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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#521

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

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

I don't know. Maybe?

Nowhere it says Spotify have 10k employees in IT/Engineering. Perhaps a large portion is in Legal or Compliance. Dealing with regulations around music distribution on a global scale looks pretty complicated to me.

Also, Spotify does streaming, which is a fundamentally different - and more complex -business than e-commerce of digital goods (which is Valve's business model).

Ultimately, my point still stands. Spotify has competitors. If they are so bloated, nothing should stop a leaner competitor to eat their lunch.

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

I didn't use Twitter before Musk took over, and I don't use now. So it's difficult for me to compare their two incarnations.

I'll just mention that on a recent interview Musk said (in very colorful language) that the current advertiser boycott may kill the company. So my guess is that Twitter is not doing very well with only 20% of the workforce.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#522

Post by weebull »

fullshark wrote: post #512
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…

What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice? Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should. For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I s…

The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all.

As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see which people worked out, I don't have a problem.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#523

Post by CodeMage »

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…

> The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and the kings of 300 years ago.

I've yet to hear this claim from someone who has been truly poor at least once in their life. When you have to live paycheck to paycheck, and stress out every single month over the uncertainty, not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills and have enough to eat, let me know if you feel like "the king of 300 years ago".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#524

Post by smus »

mrkeen wrote: post #504
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…

> 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 persever…

I think you're missing the point that coding isn't the only type of job

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#525

Post by sydbarrett74 »

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…

People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is incontrovertible.

What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers. And by those measures, the 'middle class' is demonstrably worse off than 50 years ago.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#526

Post by falcolas »

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…

You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some people."

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#527

Post by weebull »

ActionHank wrote: post #505
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.

Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#528

Post by gizmo »

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…

Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work?

There is a lot of opportunism out there.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#529

Post by ActionHank »

weebull wrote: post #527
ActionHank wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.

Thank you!
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