotify.
• Good work-life balance, although that is more a Sweden thing than a Spotify thing.

All said here is true as well:

• Salary: It is average for the Swedish market, which means you will find similar offers elsewhere.

• Career advancement: A lot of buzzwords, process, and manuals designed to obfuscate performance evaluation. The bottom line is this: If you want to advance your career at Spotify, be sure to do lots of self-promotion, and don't disagree with your managers. Even then, though, Spotify will rather hire someone from the outside rather than promote you.

• Management: As a consequence of the above, lots of managers aren't the best or the smartest, but the loudest and flashiest. As such, lots of the decisions they make are aimed at looking good, at the expense of product quality and engineering teams. This is particularly true for Product managers at Spotify, who in practice act as the ruling party.

• Passive-aggressive politics: Teams do not coordinate and try to avoid each other in the race for getting their own thing done. This leads to chaos, aimless re-orgs, and routine passive-aggressive communication.

• Dogmatism: For a company that preaches openness and selfless behavior, there is a lot of cult of personality towards key figures, and lots of empty self-pride in lots of the processes and models created by the company, which leads to them being thought of as unquestionable truths.

• Fear of failure: Failure is swept under the rug and cannot be discussed openly, otherwise, you will become an outcast, while middle managers get promoted for posturing while the company flounders.

However, the biggest con is Tech:

Tech at Spotify is trailing miserably, at least in Mobile, strangled by a bunch of internal "wheel-reinvented" tools that impair innovation and adopting the most recent industry standards for technology. If you like doing new stuff with antique tools, and filled with lots of cumbersome, Spotify-only systems, look no further.

Be honest with yourselves. You act like a "can't do no wrong" entity, trying desperately to look good instead of focusing on being actually good.