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Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

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Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#391
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 1-3 years of tenure things start to look different imo. Sure you get bad hires, and you also get people who become lazy. But on any given project you tend to have some split of people who work on the wrong things, don’t work on anything, or fail to deliver. People who consistently hit one of these categories usually move on on their own - either because of culture fit or comp growth. It’s much easier and health…

And those people become lazy because they put A LOT into the company those first 1-3 years. And after they coast a bit, they usual come back strong because 1. They are intimately familiar with the corporate culture and the internal software paradigm and 2. They have emotional investment. It's like getting divorced in your early 40s because things are not the same as a few years before, and not getting to the good par…

Absolutely! I also didn’t quite see it when I moved around earlier in my career - but many of the more tenured folks simply know how to work efficiently in the organization.

They tend not to pick up meaningless fights, or invest time in work that the org doesn’t care about, when their are debates - they can usually settle them.

In hindsight I spent too much time early in my career on work no one cared about. I spend less time on that stuff now and have better wlb and feedback to boot.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#392
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…

Blame music publishers. They are the ones raising prices and paying artists pennies. Spotify has no power to change this. Spotify is/was spending heavily on podcasts to try to create a new revenue stream with better economics.

Spotify has plenty of power to change this and it's disingenuous to argue otherwise. Spotify has lobbied hard to affect royalty rates for music / songwriters and keep them low. Certainly the music publishers / labels are also to blame, but Spotify isn't innocent.

Also - Spotify wanted Podcasts so they went to the podcasters and made deals. Spotify is apparently paying to create royalty free music it can insert into playlists. Spotify could just as easily be making direct deals with, say, indie music artists or wooing bands away from major labels if it wanted to focus on music.

It's not. It's aiming for the streaming service equivalent of reality TV instead but paying big money for them instead of to musicians.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#393

I am a Spotify user for a long time. I don't understand this layoff. They spend millions on podcasts deals ... I just want a music app with good discovery option and offline listening mode. Am I asking too much?

sounds like you'd like Pandora

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#394
post #156

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)…

> Create new moonshots for them just because

This seems disingenuous? They're "moonshots" as they've low chance of succeeding. You could pick the most proficient engineers and out-of-the-box thinkers and put them working on a "moonshot" and they'd still fail. Giving that team a new lofty goal seems like a great idea since they have experience working on large problems and can likely prune good/bad approaches much sooner than a fresh team.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#395
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.

Unions often have coasters and quiet quitters. As an experienced developer I would never work with people like that.

Reminder that “quiet quitting” is a term for people who do what they have been asked to do by their position. It’s a smear-word for a good thing.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who benefitted from the mass hirings? Stock holders, and also workers. Did the workers complain when the job market (esp in tech) was on fire and wages were increasing? No. Did they blame the people at the top for their new job and wages? No. But, now they want to blame leaders when there are mass layoffs. I think the blame is misplaced. The root cause was the stock market, and better yet blame the fed. The incentive…

All of these companies laying people off are claiming that they "over hired" or "over extended" themselves during the pandemic and now they need to tighten their belts. Who made the decision to hire more workers than the company needed? Leadership. Who made the decisions to put the company in a position where it would need to lay people off? Leadership. Who bears the consequences of those decisions? It's not the peop…

A working agreement is a contract between two parties.

Who made the decision to join a company that was seeing sudden, unsustainable growth ? Workers. Who made the decisions to place themselves in a position they maybe aren't that needed? Workers.

Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers

There are two sides to the coin here.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#397

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…

And yet, people still pay for crap experiences. For me, even a slight annoyance means I'm out, with a quick email to 'contact us' explaining exactly why. Never heard back from several and they dont receive my $$ anymore.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure layoffs decrease productivity of the remaining employees, unless you're a H-1B visa worker, no one "works harder" after layoffs. Morale is low, resentment over "now I have to do X as well" grows and productivity gets hit.

