Spotify

A developer position at Spotify may be good for you or not, depending on what's important to you and at what point you are in your career.

There are a lot of good things about Spotify, and there's plenty of bad things too. I try to be honest and objective in my review.

A note of warning: what I write are not absolute truths; all these depend on the team you work on, or the manager you have, or the recruiter you meet. Those can make a huge difference in your day-to-day work experience.

The good:

• Relaxed Work Environment: Spotify has a very relaxed work environment. Failure is tolerated and even embraced. You will not be penalized for mistakes; you'll be encouraged to learn from them, to become better and avoid them in the future.

• Great Product: Spotifiers take a lot of pride in creating value for the customer, improving people's lives, and making the world better through music. Most people live this mentality, and it is encouraged throughout the company by the leadership. Each person works hard to create a product with high quality and attention to detail.

• Great Colleagues: Generally, the bar is quite high at Spotify. Spotify strives to hire people that are excellent in their field and above the bar for their level. They also try to hire good people, not just great developers.

• Social Life: You will probably attend a lot of great parties at Spotify and many events with visiting artists. There are great Summer and Christmas parties every year, and after-works every two weeks. The Social Team organizes trips and activities all year round, so there is always something to do, and it's easy to get a social life if you're new in Sweden.

• Brand Name: If you have work experience at Spotify, it's a huge asset in your CV, especially in Sweden. Recruiters go nuts for Spotify people on LinkedIn. (This might not be so great sometimes.)

• Diversity: Spotify pays a lot of attention to diversity, and they try to hire and promote women in tech. Everybody gets diversity training when they start. Spotify isn't perfect, but they're trying really hard to be on par or better than the tech industry in that.

• Learning: Spotify is a challenging environment where the bar is set quite high. When I first joined, I realized that I was playing at a completely different level of competence and had to up my game. I learned a lot through that, and with a lot of help from my colleagues.

• Work/Life Balance: Nobody will ask you to work overtime without any significant reason. The company wants you to have a balance between your work and private life, and your manager will help you keep it.

• Accountability: You will probably not be held accountable for anything you do as a dev (in most teams), unless it's terribly catastrophic. This is good if you're a junior developer and you're just starting in your field. You should not be afraid to ask questions, or fail. But it's a double-edged sword. You'll also not be rewarded for extra effort or achievement.

• Salary: Generally, other companies pay better. Spotify tends to pay engineers less than the national average and they often pride themselves for that. (The recruiters often say this openly to journalists and conferences. But it's a different story if you work in a US office.) If you're not from Sweden, some Spotify recruiters will try to sign you up with as little as they can get away with, but you should be able to negotiate a higher salary. Note that rents in Sweden are high; you should set aside 12-14k SEK for rent each month if you're moving to a furnished second-hand apartment.

• Salary Parity: Developers and QA are generally not paid according to skill or achievements, but negotiation skills. There are huge differences between developers of the same experience and achievement. Also, due to the fact that salary ranges are not published, it's impossible to negotiate properly. In addition to that, there are huge differences depending on the teams that are politically better; e.g., a mobile dev will get less than an analytics dev, irrespective of their achievements or experience. QAs tend to get less than developers, and design and product tend to get way more.

• Stock Options: The stock options program at Spotify is quite limited and you get an insignificant fraction of the available options. You also get taxed quite heavily; the Swedish state will get at least 52% on the price difference, before you even sell them (profit is calculated on converting the options to shares). Taxes are much lower if you work for a small company (with fewer than 300 employees).

• Personal Growth: If you're looking to grow your skills beyond development, Spotify can be tricky. The opportunities you get depend on the people you work under, and the tech org structure side you're on. There is no definite program or structure set up to allow for growth; you will probably need to push and prod (and sometimes fight) with some of your superiors in order to get more training.

• Lack of Training and Development: Spotify does internal training only, and it's limited to some soft skills. If you want to attend an external course, even if it will help you do your job better, Spotify will not support you in any way with that.

• Management: Despite the company's efforts, management is a mixed bag. There are good and bad managers, and they don't really get evaluated so much. There is no structured feedback for your immediate manager; if you have a bad one, you might be stuck with her/him for a while.

• Attitudes Towards Developers: There is an underlying attitude by the leaders of the company that developers are replaceable, and that seniority or experience doesn't really matter. The company's recruitment efforts can be summed up as "we need more warm bodies fast to write the code". HR makes zero effort to make Spotify attractive to senior developers, and often people don't stay longer than 3-4 years.

• No Way Up for Senior Developers: There is no way up for developers. If you want to grow upwards as a developer, and not become a manager somehow, you're out of luck. There is only one level for developers, and maybe you can call yourself "Senior" on your LinkedIn profile, if you've stayed with the company for several years.

• Slow Pace of Change: The tech work environment doesn't change very much. Despite the fact that there are several well-known problems in how we work, inc. those mentioned above, the tech leadership is loath to make real changes, and when they do, it takes them forever to implement them.

• Scrum Micromanagement: If taken to extremes, Scrum can be as heavy as waterfall. There are teams at Spotify that micromanage every little task, and the bureaucracy around little things can be frustrating. There is also an open question if such teams are reaping any benefits from Scrum.

I think management is aware of the discussion above.

It's up to them to decide what to do with it.