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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 emai…
It always helps to remember that people, generically, are idiots who don't mean to say what, literally, they say; have no idea how to say what they mean; and are otherwise just struggling to create an impression of being in control and knowing whats going on. The first paragraph of this article reads this way to me: a person flinging around cliches because they've no idea what they're supposed to say, or how to say i…
12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.
You have to do what's best for you and those that you support. Do not accept anything less; your company certainly will not.
Until it becomes apparent that the constant turnover of tech workers hits the bottom line, these companies will do less than nothing to make things better for their employees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is, once you adopt this mentality, there's often pushback that you should also consider labor just like a business acting in self interest. Labor should focus on their profits (comp vs time vs benefits of concern) and optimize on those, just as businesses do in terms of employment. Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevel…
As someone who has managed a lot of tech teams over the years across multiple companies and including remote teams in different countries, I can confidently say that people already act exactly like this.
> Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.
This is how most people operate, especially in the tech world in recent years. Usually when people go above and beyond, it’s for promotion and advancement opportunities or to build their resume to move to another job.
The thing is, if either side takes these positions too far then the other side is going to want to cut ties. A company doing a 6% layoff into an obvious global downturn isn’t exactly unreasonable. An employee who actively tries to do as little as possible and requires more management oversight than their peers is being unreasonable, though, and will find themselves at the top of the list for layoffs (with good reason).
Neither companies nor employees should be adopting extreme positions. I don’t see Spotify doing anything unreasonable here.
The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry. The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The problem is, once you adopt this mentality, there's often pushback that you should also consider labor just like a business acting in self interest. Labor should focus on their profits (comp vs time vs benefits of concern) and optimize on those, just as businesses do in terms of employment. Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevel…
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 emai…
What kind of emails are you referring to? I haven't worked at a tech company in a long while
The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry. The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.
Main problem these company took benefit of cheap interest rates and overhired. hiring for promotion and ego. hiring not sake of true business growth.
Saw entire teams and orgs at two big tech companies sitting idle..senior and staff engineers have no commit in over a year. ok..maybe they doing design work or something else to drive efficiency or cross org optimization.
but no, even college level hires have no commit or other meaningful work. reasonable question: what they do? especially when team own no critical service and even have no support burden..why 7 engineers plus 3 managers?
meanwhile managers getting increasing hc and fighting territory battle.
this was massive grift. a union only make the grift last longer. real solution: remove dead weight.. massive bureaucracy..go back to entreprenurial root of company and what it vision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I forgot to add that not only will they change "currently playing" every 3 secs, also the cover art of each series changes, as an A/B test. So if you use that as a visual confirmation, well tough luck.
In the case of Netflix, there's a reason for all of this. They don't really want you to go and sniff around the catalog in easy ways. You might discover its not great. Best to throw a bunch of random stuff in your face to give you the illusion of a fabulously rich and "dynamic" experience.
The distraction UX of Netflix is intentional. In the case of Spotify it's mostly incompetence.
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.