But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!
Each feature, integration (maybe with each publisher), country, etc is likely its own microsservice and infra and devops and team.
Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#162Earlier 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…
Spotify has a lot of front ends to manage, I think more than 20 would be required.
Mobile (iOS, Android), web, vehicle native integrations (Tesla, Volvo, VW, BMW, Audi, Ford), gaming (Xbox, Switch, PS4, PS5), desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook) and voice assistants (Alexa, Google).
Maintaining that variety of front ends must be very labour intensive.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#163Earlier 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…
Lmao, I love this comment so much because of how incredibly uninformed it is. 5-6 backend engineers to run Spotify in 185 countries... I've seen a lot of ridiculous comments when it comes to company sizes, but yours is probably the best one I've seen in my life, thanks for the laugh.
Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/useful and you can't even imagine it?
I'd love to hear how you split the workload between these 5 backenders.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#164I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.
To put it into context 9000 workers on an average of $75000 is $675 mil a year on salaries alone, so Joe's 200 over 3 and a half years, harry and meg etc etc isn't a big a deal as it might sound. The elephant is the 9000 staff IMO.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#165I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.
The Joe Rogan experience definitely worked for Both Spotify and Joe
You think Spotify actually made money from it? They seem to be pulling back from Podcasts...
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can accept that... if it's said how exactly.
Am I understanding correctly that you're looking for a HN poster to explain to you the complexities involved in maintaining compliance, legal and licensing for a globally distributed service, just so you can decide whether or not to be outraged by the size of Spotify's staff count?
I am not outraged. I am baffled. And yes, if somebody is willing to give a bit more details, they can be informative (and a few people already did).
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#167I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
At least Rogan is still one of the most popular podcasters in the world. They paid a similar ammount for Gimlet and that company is now completely defunct and all their hit podcasts either jumped ship or stopped. So that was probably a worse investment.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#168Should 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…
There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts. Will not miss them.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Lmao, I love this comment so much because of how incredibly uninformed it is. 5-6 backend engineers to run Spotify in 185 countries... I've seen a lot of ridiculous comments when it comes to company sizes, but yours is probably the best one I've seen in my life, thanks for the laugh. Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/usefu…
Obviously I can't be well informed since I don't work in there, I am saying that the core functionality of moving bytes around the globe is not something you need hundreds of people for -- because I worked on similar teams. In fact the DevOps team was times bigger than the programmers which might be one clue in Spotify's case.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#170I have never had Spotify and would like to understand what people like about it? Admittedly I pay for YouTube Premium which comes with YouTube Music, so I use that for music. YouTube is kind of an integral part of life I find, everybody uses it. It has so much useful content, it has educational content, product reviews, how to guides, and then of course all the entertainment content. So assuming that probably most pe…
I listen to podcasts: While doing pretty much anything in the house, while driving. Turns out that is a pretty sizeable chunk of time.