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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#551

Post by dsaavy »

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…

A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot be replaced without the business collapsing.

No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#552

Post by coredog64 »

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…

> In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place.

These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have a well known company on their resume, and are being let go during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit. What’s not to like?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#553

Post by hk1337 »

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 remember comments clamoring how great Spotify was going to be because of their European roots compared to Apple (Music) a U.S. company.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#554

Post by apwell23 »

scarab92 wrote: post #98
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…

All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they had excess engineering headcount.

It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on moving from background listening to active foreground use.

It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#555

Post by rsanek »

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.

i feel like this is a pretty hard thing to assess without access to internal metrics

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#556

Post by bogomipz »

svarcoe wrote: post #516
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…

And they were still hiring too! My first day was last Monday haha, last day today

Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#557

Post by avgcorrection »

sydbarrett74 wrote: post #525
lettergram wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That people are better off now than 15–20 years ago (see OP) is absolutely not obvious.

> What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers.

Uh, see the Neoliberal shift that happened some decades ago. Things got worse. The rich got richer and the rest got poorer.

This isn’t some psyche thing for crying in the sink.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#558

Post by sgerenser »

jamesblonde wrote: post #77
epistasis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a semantic difference in the terms: > In the past, layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved. An RIF, on the hand, did not come with such an expectation; it usually meant that a certain position or an entire department was being eliminated. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/r…

That "semantic difference" is justification for using the word, but the intent behind using RIF is the usual - water down the harshness of the thing. I don't buy we need a new word for this. Particularly this justification is nonsense - "layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved" Who said this is true? Lik…

I’ve only heard the term “Layoff” in regards to a temporary staff reduction in the trades/blue collar/seasonal work. In white collar jobs, layoff has pretty much always meant a permanent staff reduction.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#560

Post by boringg »

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…

If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap.

I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future.

I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.

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