Spotify reducing employee base by about 6% • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#41

Post by PragmaticPulp » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

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.

Profit is what matters, not revenue. You can’t look at revenue numbers alone.

Regardless, you shouldn’t assume that any company’s first priority is to continue employing and paying everyone. A business is a business, and the employees are hired to do a job. The working world makes a lot more sense when you accept that jobs are jobs and not a benevolent source of guaranteed income.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#42

Post by phatfish » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

wreath wrote: post #26

ttrrooppeerr wrote: post #7

[flagged]

You can't stand, not even listening, but having opposed views sharing tenancy in the same software as where your music is?

Not just sharing the same "software". If the parent has a paid Spotify subscription they are directly funding his podcast.

Admittedly there are probably other podcasts they might not like too, but Joe is certainly the biggest ass on platform and got a mountain of subscriber money for the exclusive deal.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#43

Post by halgir » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #30

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....

Given how much all of the accountability statements are getting sneered at and used for media/social media outrage bait, I wouldn’t blame companies for going back to simple just-the-facts announcements. In the current climate where every word and every sentence is picked apart, saying as little as possible might be the only strategy that minimizes outrage, ironically.

I think just dropping the free accountability statement would help. It's not so much the lack of responsibility, it's the accompanying false humility that annoys people.

Or even better, back your words with actions. Like the Nintendo executive team did a decade ago.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#44

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#45

Post by dataengineer56 » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #31

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 th…

The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#46

Post by htag » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

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…

In the days-of-old to gain a skill you needed an apprenticeship. To gain an apprenticeship you can to become a guild member. This created a moat, where only guild members were highly skilled.

How do you purpose to market guild labor over non-guild labor, especially at a time when anyone can earn a CS degree, publish open source, and right to work laws pepper the country.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#47

Post by allochthon » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

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…

Over the last decade I've had a similar thought and hope. Or at least the idea of working for an employee-owned and directed tech business (maybe on the model of REI?). Curious whether anyone knows of any successes in this area with respect to the tech industry?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#48

Post by erdaniels » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

Unrelated but, does anyone have a good universal solution of what music you "like" or "own"? I want to move off of Spotify but I want to make sure all my music is playable from some platform or locally.

A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#49

Post by xenolithis » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

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…

Songza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza) really brought a lot of value to GPM. RIP

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#50

Post by fleddr » Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

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....

In the tech sector, "taking responsibility" means admitting your decisions led to the situation yet you'll externalize the consequences to employees.

In other words, it means nothing.

Taking actual responsibility could include stepping down, canceling bonuses, reduced compensation for leadership. It could include steps to become better at forecasting rather than randomly guessing. It could include ironing the business model to become less dependent on the whims of advertisers. It could include re-education and internal placement of the excess employees or reducing their hours rather than firing them.

Why would you do that though when not only can you get away with doing nothing, the market rewards it.