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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#301

Post by kranke155 »

dijit wrote: post #282

Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…

How big is the difference in your estimate, between the bills they have now vs cost of cloud + staff to support it?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#302

Post by schnable »

oblio wrote: post #268
byyll wrote: post #248

Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.

Well, this is another version of the classic "I could build this in an weekend" trope. 9500 is probably excessive, but think of it just this way: 1. Spotify has a worldwide presence, apparently 184 markets; that probably entails a legal presence in many of those jurisdictions, sales, marketing, support, localization, etc.; at a conservative 2 persons per market, just that's going to generate about 400 jobs; now, most…

Plus it’s a two sided market - most of that needs to be created and operated for consumer and producer side, and all the systems linking them between.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#303

Post by kibwen »

candiddevmike wrote: post #296
byyll wrote: post #248

Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.

More and more it seems they're an advertising company that also serves music and podcasts. I keep seeing sponsored recommendations and I'm a premium subscriber, for now.

Seemingly every company in the "tech" industry is just an advertising company shambling around in the rotten skin-suit of a legitimate business.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#304

Post by pachico »

Firing people is business as usual. I don't know why this is usually taken with such surprise.

It's part of the life cycle of many companies to hyper-hire when money flows in, and cut lots of jobs when they "re-adjust". I don't think this is good, I personally don't like it, but I learned not to be surprised anymore.

We like cloud because it scales in and out: often management don't see workforce differently.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#305

Post by School-Cotton »

mvdtnz wrote: post #36
baby wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.

To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over 1,000 employee-years of salaries.

Companies exist to make money, not to be a charity for their employees.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#307

Post by mlrtime »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #40

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse. Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them yea…

I think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience.

Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon.

Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#308

Post by kranke155 »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #269
byyll wrote: post #248

Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.

I'm wondering what it is that they're doing all day. The spotify app randomly changes, and if so, rarely for the better. I'd wager spotify could benefit from X' style layoffs.

The X layoffs are too soon to make a judgement call on, look at the advertiser fight X is involved in now. Its up in the air if they kept enough people to make advertisers happy or moderation. Moderation has become a real problem on X, Ive sent reports that were clearly a problematic account, sometimes even fake accounts that are stealing identities, and the X UI sends me a message saying "nah all good"

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#309

Post by blcknight »

dijit wrote: post #282

Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…

Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design).

They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#310

Post by _heimdall »

WUMBOWUMBO wrote: post #261
deburo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not aware how dire inflation and the very high interest rate make the current situation?

Hasn't inflation gone down to ~3%?

Sweden's current inflation rate is 4.2%

https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/monetary-policy/the-inflation-...

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