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

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#501

Post by maxehmookau » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:58 PM UTC

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#502

Post by aerhardt » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:58 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…

I find their algorithms for recommendation (song and artist “radios”) far inferior to 2000’s Pandora, so at least in that area I agree with GP that throwing 1000 times the resources at the problem doesn’t seem to be doing anything…

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#503

Post by jzb » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 2:59 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…

I'm guessing there's a lot of work at Spotify that goes into anti-copying efforts, for one thing. If the API and clients behave the same way for an extended period, it gets too easy to have spotify downloaders that work reliably for a larger audience. (I realize these things exist and work, but it remains enough of a moving target to keep it from pissing off Spotify's label/music publishing partners too much.)

There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms...

They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense.

And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc.

Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...)

That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#504

Post by mrkeen » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:00 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…

> What do you think the employees do?

Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music.

If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw.

But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#505

Post by ActionHank » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.

Did they retrench the people who made that decision? Did they retrench the management who approved that contract?

Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching, but they still gave Joe the bag.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#506

Post by rightbyte » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:01 PM UTC

slig wrote: post #485

jzb wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite for me. I cancelled because of that. Partially because I didn’t like Spotify endorsing his content, but also because I subscribed to Spotify for music , not podcasts. I wanted to see them invest more in features around music and work on better compensation for artists - not spend my subscription money on shoving podcast content at me.

I wonder why they force podcasts so much. I've never listened to them, and I'm sure they have that data, and the recommendations are way, way off anything I'd consider listening to.

I guess they try to force it because they have higher margins on them.

Podcast are cheaper to produce and requires no record label sharing the profits with Spotify.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#507

Post by pm90 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

> Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees from the team (and keep others on their toes).

Until there are real consequences these companies will not change.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#508

Post by maxehmookau » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

switch007 wrote: post #221

that_guy_iain wrote: post #57

Super good time to announce layoffs, at the start of the month where everyone is preparing for time off and holidays.

It’s unfortunately common when financial end of year is around the same time. Announced now, people can at least try to scale back Christmas and NYE plans if necessary.

Something I'm sure their CEO will do out of kindness and solidarity. /s

How depressing.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#509

Post by KineticLensman » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #491

nojvek wrote: post #472

Post-pandemic, the trend of Corporations raking in higher and higher profits, while needing fewer and fewer staff scares me. The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates the ultra wealthy from middle class. With rise of AI and automation, that trend will likely accelerate. The top 10% hold more than 50% of wealth. It's likely in a few decades, the top 1% will hold more than 50% of the wealth. They…

The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and the kings of 300 years ago. It’s not perfect but a rising tide does raise all ships. Regarding the ultra wealthy, the disparity was actually greater in the past. All that said, you distribute wealth by reducing taxes on the poor and increasing it on wealthy. Alternatively, shifting the growth differential such that the poor grow faster than the wealthy (hard…

> a rising tide does raise all ships

The thing that has always bothered me about this analogy is that a sea level rise affects all ships uniformly while the magnification of wealth doesn't. It's more like everyone standing on a plain and then the centre deforms upwards, creating a peak of wealth while most people are on the (only slightly higher) foothills.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#510

Post by chasely » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."