Progressively getting worse every day - IOS Engineer Spotify Employee Review

* Management has progressively been getting more top-down, with few ways to offer your opinion (and it won't get listened to anyway) * Related to above, all the AI talk in the media comes from management. We are mandated to use Claude code, people pushing for AI in coding got promoted to staff and principal over that, no actual effort to evaluate it as a tool. They even started measuring number of PRs people open and how long it takes to review a PR as a metric, something the industry knew is a terrible metric since the 80s. It used to be teams had autonomy in deciding which tools to use, but there were guides, recommendations and approved tooling (from a security perspective) * Slack history is deleted because Management got pissy about the leaks. Given how important Slack is to everyday work this was a massive loss of company knowledge base. It was apparent before that Management has no idea what day to day of an average worker looks like with how much they were pushing Workplace (before Meta killed it), but had little to no Slack presence * If upper management reports a bug with the app, you have to drop everything to fix it. Insanely disruptive, no changes to the behavior after many, many complaints through different formats about it * Used to claim transparency and "no office politics" as part of the culture, but then studios get killed over office politics and any transparency efforts are curbed by all the other policies * Stealth layoffs - they got smarter after the first big round of layoffs where 10% of the company got fired and morale fell, now they do a bunch of smaller layoffs and "reorgs" in different areas to make it less obvious