Spotify has a lot of jobs online. Due to the pandemic I decided to apply even they were not my first choice. I’m experienced in my field. I got contacted by the HR in 1-2 weeks and we planned an interview over Google Meet.
Everything was fine and I proceeded to the next online interview. Here I had to solve a relatively easy algorithmic problem. I had to use an online IDE with basic editing capabilities. The people I met were pretty reasonable but not very nice. I managed to provide multiple solutions and working implementations to the problem so they moved me to the final stage.
In the final stage things started to get very messy. I had to go in a 5 hours meeting where I met 10+ people. The interviews were predatory and at least half of the people had very little experience in taking an interview. Some of them were sarcastic or arrogant. This stage had 5 interviews: an informal chat, 2 live coding (algorithms and IDE), a system design and a values interview.
At least 2 interviews were very weird. The values was not a conversation. For the entire interview I had to prove that I’m not some sort of jerk. Also some questions were inappropriate, such as: “Did I have a revelation under the shower and provided a completely new solution to a problem?”. I’m not sure if they wanted to find out if I’m a genius.
The system design was also weird. In this one I had to use an online whiteboard with no system design capabilities (no ER, UML or even basic flowcharts). The design request was very vague and I had to conduct the interview myself. I had to guess the requirements (and fight the tool) since the people didn’t talk almost at all. One just introduced himself and was almost silent for the whole interview.
After this experience I had very mixed feelings about the interview and the people I met.
After one week I had another call with HR where they informed me that I did really well in all the interviews with just a small exception, where someone considered that I didn’t communicate enough. However, due to the pandemic, they don’t have enough growth to make me an offer right now.
After this experience I was able to draw a few conclusions:
- The company seems very large considering the niche and the limited availability of products. This results in entire teams focused on very small areas (like a screen, a web page or some tooling)
- They have some experienced developers but the majority of them have very little relevant experience outside Spotify. They were hired as junior/mids so all they know is Spotify. For this reason you should not rely too much on the positive company reviews you find online.
- A recurring negative theme, when asking people about what are their challenges, was the organisation structure. It makes finding the responsible person/team for a feature too hard. Also the teams work in different ways: some Scrum, some with no structure. This makes alignment very hard.
- If you are a junior-mid developer, working at Spotify can be a relatively good chance to get some exposure with a larger system and organisation. However don’t count on job variety or career opportunities. Take it just as a temporary tech experience.
- If you are a senior, you should look somewhere else. It can take years to develop and grow an idea. The company still operates with great loss and its future is uncertain if they don’t find better ways to monetise their products. Apple and Amazon grow very fast in the business with better profits and more variety.
