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

321–330 of 495 posts

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#321

Post by ditonal »

tootie wrote: post #201
polygotdomain wrote: post #101

I think we've gotten into this weird spot where tech companies are almost goading each other into layoffs. I don't doubt that there was some overexpansion during COVID, but it seems to have shifted. Tech companies have signaled to the market that staffing numbers were too high (regardless of profitability), and that investors want to see them brought back down. These layoffs don't really seem to be an indication of c…

I think everyone trying to attribute some kind of 4D chess maneuvers to these actions is massively overestimating tech CEOs.

100%

People regurgitate “they overhired during COVID and now they’re making the prudent decision to cut costs”

The first part of the sentence implies poor decision making by weak leaders, so they lose the benefit of the doubt they’re capable of prudent decisions.

You can’t have it both ways - they made a stupid copycat decision to overhire but now layoffs are smart and thoughtful.

Occam’s razor - they made stupid copycat decisions both times because in both cases execs act with a herd mentality.

I can’t tell you the number of times the “leaders” of big tech companies I’ve worked at cited decisions by researching “peer companies”. Management wants to self identify as leaders but their decision making is literally based on following the same decisions of other companies. They think “if company A is doing it, it must be smart “ the only problem is that the peer companies they’re copying are themselves copying others.

All of these big tech companies have been overtaken by professional politicians incapable of leading , with perhaps Apple as the lone exception.

This is a golden time to launch a startup as the big companies are putting their lunch money on the table and cowering in fear.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#322

Post by ROTMetro »

karl11 wrote: post #157
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…

Revenue is irrelevant when looking at savings, you have to look at net revenue or gross margin. Majority of Spotify’s revenue goes to record labels. If you are making -40mm / yr then a $90mm swing is a huge deal. Also, can’t just look at salary - employees cost a lot more than their salary. 10% employer tax, health care, other ancillary benefits, IT equipment / space, etc. A $150k salary probably costs the company $2…

Do Swedish companies pay a lot into health care? Can you recover the cost of the IT equipment already paid for since these are existing employees?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#323

Post by jlarocco »

kypro wrote: post #124
nrook wrote: post #95

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.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but a lot of these companies massively over hired over the last couple of years. While others were losing their jobs during the pandemic tech employees were in higher demand than ever. In fact, I'd argue the demand for tech workers has been so high over the last couple of years that a lot of people who really shouldn't have got a job based on their experience were able to do so. I…

There's another way to look at it, though.

Without unions, employees are disposable. Companies hire them when money is plentiful and throw them away when it's convenient. It clearly benefits the employers and investors to operate that way.

With a union, employees aren't so dispensable, and companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim. Despite being more stable for everybody, it's extra difficulty for the company and it balances out their power over employees.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#324

Post by snird »

ohyoutravel wrote: post #227
jzb wrote: post #93

I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off. Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself. Spotify is stingy AF with the artists that drove people to the service, and then firehoses Rogan with cash and tries to shove podcasts down people's throats. I was a happy Spotify sub…

Apropos of little, I cancelled my family Spotify plan because of the Joe Rogan deal and moved to Apple Music. Totally forgot that’s the reason I moved us until your comment.

I moved when Rogan hosted Roger Waters, who kept saying anti-semitic things with no push back at all.

Spotify aligning themselves with content, any content, made them a publisher and not a software company. That's their biggest mistake.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#325

Post by mrweasel »

nivenkos wrote: post #69
mrweasel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a ton of jobs out there, depending on where in the world you're able to work. They might not be as exciting, the companies aren't as well known, but they still pay fairly well and it's stable. I do feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, it's not their fault. Many of the companies currently firing people simply had too many employees to begin with. Daniel Elk even admits it: "I was too ambitious i…

It really depends where, outside the US pay is pretty terrible usually. In Europe for example, as a senior developer you get maybe $70-90k in FAANG and big companies, and $50-70k in smaller companies.

It's a little hard to compare across countries in Europe, even within a small country. I'm in Denmark, but outside Copenhagen. $90.000 isn't a terrible salary and $100.000 is pretty doable for a senior developer, dev-ops or operation person. You can go a bit higher in Copenhagen. That's not for the FAANGs, that's for the companies that a desperately looking for employees.

Other countries have much lower cost of living, so I don't see the issue with saleries being lower in those countries.

Again very much depending on which country you're in, I'd say that $50.000 is a starting salary, perhaps on the low-end, for a developer fresh out of school.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#326

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

oxfordmale wrote: post #214
shmatt wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is also naive to think layoffs effectively target dead weight. As more extensive layoffs are often decided by senior management rather than team leaders, such releases have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Natural attrition will also not be close to 0 in the next year or 2. Even if the markets stay stagnant, there will be the usual musical chairs turnover (a Facebook employee joining Google replacing a Google employe…

Layoffs are usually family within company graphs, with this family then naming the "guys" necessary for the departments to do there job. Means, you have dead weight forced to identify the vital organs, allowing to fire the "medium" weight. Yes, connections or talent are everything. No, its not fair.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#327

Post by higeorge13 »

shadowtree wrote: post #280

The core question is how many employees do you need run a stable internet business? Stable means no massive new product lines, growth, etc. Spotify is what it is. An app across a handful platforms, streaming infrastructure, and a legal/purchasing dept for music rights. Does this need 7000 people? Zero chance. Is it 1000? 700? 250? No ones knows yet, but everyone remembers WhatsApp at acquisition and watches Twitter t…

The majority of saas business is like this: Numerous engineers trying to invent new unnecessary features or sitting idle through irrelevant projects and meetings or doing continuous refactoring and ‘let’s use the new x tool/process/language/whatever’ every x months, numerous managers ‘managing’ them and managing these managers and fighting about headcount and other irrelevant metrics and so on, numerous product managers having no clue and just copy-pasting features from different saas, ux designers iterating on the designs every year and so on, founders keep founding the same saas with another tens of competitors building the same thing snd so on.

We are really privileged to be in such an industry, gaining so much money (depending on location) compared to other professions and doing so meaningless job. IMO the majority of saas business would operate decently with at least half of their staff or they shouldn’t exist at all. Most of them just facilitate invented features for other saas anyway.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#328

Post by nayuki »

This announcement is really beating around the bush and burying the lede. The sentence "And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company." comes after about 10 paragraphs, and is 70% down the length of the text.

The vague, ephemistic title "An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes" doesn't help either. If I saw this article on its own, I would probably miss its main point. But because I saw this from HN, the title from HN - "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%" - told me what I needed to know.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#329

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#330

Post by BlackjackCF »

mrsuprawsm wrote: post #310
default_png wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is though, I have probably thrown 3K into Spotify, If I cant get a "Flat rate subscription for All / Most of the music out there" - > I will 100% just go back to downloading discographies of the artists I like. People saying "Support the artists" - I don't care about the artists, I just want to listen to whatever takes my fancy, and if they can't do that at my price point, they will end up getting nothing from…

how have you spent $3k on Spotify? the company is 17 years old and if you were subscribing from day 1 for $10/month that would only be 2k.

OP probably just ballpark estimated… but you can certainly have spent $3k on Spotify since they now allow you to buy audiobooks.
Post reply on HN