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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%

#531

Post by ghaff »

surgical_fire wrote: post #521
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? 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 (…

In Twitter/X's case, I'm not sure how much is related to large cuts in headcount and how much is that Musk's behavior just cause a lot of people and companies to re-evaluate their relationship with Twitter. I know for me so many people either went elsewhere or, probably more commonly, decided they didn't need this sort of service that I cut way back on my use.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#532

Post by rorroe53 »

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…

Middle class 15-20 years ago was able to buy, or even finance building of their own houses. How many poor you know who do that?

Only thing that has really improved is access to cheap Made in China goods, and perhaps plane tickets. But actual necessities like housing are becoming more and more unaffordable.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#533

Post by emodendroket »

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…

It’s hard to know what’s “responsible” when you’re operating a business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years without making money.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#535

Post by emodendroket »

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…

They’re not “taking in higher and higher profits” so much as abandoning speculative investments.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#536

Post by apwell23 »

next_xibalba wrote: post #486
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…

> Corporations raking in higher and higher profits, To what is this claim responding? Spotify only turned a profit in 1 of the last 5 quarters. It has never turned an annual profit. I actually think the story is quite different here. Tech companies had been hiring like drunken sailors leading up to the pandemic. They're only in the last year rationalizing down to levels that are necessary and productive. I have close…

> Meta/Facebook made the right move by taking a hatchet to middle management.

They are all back( layer reduction was never really done in practice). It was just a dog and pony show. Meta is hiring aggressively again and middle management is bloated than ever before.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#537

Post by BossingAround »

htrp wrote: post #425

>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…

I don't understand how you got from the quote to "senior people are let go first".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#538

Post by emodendroket »

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…

Spotify works on like a million different devices for one thing.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#539

Post by crote »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357
crote wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass firings like these are not normal. In countries with functional labor laws, it's straight-up illegal unless you're basically going through bankruptcy. Mass firings should only happen if either 1) there's a very significant economic crisis going on, or 2) the company is doing so poorly its immediate future is uncertain. The Silicon Valley style mass-hiring followed by mass-firing style of management is indicative…

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.

Spotify has been around for 15 years, and its IPO was 7 years ago. They are well beyond their "explosive growth" phase, and anyone working for them could not be faulted for expecting to join a mature and stable company.

I can definitely agree with the "bet big" argument for startups - but Spotify isn't a startup and hasn't been one for years. It's a billion-dollar multinational!

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#540

Post by sgerenser »

thelastknowngod wrote: post #145
Epa095 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The severance package seems quite generous as well. I guess it depends a bit what they mean by `the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance` (and also where you are seeing it from, maybe its seen as more generous when seen from the US). In Sweeden the notice period for the employer is between 1 and 6 months, depending on how long the empoyee has worked there. If they count that period in a…

Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has to offer anything. There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has…

In the U.S. the WARN act does mandate 60 day notice for layoffs over a certain size. In practice, (at least with many of the recent tech layoffs) you get 60 days on-payroll during which you don’t have to do any work. Severance after that is optional but often still paid, again at least among tech companies. ~2 weeks per year of service is common, although some have offered more than that.
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