Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17% • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#421

Post by apwell23 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #111

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…

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…

Yea I worked at groupon when it was taking off and we had around 200 sales ppl calling up and negotiating deals with local business.

Everyone back then used to ask me the same question: Why does groupon have 500 ppl, isnt' it just a wordpress site.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#422

Post by prox » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #307

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?

This is why I went with Apple Music. Apple being a hardware company first makes it that they just want to provide a good portal to music. Thus far I have been happy with it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#423

Post by whywhywhywhy » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

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. Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM?

Record labels are far more awkward to deal with legally than video game publishers, so wouldn't be shocked if they needed X more lawyers at least.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#424

Post by apwell23 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

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…

> How's twitter working with 80% less employees?

Hasnt this been done to death on hackernews ( and elsewhere) . why do we keep beating this dead horse

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#425

Post by htrp » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

>Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure.

Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the people hired during 2020 and 21.

On a separate note, we can add bandmates to the insane titles that a company uses for their employees.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#426

Post by whywhywhywhy » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #223

maxglute wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM? The difference is the person you’re responding to doesn’t claim to know the answer to something it’s almost impossible for either of you to know the answer (unless you have inside knowledge or have done a deep dive on Spotify). > How's twitter working with 80% less employees? Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money and it’s hemorrhaging users. Competitors are…

>Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money

Always has no?

> and it’s hemorrhaging users.

No it's not, it has hit multiple usage records this year.

> Competitors are arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half.

Threads is a ghost town, Bluesky has pushed like 1 update this year, mastodon while it's found it's niche it will always be a niche because normal people don't understand or care what federation is.

Don't believe everything you read from people aggrieved by a service.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#427

Post by alephnan » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

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…

There was a meme about Spotify replacing the heart symbol to like a song with a ‘+’ sign.

No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively want the old version.

I’m sure they had countless meetings for this “feature” and how much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying with statistics about how this change moved the core business metrics.

That’s from my personal experience of working in FANG and people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of noise.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#428

Post by apwell23 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #307

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?

> I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

Can you describe the criteria ?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#429

Post by Ajay-p » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

When startups receive huge waves of investor cash it can seem like the runway is forever. Look at Twitter which had far more employees than it needed. When the cash seems infinite there may be a tendency to forget the principle of staying lean.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#430

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #411

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, if you want to win big, you have to make big bets. This applies to both employers doing mass hiring and employees choosing to work at employers aiming for explosive growth. It is not poor management, it is simply a different tactic. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. The fact that Silicon Valley has succeeded in producing the most profitable companies in the last few decades seems to be relevant.

Let's not romanticize correlation. Silicon valley also spent years asking how many ping pong balls fit in a bus, only hired Stanford grads, and sheltered sexual harassers in executive roles. Turns out those were neither necessary or sufficient for success either. Revenue and low interest rates can hide a lot of dumb decisions.

Correlating risk and reward is how a market works. Taking risks would not make any sense otherwise.