Spotify

Spotify is within the ideal company size range, between a large, established brand and a smaller, scrappier startup. You're free to take time off work to sit in on lunch and learns and other such knowledge-sharing extracurricular activities/meetings, but you still get to have a major influence over the product, even as a new hire. Because of the Swedish cultural influence, you will not be ground down to ash by being overworked. It is not expected at all for one to be working at the office for greater than 8-9 hours a day. Excellence is still encouraged, so going the extra mile if the individual can fit it in is met with high appreciation.

We don't have the resources of a larger company, but we move slower than a startup. It can be frustrating when you see corners being cut due to time constraints, or new and/or open-source technologies being ignored just for the sake of building a lesser alternative in-house.

We need to leverage the strengths of our developers so as to move more quickly, instead of dogmatically sticking to a specific set of technologies which could very well be obsoleted within years.

Instead of trying to do everything, let's leverage our lead in the music streaming space and focus on fewer but higher quality consumer-facing products/apps. It sucks to rush out things we aren't proud of making, only to rack up tech debt and need to do it over or figure out a hackish way of building on top of it the next quarter.

Furthermore, we should fully embrace and leverage platforms built outside of the company, at least for the time being, to move more quickly with proven codebases instead of trying to reinvent the wheel internally.