This is my main point from personal experience. I worked at a company that had almost yearly layoffs (caused by a late transition to the online world and competition). I knew whole teams that were reduced to a single person. Now that person has to do support 24x7, new feature requests, general information requests etc. Thank god I did not have to deal with that. Also it's very difficult to hire when people know the c…

I always assumed the rationale was this:

That employee now doing extra work accepts it because they are either scared of being laid off themselves, know they can't find a better job elsewhere, have irrational loyalty to the company, whatever. In any case the company benefits by exploiting the person.

If instead the person leaves, then the process fails and the issue rolls up the org hierarchy. Now the leadership evaluates if this process was actually necessary anyway. If not, let it die or let the shit roll downhill elsewhere. If it was important, invest in the refactor that everyone knew was probably necessary anyway.

For corporate leadership it's an easy way to either squeeze more out of the peasants, or force a reevaluation of priorities.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I pay someone to do nothing, who is at fault? The person who shows up ready to work everyday or the person who made a bad hiring decision and doesn't have the work for that person? I'm not arguing against layoffs, I'm arguing that the people making the hiring mistakes are not accountable. If I as a CFO give the green light to increase the company's workforce by 10% and two years later make a full reverse, that CFO…

This is extremely naive take. No one can predict the future. If I hire a bunch of construction workers expecting to sell 100 homes and suddenly the housing market collapse and I need to only build 50 homes that I have contract for, I need to fire some construction workers. It is as simple as that. No one can predict business cycles and that is the fundamental driver of sales and input costs. If one can successfully p…

> I need to only build 50 homes that I have contract for, I need to fire some construction workers.

Just like during a boom when a carpenter can charge 3x his hourly rate, pick and choose his jobs, and anyone with a pulse can walk onto a construction site and get a paycheck.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#400
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these companies laying people off are claiming that they "over hired" or "over extended" themselves during the pandemic and now they need to tighten their belts. Who made the decision to hire more workers than the company needed? Leadership. Who made the decisions to put the company in a position where it would need to lay people off? Leadership. Who bears the consequences of those decisions? It's not the peop…

A working agreement is a contract between two parties. Who made the decision to join a company that was seeing sudden, unsustainable growth ? Workers. Who made the decisions to place themselves in a position they maybe aren't that needed? Workers. Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility,…

No there are not. There's a massive information imbalance. Most companies do not make enough information public for workers to truly assess whether their growth is sustainable or not. Public companies have to file a certain amount of financial information, but they are very good at playing games with that information to mask their true financial health.

Workers have no choice when it comes to positions where they might not be needed. That could be true of literally any job someone might take. And workers pretty much never have the information to accurately assess for themselves whether or not they think they are needed until they are in the job. Every job a worker takes is a risk in which they are asked to trust the company hiring them not to turn around and immediately fire them.

> Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers

Work from home and flexibility are mutually beneficial. Knowledge workers perform better when they are able to do their work in the way that best fits them. This is not some benefit the company pays to hand out, it's the company structuring itself in a way that most benefits it.

As for salary, tech workers are still underpaid. Tech work is not factory work. The companies revenues are entirely generated by the knowledge, skills, and work of the workers. There's no physical machine the company is adding that allows the workers to do their work which they couldn't themselves easily acquire. The very fact that profit exists in tech companies tells you that workers are being underpaid.

The only thing capital brings to the table in a tech company is the ability to operate in the negative - to scale head count (and thus to some degree productivity) faster than revenue. That is not something any tech worker needs, and most tech companies almost certainly could have grown far more sustainably by growing along with their revenue. That is something capital pushes, hoping for outsized returns on the grown on its investment.

So, again, who should be suffering the consequences when the economy turns down? Keep in mind, paper losses of a falling stock market are not true losses for investors. As long as they hold through the fall - assuming the company doesn't go under completely - they'll most likely recover everything and more, but losing a job and therefor income can be life changing for a worker.

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