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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%

#171

Post by pdimitar »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #162
pdimitar wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

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.

Hm, solid point, thank you.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#172

Post by michaelt »

sigilis wrote: post #128
pdimitar wrote: post #113

But 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…

> They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform

Yes, if they were at the cutting edge on every platform and constantly adding innovative new features, that could certainly explain 500 of the 9000 employees.

But that still leaves 8,500 employees unexplained.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#173

Post by Shaanie »

steve1977 wrote: post #123
izacus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a large worldwide music/podcast delivery platform. What do you think they're doing?

Not OP, but I really don’t know why you would need that many people.

Obviously you don't need all those people. Almost no company apart from like one-man companies or dying companies employ only the people they need. You employ as many people as possible that generate additional profit, short or long-term. Do you need to hire a conversion specialist? Of course not, though if she costs $400k a year while improving conversion by 10% the payoff is absolutely massive, and you'd have to be an idiot not to hire her.

I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#174

Post by offices »

HenryBemis wrote: post #144
CartyBoston wrote: post #100

[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.

They were foolish/fickle/myopic/selfish to hire them in the first place. Companies have treated beneficial market conditions as an opportunity to make a land-grab for employees without a plan for how to afford them just a couple of years later - after the employee has organised their life and their family's life around the expectation that they were more than a temporary contractor.

If an individual took advantage of cheap credit to buy a car & flogged it while being underwater on the loan shortly after, we'd rightly judge it as a financial mistake. When a CEO does it with people's livelihoods and social circles at stake, it's applauded.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#175

Post by syrgian »

dustedcodes wrote: post #158

I 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…

Not Spotify, but I pay for Amazon Music. I listen music all the time, and it also works for 5 of my family members (out of which 1 listens a lot and the rest listen a little). It's cheaper than Youtube Premium and has better quality as far as I can tell.

I don't listen to podcasts, but I know people listen to them in during their commute.

In fact, I am surprised someone with kids and little free time considers Youtube an integral part of life. I watch an average of 2 videos a week, usually skipping most of them. Mostly DIY guides.

Maybe I will subscribe once my kids are in age to watch educational videos, but even then, I am pretty sure I will prefer Curiosity Stream, which I trust waaay more than Youtube for kid-friendly content.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#176

Post by maxglute »

piva00 wrote: post #120
maxglute wrote: post #102

Should 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…

> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free. The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface…

No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product. Where/when that point is of course highly subjective.

But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500 employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#177

Post by walteweiss »

coryrc wrote: post #81
Roritharr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art you dislike? "I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done" Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts. There obviously is a hug…

> I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math. Working at Microsoft during the Ballmer era and seeing the number of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions written-down to nothing, I would never assume corporations spend large amounts wisely.

I will never understand why that idiot was hired as a CEO in the first place.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#178

Post by maxglute »

madeofpalk wrote: post #168
danpalmer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#179

Post by danpalmer »

maxglute wrote: post #143
danpalmer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well thanks for owning up to it!

I agree that it feels like the product from an engineering perspective was "finished" a while ago, however when I think about it for a while I can come up with many things that will need ongoing engineering work. For example, bug fixes (no one ever finishes this), support for new devices/phones/smart speakers/TVs/cars, support for payments and authentication in new regions, scaling work to scale to users in more regions, reliability and operational work.

And that's just the stuff that isn't about growing more. I think it's reasonable to expect that businesses want to grow, and this isn't always anti-consumer either, as it can result in services that appeal to more users and cost less. This means engineering work on the marketing funnel, onboarding, new markets like podcasts, and lots more.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#180

Post by em500 »

sligor wrote: post #136
pdimitar wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

> I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total. How WhatsApp served 1 billion users with only 50 engineers. https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5... edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28985169

At the time WhatsApp was only forwarding messages from user to user. They didn't deal with different contracts and license deals in 180 countries. Nowadays they have a lot more country specific regulations to deal with, and also a much higher headcount.
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