Spotify

Exciting product to work on; Talented people; Chance to work on in-house technical solutions; Great place to work if you like to be involved in building the product; Modern and comfortable offices; Work-life balance.

Spotify used to be a transparent company, with the CEO doing Q&A each month. Q&As are still there, except the questions are pre-moderated, so the whole thing became literally a joke when they gaslight or give ridiculous explanations for their decisions.

There's also a huge lack of creativity. It feels like the product leads are just trying to copy TikTok or other trends on the market. Most of the new features are shipped without any strong vision for how to develop them at all. If you try to push an idea from the engineering team, they might just kill it because some Product lead didn't like it.

Spotify used to be data-driven. The motto was 'fail fast – learn faster.' Today, they use data mostly for confirmation bias.

Also, if you're a tenured employee, get ready to have a pay much lower than new joiners. The growth might be challenging, depending on how well you can brag and not how much you have actually done.

Shake up your product leads. They are too afraid to take risks and do something meaningful. Do something with the stock option plan refresher, otherwise you will lose all your talent to your competitors once the hiring market is back to normal. Hire a professional CEO.