361–370 of 1001 posts
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.
200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M
$200M/$30M = 6.5 years
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.
TikTok has 100k employees and shoes shits money.
I believe this means they generated $500m for bytedance, but I can't find a good citation, bytedance itself generated $6B in profits though for the fiscal year 2022
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342785/bytedance-key-qu...
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…
It's actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center department that actually supports other departments properly. The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align. Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did Isn't this what made Spotify success? Yes, they could have build their own datacenters, but someone else could outcompete them in the meantime. They have traded off something for another thing.
I think that's a good take, it's easy to look in hindsight and say that they made wrong choices but we wouldn't even be having the conversation had they not been at least somewhat successful. The question becomes then: 9,500 employee's and none among them know how (or wanted) to regain enough costs to save 17% of the company from losing their job just before Christmas? Certain features (spotify wrapped for example) w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hasn't inflation gone down to ~3%?
Has it? Nothing in my life except gasoline has gotten any cheaper. Edit: I misread the comment. I am aware of the difference between rates and absolutes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center department that actually supports other departments properly. The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align. Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).
Until you get the worst of both worlds and have to align an enterprise architecture approval committee, get cyber sign-off, put the request through your service desk, have it land with some sort of enterprise task prioritisation team, and finally land with your internal cloud team to action the request your team isn’t empowered to do, only to then have a simple service provisioning turn into a massively overcomplicat…
edit: And that moment depends not just on costs but the growth rate of the company so it's almost impossible to predict ahead of time (otherwise wall street investing would be a lot more boring).
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…
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…
Lose the ads, audiobooks, podcasts, drop any platform that isn't iOS, Android or web. Would that be profitable, or would people not want to buy the service?
Looks like Benn Jordan's analysis on how Spotify will fail is slowly starting to materialize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
Also the fucking music industry sucks.
I also used to work for a company that used to have a streaming service and they paid like over 20 million alone just to the record industry.
I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
Assuming that investing in Rogan did what Spotify hoped it would (driving enough subscriptions to make a profit), not having made the investment would have meant more layoffs now.