Spotify

• Great work-life balance. Spotify really does care about your wellbeing.

They were very responsive to the Covid Pandemic and were ahead of a lot of other tech companies in creating a WFH policy.

• Intro-days was a great benefit. Hopefully, they bring back in-person Intro-Days in the future, as it was fun to go to Sweden to see the leadership team in person.

• You are encouraged to grow and learn new skills. There are plenty of opportunities to learn new skills internally, primarily through TechU courses. I've been a huge fan and do encourage co-workers to utilize this benefit.

• Related to the above, you are also encouraged to use your newfound skills to challenge yourself.

• People are really passionate about what they are working on, and it is very easy to strike up conversations with subject matter experts when needed. The general culture is that everyone wants to see you succeed.

A lot of engineering policies and practices seem to be taken directly from FAANG companies. It seems at times that the decision-makers really just wanted to work for FAANG instead.

Teams are chasing metrics with their portion of the Spotify app. This comes at the expense of the holistic user experience, which has degraded quite a bit, in my opinion.

Promotion policy is a bit heavy-weight, especially at the Staff level. It's better to just apply and interview externally at that point. There seems to be no transparency or avenue for feedback on packages. It's also significantly easier to get hired as a Staff engineer than to be promoted to one.

The culture seems to have taken a hit ever since the company went public. This makes sense, as they are beholden to the shareholders.

Compensation needs to be re-evaluated. Equity refreshers do not happen unless you are promoted or explicitly asked about. Cost of living increases are also well below inflation.