Spotify

Great work-life balance.

You get to travel a lot (hit or miss if you're into that; personally for me, Stockholm gets old).

Pay is mid-tier. Still great if you're comfortable knowing most SWEs at other tech companies make more than you.

Great insurance, vacation policy, and parental leave.

With great work-life balance and autonomy comes some seriously unmotivated employees who take forever to get anything done. Maybe it's because the hiring bar has seriously lowered, or maybe it's because there's no bonus structure, combined with the fact that Spotify will probably not fire you as long as you push some code and are a fun/nice person.

Regardless, at some point, you're going to realize you spend 40 hours a week at work and would like to spend most of it NOT trying to motivate underperforming teammates to actually code, and NOT dealing with process-heavy and debilitating consensus-driven product decisions that get trashed in 6 months because you're re-orged to some other part of the company.

Spotify is honestly great if you're a parent or just want to coast because they expect so little from you. That said, if you're ambitious and find satisfaction from actually building great products with hardworking and innovative teammates, I'd refrain from coming here.

Not everyone deserves autonomy.

Middle management needs to be better about accountability and actually caring about impact and growth for ICs and their team, not setting up fikas (Swedish coffee breaks) for us to force small talk over crap pastries.