May soon get an offer from Spotify. For various reasons I’d hope to be promoted soon, but then would be at the same level as my manager. So unless she’s promoted first or I transfer to another team, I’m concerned about being limited in potential career growth. Does Spotify have rules about how long a role must be held before being eligible for promotion? How easy is it to transfer internally? Can you transfer and be promoted at the same time (e.g. transfer to a more senior role)? Also, has anyone transferred internationally? Does Spotify help with relocation in that case?
Did I miss out by posting this too early 😂? I was hoping to catch some east coast/European Spotifyers.
80% chance you will be downleveled when it comes to offer. Promotions are extremely tiredsome to secure. There is no tenure requirement or anything like this, with an exception that you won’t be promoted in the first ~6 months after joining the company. Changing teams in Spotify is extremely easy. We also have an embedding practice: you can temporary switch a team to gain some knowledge and experience, or help out another the team with your knowledge. After weeks/months of embedding you can hop in back to your home team, or what some people do is just keep on going with the host team. Being promoted as part of the move between the teams is almost unheard of. International transfers are easy and common.
Thanks a ton for this info. I can see how the embedding practice would work well for engineers, but I can’t imagine it would be the same for PMs, or am I wrong? And what’s so tiring about the promotion process?
For PMs ”embedding” usually less formal and less flexible and called “interim PM”. Only happens if there is a gap. With that said, I’ve seen shadow PMs: people wanting to make a switch from an engineer / hr, and present in the team, doing baby steps, but taking it really slowly and doing it in a presence of normal PM. The promo process might be different across different parts of the org, but the common framework I saw is following. You need to collect a heck of a feedback, get a support of your manager and then write down a lengthy document substantiating: - how your promo will be useful - how you exhibited next level skills across ~15 aspects, with concrete examples and without subjective views; examples should also show you do this consistently for at least 6 months - your manager also writes a statement This goes into promo comittee, that decides whether you (your package) is good enough; so you can have a full support of your manager and yet get rejected at this stage - and then the comittee input gets feeded to VP level person and HR, which can also reject you based on their views, staffing plans or budgets. If you’re rejected, you need to start over in the next 6 months, as promos can only be done bi-annually. And the whole process takes like 3-4 months: writing the package, awaiting on the decisions. This is also hampered by all sorts of problems, for example, if you’re on a low skill team it’s way easier to show an impact. Which leads to situations when staff engineer from a less competent area can perform same way as middle engineer in a highly competitive area, yet their TC will be drastically different. Or, if you have no support from your manager or simply too many senior engineers around, it doesn’t really matter how good you’re, you won’t get a promo, even if you were busting your ass in the past 6-12-24 months.
Promoted to senior?
Yep