361–370 of 455 posts
SoundCloud employee here. If you are hiring, please reach out to people from SoundCloud. The decisions of who to let go were not based on performance. A lot of amazing people, both attitude and technically.
Their Github org seems to have gone from 45 to 37 members. Not sure what that means, do they only have 37 devs? https://github.com/orgs/soundcloud/people https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Lo9slf... edit: now it's at 35... ouch
those are just the people who publically show they're part of that org.
I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…
I was a long-time SC engineer and can confirm, the influx of Brazilians and especially former ThoughtWorks folks was the inflection point in the destruction of the engineering organization. Conniving and intensely political, they absolutely ruined what was a compassionate, innovative, and productive culture.
I joined after the re-organisations that Phil mentions in the linked post here were well underway. From all I could tell, no one regrets it. At the position I head, I only heard rumours about the struggle that he went through trying to improve the engineering problems there.
Everyone (with perhaps a couple of exceptions) I know personally there (Brazilians or otherwise) was trying very hard to improve things. Their efforts could have been misdirected. Their strategy could have been even counter-productive. The intentions were good, though. And I did see some ill-intentioned people in other places.
I even think that thowaway999 was probably well-intentioned. However, an anonymous director calling people that he disagrees with "conniving and intensely political" and claiming a moral high ground is almost comical.
That is so sad for Berlin as well. SoundCloud is one of the companies that made the startup scene an actual scene. I know that SoundCloud's interview process is tough, so I guess it's a good day for companies looking for talent around Berlin.
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How successful are CBbaby (nowadays) and Bandcamp? I know people who use Bandcamp but I don't know how much of a bubble I'm in.
Insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The music industry is a shade of what it once was, and both CDBaby and Bandcamp are tiny slithers off of that.
The question isn't 'Will SoundCloud close?' but instead 'When will SoundCloud close?'. Just a very steady decline over the past two years. Their talented team will easily land of their feet anywhere else, it's a shame that someone's so previously unique is fading away due to trying to compete with Spotify. Removing Likes & Groups have really pissed off their community.
now i'm out of the fancy shithole that startup land is. prefer working with a few ex-collegues from my hammock.
if you're in need for freelance work and don't bother writing ruby and sometimes php, get in touch. if you're into elixir get in touch right now. no erlang project yet but that can be changed.
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Could you go into a bit more detail ? What did the Brazilians do / change ? As for ThoughtWorks, I've been at an interview with them and got a strong cultish vibe from the whole thing. Especially when they made it clear that their 'social responsibility pillar' is cool and all, but "we're still a commercial company that needs to make a profit so don't imagine you'll be doing charity here"... I'm curious how the peopl…
I happen to be one of the "incestuous" Brazilian boys. Also, I came from ThoughtWorks. I doubt thowaway999 considers me one of the "bad ones", but I do need to give my two cents here. 1. I fully agree about the fractured organisation with lots of in-fighting. 2. I relate with the statement about "confused hipsters who couldn't differentiate between language du jour and its monads and delivering a product". I think it…
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If you're deliberately looking for it — you will definitely find/experience it at some point. In my personal experience, Berlin is very foreigner-friendly.
I'm told both things, actually, in equal measure. That there's ample casual racism compared to London and yet it's incredibly foreigner friendly. I'm married to a German so I have spent a lot of time in Germany, just not Berlin yet. No idea why my question was downvoted, I was quite interested to hear what the poster had to say about the scene.
It's been a downhill trend ever since trending likes were replaced by reposts. Trending likes actually showed which tunes my friends found most interesting. Reposts allowed a single user to spam a feed with their personal taste. Then repost bots were allowed to require repost to unlock a free download and now discovery on SoundCloud is almost dead. My friends who are successful producers but refuse to play the bot an…