Spotify

• Nice onboarding of people, with time and effort.
• You'll receive swags every now and then, which feels amazing.
• Daniel (the CEO) and his directly managed team are super cool, super awesome, and very open to share. He is probably the most frank leader I have ever seen in my 9-10 years of industry experience.

Note: This is based on the team I joined and the people around it; other teams might have a completely different atmosphere.

I joined during COVID, and everything happened remotely. I resisted thinking negatively because I thought it might be due to COVID and things would improve over time, but frankly, people are rude, insensitive, and not welcoming to new people joining the team.

They are very happy within themselves, not trying to include new people in discussions, and don't even listen when I try to say something, so forget about understanding me or making me understand. There is no sense of belonging.

Sometimes, I feel very depressed oftenly. I know no one, and no one knows me. No one entertains new joiners on my team. I have never interacted with my product manager or the engineers in other guilds on my team. In meetings, they mostly talk in some code words, and when I try to ask, they simply ignore and move on. The groups of 'oldies' hijack every single meeting; they don't bother asking or listening in retros, groomings, plannings, etc. I used to receive feedback forms initially, where I tried to share my feedback, but now those forms have also stopped coming after the manager left.

Social activities are physical (not remote-friendly); people meet and enjoy. It was fine until here, because that's their life. But shamelessly, they say in group chats (Slack) for people working remotely, "We don't care," which hurts sometimes. I feel so useless and meaningless. There is definitely discrimination.

This is a remote-first company, but people and teams here are not at all remote-friendly, not even friendly in general. People will definitely butter up/people-please those in higher positions and just ignore you if you are junior to them or at the same level.

Please give some importance to new joiners to make them feel included and be part of the band.

Open some feedback channels with more regular frequency; once in 6-12 months might be too late.