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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%

#261

Post by juve1996 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #33
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.

CEOs will never really take the same responsibility. They're all rich. Even if they resign they'll have another job easily.

The problem is the system. With an adequate social safety net, these layoffs matter much, much less.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#262

Post by Apocryphon »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #111
ttrrooppeerr wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Just a quick glance at his podcast shows his last 5 guests: famous comedian, ancient civilization researcher, wildlife conservationist, UFC fighter. The horror! Please don’t venture out of whatever bubble you live in or you might find some podcasts there you REALLY disagree with, and you clearly don’t do well with that. I mean honestly, the guys not even a political commentator, just has opinions that are occasionall…

I have no bone to pick when it comes to Joe Rogan (love Newsradio) but to continue the sibling post:

> wildlife conversationist

As host of the Extinct or Alive series, Galante has been seen negatively by ecologists for being a "parachute scientist".[46] Galante's website stated that he personally captured the first video footage of a Zanzibar servaline genet,[47] which is contradicted by Zanzibar researchers.[48] Galante has also claimed that he personally rediscovered the Fernandina Island tortoise [49] and the Rio Apaporis Caiman,[50] both claims which have been contradicted by the leaders of their respective expeditions,[46] the latter of which published their findings and exploration prior to Galante's trip to Colombia.[51] As of 2022, Galante has not outlined his claimed discoveries in any scientific journals.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#263

Post by hello_moto »

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…

> Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer.

Hardware/Software expenses, office spaces, health insurance are fixed cost.

$150k employee vs 200k employee will have the same amount of fixed cost (assuming both are in the same function).

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#264

Post by schnitzelstoat »

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…

Aren't most of the employees based in Europe? In that case it's more like $100k or less.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#265

Post by survirtual »

coldpie wrote: post #40
survirtual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Agreed.

Generally, I think that the strategy will be some combination of technology, coop ownership, and worker insurance.

Technology, for making corporation killers. Making alternative tech stacks that make existing corporate offerings irrelevant and requiring a sort of ransom to keep the licenses non-competitive. This provides nuclear leverage.

Cooperative ownership to align the organizations objectives with individual workers. The profit is distributed in a relatively fair way without these 100x pay differences, in a manner members can all agree with, and planets away from only caring about enriching investors.

Worker insurance where the coop offers healthcare and minimum income guarantees between jobs with corps. When a member is working for a corp, it is expected the corp pays for their insurance etc. If the member leaves the corp, they seamlessly continue to have healthcare etc.

I think the first step to making something like this happen is creating an extremely valuable piece of tech that society cannot do without. That acts as a beacon to attract workers and provides leverage. With the appropriate legal framework around that, it would cascade from there.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#266

Post by Apocryphon »

honeybadger1 wrote: post #188
popularrecluse wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just live in a world now where propagating false and dangerous misinformation is merely offering a differing point of view. We were happy to let subject-matter experts help build the modern world, but then turn on them as we seek out the information that comports with the way we wish the world to be. It's good to be skeptical, but a very significant portion of the population has serious epistemic deficiencies.

I am not interested in engaging on identity politics.

Just turn off your internet services if you don't want to engage with differing points of view.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#267

Post by scarface74 »

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…

That’s not the concept behind “a feature not a product”. The entire idea is that a major company can add streaming as a bullet point to their ecosystem - like Apple and Amazon - and doesn’t need to be profitable by itself.

That is the “DropBox problem”. DropBox is trying to be a sustainable company while Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon just throw it in as a feature in their portfolios.

This is the same with the movie studios in 2023. In 2006 when Apple first approached the movie studios, the idea of VOD digitally was new. Now the studios have a standardized process for it. There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses.

VOD = Video on Demand where you pay to rent or buy each individual film.

There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about.

The smaller labels will come along

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#268

Post by xyzelement »

CydeWeys wrote: post #192
xyzelement wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> you really can't see any difference between thousands of people being laid off and making a bug in a code review??

Thank you for engaging. I intentionally picked something small like a production outage because - unlike hiring/firing 10k+ people - it's something more of us can relate to.

The topic at hand is - what does it mean to say "I am responsible?" I am using the relatable examples to explain it - it means as an adult I am saying "I am not blaming someone else, I am the one in charge here, and this happened on my watch / I made the decision."

This is in contrast to saying things like "the market is forcing our hand, I am powerless here" or "people under me made bad hiring decisions, I had no idea" - you are acknowledging that what happens on your watch, good or bad, is ultimately on you.

It's a separate concept from punishment. If you keep making bad decisions, your employees can chose to punish you by quitting, your boss (the board/shareholders) can punish you by asking you to resign, etc. Acknowledging responsibility over the decision doesn't imply you have to fire yourself.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#269

Post by impossiblefork »

woeirua wrote: post #164

This is an unpopular opinion, but history from the DotCom crash tells us that the layoffs are just getting started. Turns out you can’t run at a loss forever, and when the going gets rough the fastest way to increase profitability is to cut costs. Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company. That is probably true…

It's pretty funny though, that people so recently talked of labour shortages, but are now, saying, not with their mouths, but with money, the opposite-- across both Google, Spotify and some others, that there are a whole 6% too many.

It's even funnier in Swedish, because the word for redundancies, is arbetsbrist, 'shortage of work'.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#270

Post by survirtual »

htag wrote: post #46
survirtual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Guild-owned technology, created with human-aligned intentions (as opposed to greed-aligned). Human-centric tech is superior to capital-centric tech.

Open source is basically this in a naive and unorganized way, especially when MIT licensed (a giant con in my opinion). GNU does much better. But if there existed a guild license connected to tech and patents that are must haves, it would tip the balance.

The guild would offer objective security to a worker — health insurance, income insurance, and legal backing, with intentions aligned entirely with the worker. It provides a behemoth aligned with maximizing the rights and income of a worker. That would do a whole lot in attracting people to join.

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