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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%

#561

Post by fullshark »

nyokodo wrote: post #541
fullshark wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers Now, remember this the next time you’re tempted to lose sleep, sacrifice family time or leisure for your employer and then act accordingly.

It's not just that, most of us are knowledge workers, think about how many hours off the clock you spent trying to solve some business problem. Why aren't you enjoying your kid's soccer game and instead thinking about that problem at work? To make your upcoming work day easier, or is it because you're spending many many more hours on the clock actually, working for your employer?

When employers wanted your body, it was a lot easier to have separation between work and home life, but now that employers want your mind, that separation is incredibly illdefined for most of us I think. I used to give that time freely but now I wonder what's the point.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#562

Post by yibg »

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…

No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let’s assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year. 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 - 10000 employees, let’s round up and say 10,000 employees. If they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies.

At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#563

Post by commandlinefan »

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…

> none of us are irreplaceable

But the smart ones know now to be as irreplaceable as possible, however they have to.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#564

Post by Solvency »

Spotify spends millions per month on lavish "creative" team salaries in NYC who do nothing but create gradient playlist covers and other low grade "design" work that is 100% unnecessary. All while they redesign and destroy their UX and product experiences every iteration. All of that money could go straight to the artists.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#567

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

> I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers...

Interestingly, there was a really good article in the NY times yesterday that made that exact point: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/business/economy/doctors-...

Basically, the article was talking about how being a doctor or pharmacist used to be a very respected profession, and most doctors/pharmacists didn't previously see the need to unionize. With all the consolidation that's gone on in medicine over the past couple decades, though (the article talks about how many of them used to be partners in small doctor groups, that is increasingly rare these days), they now realize they're wage slaves just like the rest of us, and their management has been treating them like interchangeable widgets to squeeze the most productivity out of.

If doctors are unionizing, maybe software developers should rethink their historical aversion to the idea.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#568

Post by [deleted] »

bogomipz wrote: post #556
svarcoe wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#569

Post by chinchilla2020 »

mlrtime wrote: post #307
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 think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience. Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon. Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

> Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

Spotify does have this. They've had it forever. It automatically happens after listening to a song you like, or you can make a playlist and generate a radio off of it.

The recommendations are so far ahead of pandora it's like the difference between AIM chatbots and GPT-4. I use spotify but my boat friend uses pandora when we go out and I am astonished by how bad the matching on it is.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#570

Post by anthonypasq »

epistasis wrote: post #58
baby wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s a great podcaster.

Good enough to bring in $200M of revenue through subscriptions or ads?

that wasnt the purpose of buying him. the purpose was to buy a gigantic audience of listeners that would hopefully now use spotify as their main podcast app
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