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Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#191

Post by aequitas »

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…

I just went back to Spotify after trying a 6 month Apple Music trial for only 3 weeks. Apple Music is even worse. First of all they don’t support handoff between my mac and iPhone. A feature that Spotify supports a lot better. There is no way to go back to the previous song. The mac app constantly fails to resume playing a song after a short while paused. And sometimes I have to go to a song or playlist again to get it to start playing music again. Searching for song has horrible ux. I haven’t found a way to get to the playlist I’m currently on.

While spotify has its issues I’m now a lot more happy with it after trying an alternative.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#192

Post by CydeWeys »

xyzelement wrote: post #73
CydeWeys wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree, adults speak in language of responsibility which doesn't imply throwing yourself on the sword. When you get a speeding ticket, do you blame the cop, the car, the state, anyone but yourself? Or do you say "yup, I am the one behind the wheel so I am responsible" It doesn't mean you will never allow yourself to drive again or to only go 10mph from now on as self punishment. It just means you acknowledge your…

> When you get a speeding ticket, do you blame the cop, the car, the state, anyone but yourself? Or do you say "yup, I am the one behind the wheel so I am responsible"

If you admit you're the one who was behind the wheel and thus responsible, then you DEAL WITH THE PENALTY, which includes paying a fine, points on your license, potential driver's ed, etc.

These CEOs aren't facing any actual consequences here. They're just parroting the empty words "I take responsibility".

> or: We had a prod outage, I was the code reviewer. "yup, I am the one who fucked up. It's my responsibility". Doesn't mean I am going to forego salary for the next 10 years to make the company whole for the outage.

Complete red herring. I'm struggling to believe that you're arguing in good faith here, actually. You really can't see any difference between thousands of people being laid off and making a bug in a code review??

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#193

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #172
achiang wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to use the fully loaded cost of an employee when estimating opex savings, which includes health care costs, retirement funding, etc. Rule of thumb is that fully loaded cost for US employees is approximately 2x yearly salary (although people who've actually run a company can correct my potentially stale or incorrect understanding).

2X is my understanding as well. Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer. Some other big employer costs related to employees you forgot include employment taxes, hardware/software expenses and licenses, and office space and related perks. Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low. Spotify might be saving up to $500k all-in per employ…

> Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low.

Probably not low. It's an enormous salary for a developer outside of the Valley and Spotify has plenty of employees which are not in the USA.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#194

Post by missedthecue »

jjulius wrote: post #110
missedthecue wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks?

>If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks? Where does OP say that Spotify is "morally obligated to keep writing paychecks"?

He didn't, hence why my comment has a question mark.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#195

Post by puszczyk »

EastSmith wrote: post #89
silveroriole wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do. Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable. It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just ma…

WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?

WTF!!! Same here, the playlists are now public

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#196

Post by tootie »

shmatt wrote: post #156
phamilton4 wrote: post #127

I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -3…

It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%. If you start figuring some of your moonshot ideas aren't hitting their OKR's, you have a few options: * Just let them keep doing whatever without delivering what they claim they can * Create new moonshots for them just because * Move them to other products, but that doesn't mean they'll create more value as an org with (now)…

I've seen this play out the consulting world which puts a much finer point on the process. There, work is all project-based. We build something for a customer and then maybe build another thing or otherwise move on to something else. There's basically no long-term value for our own business beyond unquantifiable things like reputation. When the pipeline dries up and there's not enough work to keep everyone staffed, layoffs happen. And as much as we tried to be meritocratic, being good at your job was less visible than being ok at your job while working on a valuable project. It was incumbent on managers to do emergency shuffling if they wanted to stash top performers on good projects or vice-versa, but it wasn't easy.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#197

Post by phamilton4 »

achiang wrote: post #161
phamilton4 wrote: post #127

I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -3…

You need to use the fully loaded cost of an employee when estimating opex savings, which includes health care costs, retirement funding, etc. Rule of thumb is that fully loaded cost for US employees is approximately 2x yearly salary (although people who've actually run a company can correct my potentially stale or incorrect understanding).

Understand 2x, I was also looking across all the jobs at spotify. There are some that go as low as 70k salary, a majority seem to be 170k+. It was just for ease of calculation. even if we take 500k that's still 0.033% of revenue -_-

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#198

Post by ben7799 »

saurik wrote: post #168
scarface74 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streaming music has always been a very bad business. No matter how much Spotify grows, it will only make 30% gross margins. Almost the definition of a tech company is one that has high fixed costs and low to almost 0 marginal cost and can take advantage of scale. Spotify doesn’t have that. At least with podcasts, they don’t have to pay a third party for each additional user. Spotify suffers from the “Dropbox problem”…

Anyone can build and add Dropbox-like functionality to their product suite (and I was even involved in a couple such efforts a while back)... but Spotify is not at all like that, in that not only is having the music licenses they have more than just some engineering work, people bring their music to Spotify , and so you can't even have a few ins and a major investor and then try and quickly get the same licenses to h…

Very few actually feel good about bringing their music to spotify.

Other than the very few giant artists getting the sweetheart deals with guaranteed payouts most feel like they're forced to bring their music to spotify even though they know the whole thing is just bad.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#200

Post by twawaaay »

shmatt wrote: post #156
phamilton4 wrote: post #127

I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -3…

It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%. If you start figuring some of your moonshot ideas aren't hitting their OKR's, you have a few options: * Just let them keep doing whatever without delivering what they claim they can * Create new moonshots for them just because * Move them to other products, but that doesn't mean they'll create more value as an org with (now)…

> It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%.

Pretty much my experience that when a company keeps growing, at some point most corporate employees will not actually be contributing anything.

Paradoxically, constraining teams with resources (but allowing them to make their own decisions) makes teams more efficient than if they had resources. Necessity is the mother of invention -- when people are forced to deal with the problem they will find a solution.

Corporations are worst possible places to be efficient -- not only you have the resources (and most people get lazy when they don't have to be inventive) but you are also typically not even allowed to be inventive as companies typically work towards centralising decisionmaking rather than allowing teams to steer themselves.

Same goes for hiring. I worked with teams which hired anybody because the manager was forced to hire quickly or loose budget. Or managers hired people just to enlarge their estates because headcount was how they decided who is more important.

So I completely understand why companies are laying off people. The only question is whether they are too optimistic about being able to identify who to lay off, exactly.

In my experience it is pretty difficult even for managers to understand who are best contributors in their teams. Get removed 2-3 levels from a line manager (2-3 levels is where the decisions would typically be made) and you can pretty much dream about understanding who to lay off, individually.

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