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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%

#381

Post by byyll »

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…

I certainly couldn't build that in a weekend but nor would I need 9500 people. Keep in mind WhatsApp was running with 50 engineers in 2015 when it had 900 million users. Last year, according to some sources, it had 3000 employees and 2.4 billion users. And that's groups, voice messages, video and voice calls, WhatsApp for business, integrations and a lot more.

Some of these seem reasonable, some not. There is no need for legal presence everywhere or to even have a permanent hire for that. The many clients make sense (including consoles too) but more than 10 people per client? It's not the most complicated app. R&D I guess makes sense too.

Actually, it would be interesting to see the breakdown of employees by category.

Regardless, I think the answer lies somewhere between what you said (unknown at a glance costs) and what others have said - too many managers managing managers and overhiring.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#382

Post by ctvo »

dijit wrote: post #356
ctvo wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single engineer is 400k in total costs, and they hired thousands for initiatives that didn’t pan out. Thinking cloud costs come anywhere close to being a factor here is nonsense and not supported by anything in the article. You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like podcasts, which haven’t had the expected returns. You did this in an attempt to…

Five things wrong 1. I didn't edit my comment to remove anything like that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. 2. I didn't perceive injustice, I thought it was a bit brainless to not associate company costs with long term survivability. 3. An engineer being 400k TC is an anomaly, Spotify does not pay any of it's Swedish engineering force nearly that much, and since we don't know the demographics of the layoffs i…

> 3. An engineer being 400k TC is an anomaly, Spotify does not pay any of it's Swedish engineering force nearly that much, and since we don't know the demographics of the layoffs it's hard to argue engineers anyway. (Citation here says the avg was 125.000[0] which is still very high if these were europeans)

Are we going to ignore that on average their US engineers costs significantly more than ~400K total costs and they have an engineering hub in New York City?

> 4. Their cloud bill would still be roughly 500 people based on that TC based on committed use alone.

And they paid Meghan and Harry 20,000,000 USD for a podcast deal that didn't work out. That's 50 engineers. Should we look at the Rogan deal too and go through everything that didn't work out in the last 3 years?

You've provided no evidence that by not using the cloud Spotify would have made more money or prevented these layoffs. And costs is one thing: Could they have grown as quickly? Scaled as fast? Hired as easily? Without numbers, which you won't share (outside of "trust me I've seen it"), this becomes even harder to debate.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#383

Post by rospaya »

maxglute wrote: post #193
surgical_fire wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 bet…

> Relax, I was being hyperbolic

I see this type of hyperbole twice a week on HN and it's getting really boring.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#384

Post by sva_ »

Mindwipe wrote: post #312
ianwalter wrote: post #306

Instead of investing in massive podcaster deals, they should have just focused on integrating podcasts into the app in a sane way. I would pay more if it were as good as Pocket Casts, but it's nowhere close.

The whole point was to move into podcasts for exclusivity so they had something they could put behind a hard paywall to boost revenue - the music service will never be significantly profitable and will probably never be genuinely profitable at all, so they need to move into another area or they will eventually collapse.

I think you can listen to them for free but with ads.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#385

Post by RamblingCTO »

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 still hate the change about the "add to playlist/like" button with all my heart. I don't want to like all the songs I add to playlists. I have a few hundred playlists with a looooot of songs (I listened to 86000 minutes last year of over 4000 artists ...). That change was utterly idiotic

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#386

Post by FirmwareBurner »

pavlov wrote: post #287
gumballindie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost everyone I know uses it daily. Counterpoint: almost no one I know uses it. It was fun at first but became boring fast, a bit like Netflix. If I want to listen to music I use youtube.

This is like the HN trope of “nobody uses Facebook / Instagram / [other social media product] anyway.” These services are global with hundreds of millions of users or more. There’s nothing useful to be extrapolated from the usage patterns of yourself and a handful of friends. (Personally I only listen to Amiga MODs and watch 8mm home movies of my mother while whistling the theme from “Psycho”.)

And here I am with my "definitely legit" collection of MP3s I keep on my phone and PC, played on Winamp 2.95.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#387

Post by dagw »

notRobot wrote: post #332
cedws wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm bullish about Oxide (who are building hardware to make it easy to essentially run your own cloud.) Nobody wants to deal with the nasty parts of running servers but if a company can take some of that complexity away, you could save a tonne of money over AWS.

How is running your own cloud different than traditional bare metal?

traditional bare metal: Email IT and ask for 3 severs spun up for this small in-house project my team is working on. Email back and forth for a few days, book two meetings, and then wait 10-14 days before getting access to the servers.

Cloud: log onto a web portal, select the specs I want for the servers, press OK and log in 30 seconds later.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#388

Post by mewpmewp2 »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #354

"..Spotify had taken advantage of cheap borrowing during 2020 and 2021, when central bankers cut interest rates sharply in response to coronavirus pandemic lockdowns" > “Embracing this leaner structure will also allow us to invest our profits more strategically back into the business,” > invest our profits more strategically back into the business why didn't they do this in 2020 when they got zero interest loans and…

I don't understand the question? They were able to use money more freely as it was more abundant, so they were able to take more risks. Now that money is more expensive, they need to be more careful about it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#389

Post by s3p »

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.

They’re not leaving. 17% of the staff doesn’t include the entirety of the curation team.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#390

Post by lupire »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #313
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.

The magic word is "growth". For context, I find this artist's explanation of the situation helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU

That's why Spotify fails artists, and wishful thinking for a replacement.

In the OS world, it would be "why Microsoft will ultimately fail".

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