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SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

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Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#391

Post by thowaway999 »

brazillianboy2 wrote: post #363
throwaway52342 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

beware that this is only one side of the story. 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)…

Note that I never used the term "conniving" myself nor called anyone by name. Someone else did, and that is on them.

For me what was most difficult and disappointing was not being able to rally peers or their teams to get the necessary work done. Rather they were too busy sniveling amongst themselves — too jaded from burnout, I suspect. I felt incapable in the role at first until I recognized that it was really a maturity problem that pervaded much of the engineering organization.

I knew it was time to call it quits pretty early when seeing that nailing myself to the cross wouldn't affect change but hung on for two years. I was able to help a few people along the way by shielding them from the bullpen and the drama and giving some good career development opportunities. Let's face it: my peers in the leadership circle were long burned out, and I was quickly becoming so myself.

I have nothing but respect for the founders. They had their work cut out for them. Never asked a whole lot from them but they gave it their sincere all when I did. Maybe a learning opportunity for them would be having someone in their steed who was less conflict averse who could have helped referee the discord.

If anything, I wanted to caution folks to not be under any illusions with respect to SoundCloud's organizational and personnel context and work environment in Berlin. Everybody held it up as a panacea, which it sadly wasn't. Irrational exuberance is dangerous.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#392

Post by thowaway999 »

brazilianboy wrote: post #345
delegate wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I apologize about calling out the entire Brazilian group by name. That was unfair. Not all of you were bad. I think if you asked folks at large anonymously they would say that their was a whiff of nepotistic networking privilege in whom was hired, why certain immature acts were tolerated from members of the group, and why certain favored outcomes occurred to the Brazilian network disproportionally.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#393

Post by abandonliberty »

thowaway9999 wrote: post #203
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

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…

follow the money: http://philcalcado.com/2017/06/26/on_leaving_digitalocean.ht...

Everything mentioned in the linked article and his soundcloud post seems quite good. They greatly reduced new feature cycle time by bringing the right people together and having them work collaboratively rather than sequentially.

What were the unintended negative side-effects?

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#394

Post by tw352852 »

bm1362 wrote: post #384
dustinmoris wrote: post #22

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company…

I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.

I did the back of the napkin math, and saw this coming a year ago. The numbers just didn't work out.

When the whole finance team quit late last year, I knew it wasn't good.

I got out of there earlier this year. I feel bad for the new hires that were just coming in. I heard that a atleast one was just moving from the US to Germany, their things are still in transit in a shipping container and they just got laid off.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#395

Post by thowaway999 »

karpest4 wrote: post #375
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

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 hope you understand that you sound fairly angry and biased (no pun intended). By being a director and having this sort of blaming outlook on other people, you most likely have a good share of responsibility for the downfall of the company.

I did my best to behave professionally every day of the job and help those around me. This is to say act better than the fray. Doing so for so long led to cognitive dissonance and personal burnout. My resignation was promptly tendered when I realized the burnout became so severe that I couldn't hold back from dispensing the most restrained of zinger, which was nothing compared to what was happening around me.

If I sound angry, it was because I sacrificed a lot of time, energy, and giving up a good life I had in other city for taking the job. Worse was realizing how much of a lost opportunity all of it was. We could have achieved more had we more trust and decency.

If you're looking for examples, consider scouring the annals of the web for "shit Soundclouders say" - a Tumblr feed of leaked statements from our colleagues. I don't know who put that together, but it certainly didn't help the trust or maturity aspects of day to day work. To give an example of the shit posted on their, English was a second language for the majority of us at the company. There was a fair bit of mockery for peculiarities about how people wrote in their second tongue - among memorable immature tantrums recorded on the Tumblr. Do you see where I am going?

I bear responsibility for not being more persuasive. I tried to get this damn Tumblr deleted but couldn't. Nobody cared - especially because it predated me and them. Everybody accepted that immaturity as a given.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#396

Post by tw352852 »

brazillianboy2 wrote: post #362
beckler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those are just the people who publically show they're part of that org.

yeah. You have to chose to be publicly visible as part of an org. I can assure you they have more than 35 devs.

