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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%

#191

Post by tarsinge »

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…

If a company needs to fire people to prevent a product from degrading then it’s too late the company culture is rotten to its core.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#192

Post by toboche »

ath3nd wrote: post #70
toboche wrote: post #65

I wonder what amount of money will be saved doing these layoffs and how that compares to the overall spending of the company, given that the content streaming rights are probably a huge (the largest?) expense for the business.

It's about appearing efficient to the investors and therefore bumping the stock price and giving a payout to the few big stockholdets, rather than real efficiency. They go through a round of this routinely now, it seems, the letter is more or less the same as what he sent during last year, only percentages of laid off are different. That new version that ChatGPT generated made it more fluffy than last time. If they w…

That's exactly why I'm wondering about the overall improvement these layoffs will make for the business as a whole. From what this blog post is saying, it could be just applying the tactics most of the industry is following at the moment, no to stay behind the others.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#193

Post by maxglute »

surgical_fire wrote: post #188
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…

[flagged]

Relax, I was being hyperbolic. Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM? How's twitter working with 80% less employees? Sure it's worth less, but it works mostly fine. Yes spotify needs more than 10 employees, but did it need 10000? After these rounds of cuts, will it still need 7500 next year? I surmise it can settle much lower than what people expect, and maybe their service/product would have been better without having that many brains adding creep/degrading the product (subject to opinion) in the first place.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#194

Post by poisonborz »

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?!

This is the only valid question here. Bloated workforce is somehow a must-have byproduct of growing cash flow, someone could surely say why. Is it prestige? Is it managers gaining more power by commanding more teams and this workforce then remains? Is it to please shareholders with feature bloat? Is it an actual (one-time?) need to scale up globally?

I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#195

Post by danpalmer »

maxglute wrote: post #178
madeofpalk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does.

I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist.

When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#196

Post by ath3nd »

toboche wrote: post #192
ath3nd wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about appearing efficient to the investors and therefore bumping the stock price and giving a payout to the few big stockholdets, rather than real efficiency. They go through a round of this routinely now, it seems, the letter is more or less the same as what he sent during last year, only percentages of laid off are different. That new version that ChatGPT generated made it more fluffy than last time. If they w…

That's exactly why I'm wondering about the overall improvement these layoffs will make for the business as a whole. From what this blog post is saying, it could be just applying the tactics most of the industry is following at the moment, no to stay behind the others.

It's one of the many strategies to bump up their stock price.

- Harsh RTO -> people leaving, better spreadsheet at the end of fiscal quarter, BOOM, the stock is up!

- Overhire again and make sure to make a lot of fuss about hiring and growing-> ah, company is growing, BOOM the stock is up!

- End of the year incoming, layoffs again -> ah, the company is more efficient, BOOM stock the goes up again!

Managing a company that way: stock value over efficiency, also disconnects the stock value with the actual financials of the company and creates investment bubbles. The C-level and their major shareholders can also massively profit from knowing when the bubble itself is going to pop or even cause a strategic pop themselves by dumping stocks or making public announcements about specific comapny details at the right time.

They win either way, is my point, while at the end, to them people's livelihoods are just a number on a spreadsheet. The answer to that kind of management is:

- strong unions

- strong government control over business and better labor protection laws

- use financial instruments and restrictive laws to tie the stock value of a publicly traded company to its actual current financial performance and its current assets. This one won't happen for many reasons :)

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#199

Post by mahmoudhossam »

This isn't about rising costs though, this is about the labels and shareholders being greedy and wanting an even bigger piece of the cake that is already massive.

Meanwhile artists are getting paid next to nothing and now even workers are getting the short end of the stick.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#200

Post by sho_hn »

amatix wrote: post #198
goodluckchuck wrote: post #197

There were 1,600 people at Spotify?

> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.

I'm also curious what they need 10k people for. What of the business is so labor-intensive?
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