Bewertungen für Spotify

Kontras

Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten und teilweise unklare Managemententscheidungen

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Limited career paths if you are based in the local office, which is normal and probably apply to other companies as well

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Strict schedules and deadlines which can be challenging though improving!

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Not a lot of holidays and sometimes lack in transparency - startup culture is slowly disappearing.

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None I can think of

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If you are not in the main offices (Stockholm or New York) many benefits are not available to you or only after extensive begging. It took several years for Swedish to be offered to foreign employees in the Gothenburg office and even then it was only through a conference call, not on site. Many discounts or special deals (e.g. with banks) are also only available in shops around the major offices, which means employees in the other offices are often left out.

The time between the official announcement of a promotion and the time when it's registered in the HR system can take up to four months, during which of course the question of a potential salary bump is neatly avoided. I have yet to receive a good explanation why it takes so long or why the company is loath to discuss salary increases for people it deems worthy of promotions.

The stock options are laughable. Permanent employees do not get many when they join and stock options are granted for exceptional performance, not RSUs, which means you first have to pay for the privilege of getting at the shares. In Sweden you can even pay taxes of up to 90% (e.g. cashless exercise or same-day sale), which means the options are mostly a gift for the government.

There is somewhat of a frat house culture, which is considered "playful", one of the company's values. This translates into pinball machines, nerf guns, hoverboards, free snacks and drinks, many office parties, ping-pong and billiards tables, Fridays where people walk around in bunny/unicorn/squirrel costumes and drink beer or wine in the afternoon, board games coming out of your ears, Mario Kart competitions, and the likes. The relaxed environment is definitely nice and a big plus. The "playfulness" is for some people a major bonus, while for others it feels silly or yet another way to keep people in the office longer. For those who don't participate, it's an easy way to be excluded and being labelled "not fun".

Office parties encourage employees to bring along their friends and families. The same goes for sports events. While some love to socialize with colleagues outside of work, that's definitely not for everyone. Again, while it can promote togetherness, it also causes cliques to be formed. The lack of clear boundaries can also be a fast track to burn-out, although most employees are too young to have experienced (or care about it), or they do not mind melding work and their private lives.

Diversity and inclusion are major threads running through the company. A good initiative that's hampered by the idea that inclusion and equality stop at gender and sexuality, but mostly gender. People with a different personality who differ from the norm are often treated as outcasts, especially if these people do not participate in the many social events (outside of work hours). I doubt that happens on purpose, but it definitely happens. While that's to be expected, there have been occasions in which a manager called out a person (an engineer) for not smiling enough. The reason was that others thought the person was perceived to be intimidating by not having a friendly face. There are also not too many people over the age of 35-40 within the company, especially in engineering roles.

Email threads with several dozen or even a hundred people who all hit "Reply All" are very common, especially when congratulating people on promotions or when people join the company. Fortunately, you can mute those conversations when they arrive but they are still annoying as they clog up your inbox. The same is true of mutual appreciation email threads. While it could be said such emails are to keep people informed and "celebrate wins", they usually only show that the group of included people was too large or that the bar for "celebrations" was really low. Hardly a thread goes by without a GIF or meme.

"Lunch and Learn" sessions are terrible. Yes, the company pays for the lunch, which for some people is the sole reason to show up. But it's also a way to keep on working when you should really be resting your mind. In a sense, it's also insulting to the speaker who cannot eat during the usual lunch hour but has to talk to a group of people who are masticating and listening with half an ear.

Let's not beat about the bush: middle management is incompetent. Apart from sitting in meetings most of the day, there is not a lot they achieve, if anything. Most employees have half an hour every other week when they talk to their superior in a one-on-one. Those times tend to be eaten up with inane questions about projects the managers have no real idea about but heard mentioned in a meeting by someone else. Furthermore, it's not uncommon these sessions are cancelled on short notice due to managers being too busy or away at another office. I have had three different managers in my time at Spotify and not one of my superiors had a notebook (or laptop) with them for jotting down notes during such a 1:1. If a piece of paper was needed, the room's post-its and Sharpies were used for that. There is hardly ever any follow-up because, well, I guess, they forget where they stuck the post-its after the meeting.

The same goes for agile coaches. The company has dozens of them in most larger offices. What they do I don't know. They sometimes facilitate a retrospective for a team, but other than that they seem to be evangelists of productivity fads, such as the pomodoro technique.

Every six months employees need to ask feedback from their coworkers, which as far as I have been able to determine is only because otherwise the managers have no idea of their underlings' achievements or performance. They are not involved in the "squad" (i.e. team) work and there is typically a product manager per team who does the day-to-day prioritization and stakeholder management, although the latter tends to be outsourced to employees too. The feedback is (as is to be expected when asking peers) fuzzy at best. People obviously don't take notes about their coworkers, so it's often a five-minute rehash of what they can remember from the past week or so, watered down by the fact that no one wants to go on record saying their colleague is a complete jerk.

The feedback is not used as a means to cause changes in behaviour as that's left to the employee to decide whether they want to. While that's good as it leaves the employee in question in charge of their own (professional) development, it's also very loose, leading to no real change whatsoever. It mostly feels like an exercise in futility. You are required to fill in a sheet with accomplishments ahead of time, so that your manager can see what you did. It's also hard to accept the advice of a manager when that same manager hasn't the slightest idea what you did and whether you did it well - nor the means necessary to make such an assessment. Employees who do the work without making a big fuss about it often get short-changed: self-promotion is the way to make sure you're seen as a high performer, whether you actually did the work or not.

Every year there is a reorganization within R&D, not because there is a specific need that needs to be addressed, but because it's reorg season. In most cases, these reorgs amount to nothing more than relabelling departments and shuffling a handful of people around. In the years I've been at the company I've seen a reorg every single year without having seen any tangible benefits. I understand there is no single organizational structure that solves all problems, but the rationale for reorgs is often lacking or at the very least not entirely clear. Even after several years it's opaque how decisions are made. Data-driven decision-making is a lie.

One of the key insight is that although Spotify started off as a music streaming company, the actual work has very little to do with music for the overwhelming majority of engineers. Don't be fooled into thinking the company has a flat hierarchy either. From a regular engineer up to the C-suite are 5-6 people in some departments. That's not to say the company is overly focused on processes, although that's starting to increase as it grows (up).

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- Organization needs to be improved
- If you are not in a big office (NY, LND, STO) you are basically invisible, also if you bring results
- Company values only on the PPTs

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Near constant reorganizations. Very inexperienced management, from middle management to the top. HR is nightmare, but good news is most of the people can just avoid them. No RSUs. Pay not competitive for very senior people so hard to hire them. Some people have not things to do, because there was too aggressive hiring and now too many people work on small problems.

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The salary is no competative

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Changed a bit over the last years when going public, less freedom for local initiatives