It was never more than 100 at a time tho.

With these layoffs, I'm guessing it's hovering around 60

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#397

Post by tw352852 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #9

For me as a music producer and consumer, one of the most frustrating changes recently made my Soundcloud has been their cancellation of groups, which used to be a decent means of discovering new music related to kinds of music you already like. Once groups were cancelled, the listens on the songs I post to Soundcloud plummeted to virtually nothing, and I really don't bother to upload my music there anymore, nor to go…

The problem with groups was it was used by 0.5% of users, and most of the playback was actually fake spam plays. The soundcloud spammers had all the gaming figured out on that part of the system and it was basically worthless.

I know, because I worked on getting it shutdown. Not because I disliked the idea myself, but with no developers working on fixing it, the feature needed to be removed in order to cleanup the database spam and a huge chunk of a legacy code base.

We wanted to replace it, but nobody could convince management to fund it with headcount. But that's the story of SoundCloud, fantastic levels of miss-management.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#398

Post by crosa »

thowaway999 wrote: post #185

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 stopped to read when you mentioned the origin of the guys... Sorry buddy there you lost the points of your argument

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#399

Post by mickey_maus »

thowaway999 wrote: post #185

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…

This all hits really close to home for me. I'm wondering if anyone else shares your opinion on the Berlin scene being "Mickey Mouse" and why?

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#400

Post by timeforanewSC »

saaaaaam wrote: post #338
timeforanewSC wrote: post #121

I'm not sure if this is appropriate here (which is why I made a new account) but some friends and I have started developing a site which we hope captures the main benefits Soundcloud used to have for independent labels, DJs and artists. We can see many ways we think it could be sustainable as a business that benefits the creators and owners of the music as well as the listeners. So if anyone out there is interested i…

Delivering music online is hard. Not technically hard but legally hard. The reason for that is that there are two copyrights in a recorded song: the recording itself and then the song which is contained within that recording - the actual written words and melody. You may well know all of this already, but a lot of people don't - or haven't fully appreciated the complexity, so I apologise if I'm telling you something…

yeah I'm aware of all the problems with publishing. Frankly I think it's all outdated, it was great back when there was only radio, film and TV, but imo the rules need updating to work with web. However, that's not our battle. We don't want to become a streaming service, we are OK leaving that to spotify/apple music etc. I guess we would like to be closer to bandcamp by still selling downloads, however, there are a lot of other ways to add value to a service like that (speaking as someone who has run an independent digital record label). For example, an electronic label will either directly or via a promotions company, send out a bunch of exclusive pre-release "promos" to well known DJ's and taste makers. They use this to gather feedback on how well the release will do. This was important when printing vinyl as it could tell you if you have a potential hit, or a flop before choosing how many copies of the vinyl to get printed, or gave you the chance to cancel it if the feedback was all bad. That feedback loop is still in affect, however, it's lost it's value, it gathers mostly useless feedback like "downloaded for R.Hawtin" and it goes no further than the label, or the labels facebook page. What if I wanted to follow my favourite DJ and actually be able to see what he is rating pre-release, so I could pre-order and or pay the label directly, via our service, a premium so that I could also get early "exclusive" access. The DJ audience is a big one, and DJ's still have to download the file to actually DJ out at a club or whatever. I don't think that will change for a long time if ever. Just the security of being able to carry on performing if the internet goes down. I also think a lot of DJ's would like to have their virtual record box, backed up at least, online. Imagine taking a flight half way across the world to DJ and having your laptop/USB keys stolen. you want to be able to buy a new USB and reset it from any internet terminal ideally and carry on the show. So yeah, without carrying on and writing a novel, I think there are lots of areas to add value without becoming a Streaming service. I also think Soundcloud went wrong when they decided to become a streaming service.
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