Spotify

Some of the internal tooling was fun to play around with, if you're a music nerd.

Working at Spotify was easily the nadir of my career.

My manager basically ignored all input from everyone on the team, and didn't do much of anything in terms of providing technical leadership, or helping me with my career growth. He clearly didn't care about how long projects took to complete. Ultimately, he retaliated against myself and two other members of my team after we submitted negative feedback about him during a performance review.

Spotify does just about everything possible to allow managers to retaliate against their direct reports. Feedback is not anonymized or obfuscated at all, and managers are able to read their feedback from their direct reports before writing evaluations for their direct reports.

Overall, Spotify seems like it has a broad spectrum of experiences. Some teams and some managers are presumably great, and you would never have a problem with them. However, the bad managers are very bad, and they're not going anywhere. My advice for anyone thinking of accepting a position here is to make sure you know who you would be reporting to, and how they run their team. If you can, try to get some input from the ICs on that team as well.