Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

newsroom.spotify.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 495 posts

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#31

Post by fleddr »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…

"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?"

Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation.

Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

Quite similar experience with the Netflix app where it seems every single day I have to wonder where they put my currently watching series.

Ironically, we look up to these companies for their engineering culture. We really shouldn't. It's a hot mess. Toy tech. Deeply unserious about quality and customers.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#32

Post by eigen-vector »

This is probably the least tactical message amongst all the companies that have laid off people. Ek's spent most of the time rambling about efficiency and organizational changes to leadership positions who'll be least affected by the layoffs.

Then comes the layoff news. It's almost as if he's rectifying someone else's mistake and everyone getting laid off should be thankful about it.

I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#33

Post by CydeWeys »

krono wrote: post #11

No mention of who is taking full responsibility for the situation! Edit: The CEO takes full "accountability" instead, further down the original announcement[0] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230123124201/https://newsroom....

They're all meaningless buzzy catchphrases. Until a CEO takes responsibility by resigning themselves, or forfeiting their pay, or something else meaningful, it's all just words.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#34

Post by hef19898 »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…

+1 on Google Music, I really miss that.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#35

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

halgir wrote: post #21
gadders wrote: post #14

I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99. I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.

> Video > audio I get what you mean, but I wouldn't accept that as a universal truth. I spend considerably more time listening to music on Spotify than I do watching video on Netflix. The content I consume on Netflix may have cost more to produce, but the content I consume on Spotify gives me subjectively more value.

I agree with you - music keeps me entertained all day, it has far more value to me. But isn't there an argument to be made that the infrastructure requirements for video is huge compared to music? The requirements to store and stream enough 4k video all day every day to satisfy millions of users is monstrous and that has to factor into the cost. I wouldn't expect streaming audio to be nearly that costly.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#36

Post by traveler01 »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…

It's algorithm is really dumb. That's why these companies need to stop with these so called "algorithms", we should only select the genres of music we like and our front page should be a reflection of it.

I still remember when my girlfriend searched for a fart noise podcast as a joke and then I kept getting suggestions based on it for weeks.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#37

Post by filleokus »

traceroute66 wrote: post #5

Might I suggest "Spotify" be retrospectively added to the title ? The present generic "An update on January 2023 Organisational Changes" is very unhelpful. And indeed has already lead to at least one duplicate post ...

I changed it to the most relevant/interesting snippet from the post and added "Spotify: " before it. Maybe too much editorialising for HN? But it feels more informative to me.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#38

Post by halgir »

michaelmior wrote: post #24
halgir wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual statement by Ek contains: "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today." Interestingly, responsibility is usually used as a get-out-of-jail-free phrase, while accountability literally means that you will take consequences. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the literal meaning of otherwise similar words.

The dictionary definition of accountable says nothing about consequences. From Merriam-Webster 1) subject to giving an account : answerable 2) capable of being explained : explainable

You're right. Though checking their synonym guide [1], there is this:

> accountable suggests imminence of retribution for unfulfilled trust or violated obligation.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountable

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#40

Post by coldpie »

survirtual wrote: post #28
mercwear wrote: post #13

12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.

They do it because they can. Because most employees are spineless and will fall in line. People making the money we make in the tech industry should be living well below their means, saving, and supplanting the tech giants with worker-owned coops and guilds. If all tech workers united into guilds the corps would come begging us for technical contributions, and we would collectively charge up the ass for it — and all…

I agree. However, it's easy to post on HN, and much harder to do in practice. Do keep us posted if you make some progress in this direction. (This isn't sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested in that model.)
Post reply on HN