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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#142But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!
Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh. This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
exactly 0 engineers working on the stupid "enhanced shuffle" or whatever its called that I am forced to toggle through in order to switch between shuffle and non-shuffle, and makes me wait 5 seconds while adding random songs to my liked songs that I dont want and did not ask for. The amount of computing resources wasted on this trash is just insane, both on the backend for the song recommendations and on the frontend where my phone is frozen for 5 seconds. It escapes me how such a big company is fine with having that this abomination of a feature in their app. rant over
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#143Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point, more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has like 25 employees that makes the service s…
What do you think the employees do? I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding, adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals. There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localis…
>Honestly, where do you get "80%"?
Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to engineer/design team.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#144[flagged]
let me fix that for ya:
"We realized we don't need those specific 1500 jobs/workers."
"Joe Rogan is the most popular podcaster."
If cutting those 1500 jobs would put Spotify in serious harm (i.e. devs, licensing, IT security), they wouldn't let any of them go. But they do. So they are either very foolish OR they know something(s) we don't.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#145All things considered, the note seems honest - lays out the facts and considerations. The severance package seems quite generous as well.
> The severance package seems quite generous as well. I guess it depends a bit what they mean by `the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance` (and also where you are seeing it from, maybe its seen as more generous when seen from the US). In Sweeden the notice period for the employer is between 1 and 6 months, depending on how long the empoyee has worked there. If they count that period in a…
Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has to offer anything.
There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth, and when they are well known for not paying their suppliers (the artists) a fair price for the content they create.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh. This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20? I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total. And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,... Don't know. I'd struggle to…
Whelp, even for tech-core products, number of engineers are often very insignificant compared to other stuff(legal, license, buying, acquisition, hr, advertising, marketing, sales, security, management, decision board, product management, product owners, agile team, release team, test/QA, support etc.).
I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans the globe(or even multiple countries or continents), you really need a huge team to keep troubles out and the wheels going.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#147But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!
In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping…
When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping…
When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises
> When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux
They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 employees.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#149Absolutely feel bad for the people that are being let go in today's economy.
When it comes to Spotify in particular, I use it almost daily and I can't say that I've noticed any new features in the past two-three years, other than some semi-confusing reshuffle of where stuff is listed on the home page. Feels like it is an app that is well and truly in maintenance mode - it just does what it says on the tin, with extremely good market penetration.
So genuine non-facetious question as an outsider, what are the people working on? Does it take this many people to operate an app on the scale of Spotify, are there lots of people developing new features that never make it into prod, or is it something else that I haven't thought about?
For comparison the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has around 7000 employees, and they develop and operate multiple Mars rovers, several space telescopes, a whole range satellites and space probes, etc.
Maybe that's a bad comparison, but if so, why?
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping…
When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises
9000 employees, not developers alone.