I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
[flagged]
What about his resume disqualifies him from shooting the shit on a microphone?
Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#432Earlier 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…
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.
People who make CRUD sites think everything is just a CRUD site.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#433I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
As a scientist working in public health, this decision burned my faith in Spotify. They were taking down conspiracy theory podcasts daily while bankrolling Rogan to provide a platform with insane reach for cranks like Robert Malone. I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.
> for a few months
Heh. There's a zillion perfectly good competitors in this space. Why not just permanently switch to one that doesn't fund conspiracy theory wackos?
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#434[deleted]
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#435>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 p…
> 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.
No, they're saying that severance is based on tenure (and local notice period requirements). On average, people laid off get 5 months worth of severance - some more, some less, based on tenure.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#436I 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…
All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they had excess engineering headcount.
I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get people to spend time listening to anything that is proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue.
Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.
Well, if they determine that firing 17% of staff will lead to greater profits then it seems pretty mandatory based on his fiduciary duty to the board.
That’s mythology: executives have no such obligation to either shareholders or the board because business decisions are very rarely unambiguous wins or losses, and a great deal of discretion is given to their judgement over any non-trivial timeframe.
Consider, for example, the number of people who thought turn of the century Apple should become a Windows reseller or, later, sell the iPod brand to a business which understood how to be successful in the phone market like Nokia. There were certainly times where that could have generated a great deal of short-term gain, and it was easy to find some analyst prattling on about why they had to do it.
In the case of Spotify, the only situation where 17% of their company is an unambiguous waste of money with no benefit to the future business should be accompanied by the CEO’s resignation because that would be an enormous managerial failure in the hiring process. Since it seems unlikely that even 1% of their workforce is that bad, it’s far more likely that this has nothing to do with long-term success and everything to do with pleasing the activist investors and consulting firms who’ve been pushing the idea of layoffs as a way to remind workers not to ask for more.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#438I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
At least Rogan is still one of the most popular podcasters in the world. They paid a similar ammount for Gimlet and that company is now completely defunct and all their hit podcasts either jumped ship or stopped. So that was probably a worse investment.
Or $25m (2019) for two podcasts featuring the Obamas. They didn't bother to make frequent appearances and attributed the poor audience figures to Spotify's exclusive rights.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#439>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 p…
Labour laws will apply, they probably can't just pick who they lay off. Maybe they have to let go the same proportion of people at all levels of seniority.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#440I guess that defect that's been open for 3 years to "actually shuffle large playlists" doesn't stand a chance.