Spotify

Work/life balance Playful culture Tenure

Beyond technically incompetent leadership.

IC career trajectory completely determined by politics and playing the game of thrones.

IC trajectory is just management but with a different title.

Spotify has nothing but constant FOMO of other big tech companies and does nothing technically interesting.

Middle-of-the-road compensation.

Take a page out of Meta's playbook and demand managers spend 20% of their time performing staff-level IC tasks to ensure they're technically competent. A career manager has no business making decisions about what to invest in technically, especially on something as bleeding edge as AI.

Work on being more technically aware and capable of identifying technical talent and innovation.

Take more risks and invest in new ideas when they're proposed; don't wait for Google to do it and then try to play catch-up when in-house world-class experts are suggesting doing it first.

Incentivize IC loyalty by not tying promotions to business needs and politics.

Keep the fika culture alive -- this is a truly great aspect about the company.