Spotify leaves a lot to be desired in a few areas:
* HR is highly inefficient, and despite its supposedly progressive policies, it rarely aligns with the interest of allowing people to do the best of their work, and mostly serves the purpose of protecting the management of the organization. On the other hand, as far as you never have to deal with HR, they won't get in your way.
* Interviewing with the company is a true nightmare, both for interviewees and interviewers. Nobody seems to believe the way we interview and handle candidates is efficient at all, but we keep doing the same, while losing good people in the process.
* The company is surprisingly vertical and hierarchical. Too much power is given to leads and middle managers, to the point that entire structures depend on single managers to exist, and when they leave the company (which happens quite often), their organizations fall apart leaving dozens of people in the limbo.
* Managers are usually not experienced (being managers for the first or second time in their careers). The incentive for them to be managers is related to the pay grade and visibility, as opposed to what they are actually looking for to grow professionally.
* Most product owners are failed technical people who want to grow their careers by going vertical, incentivized by the low pay in the engineering side. They frequently believe that they are managers of some sort, and don't really understand what it takes to implement products.
* It doesn't pay well, scoring in the 70-80% of the market average. This is a major hurdle and stops experienced people to either come, or to stay in the organization. Engineers only afford to be underpaid for a couple years before leaving, and the ones who stay only do so because they are not competitive in the market, or because they are locked in due to stock options or visa constraints. Pay reviews can only happen once a year, through a process that is arbitrary and disconnected from actual performance and workers' market value, as pay raises are capped by HR.
* From the moment you enter the organization until the day you leave it, you are going to be dragged into an seemingly infinite amount of pointless meetings that will consume at least 50% of your time. That seems to be a fundamental part of the culture in the organization, in which everything has to be agreed and communicated on; except that this is rarely the case as managers keep to themselves what's truly important, and collective decisions are just a way to rubber-stamp decisions that have been already made. Engineers keep pointing out that this is a major issue productivity-wise, but management does nothing to stop it.
* Engineers are incentivized to prioritize work outside of their teams instead of delivering for their teams due to the way levels and promotions work. This contributes to more meetings, documents, politics and perception-based work as opposed to technical innovation.
* Do not expect to grow your career at Spotify. You'll stick to your role, level and salary during your stay there. The company truly prefers to hire new people to fill positions (even though most of the time those people have no better experience than existing employees) as opposed to promote their own people. You only have a chance to get somewhere in the organization if you start doing politics from the day you start.
