Spotify

Musical artists at all hands.

Good work-life balance.

Heavy investment into onboarding and training, though this also means it takes a long time for new hires to get started. You will spend a lot of time wishing you had something to work on.

Management is terrible at planning. I did not have a team for the first two months of joining Spotify. This is a big deal because everything is tied to your team/squad – mailing lists, meetings, infrastructure you have access to, etc.

My management did not have a plan for me, or a lot of people in the org. I was told I was joining during a "slow time," but honestly, I couldn't see this group ever working quickly. Everything has huge process overhead, and there are no strong voices.

Engineering culture is heavily document-driven. Before anyone can do any work, there MUST be an RFC, even if you want to remove some dead code in an old service. No one can agree on what information should be in an RFC – there is a real lack of engineering leadership and culture. RFCs take months to write and review before work can actually begin, but then when code is delivered, the design is re-litigated, so the RFC really served no purpose.

Recent layoffs in Jan 2023 are referred to internally as the "Blood Sacrifices." In Dec 2022, the company announced cost-cutting measures for 2023 – no travel, no fun budgets. Then in Jan, just one month later, they said these cost-cutting measures did not work and that is why they must do layoffs. In reality, the layoffs were just so inventor confidence could pick up and the stock price would go up (and it did!). The layoffs were cynical and unnecessary.

The cat is out of the bag.

Spotify acts like they do not care about the US stock market, but recent layoffs show that is a lie.