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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%

#571

Post by Solvency »

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

What team. What role.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#572

Post by l1tany11 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #165
gardenhedge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Joe Rogan experience definitely worked for Both Spotify and Joe

You think Spotify actually made money from it? They seem to be pulling back from Podcasts...

Probably didn’t help that the app was so bad for months after Joe switched over that Joe was saying “sorry the app is so bad, they tell me they are working on it”.

How much audience did they fail to convert? How much harder did that make building momentum?

9000 employees and couldn’t get playback to work…

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#573

Post by capableweb »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #331
capableweb wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is a public for-profit company with shareholders, the purpose of their organization is not to make profit so they can redistribute it, but to increase the share value as much as possible in order for the shareholders to benefit. Sometimes that means that they need to increase profits, but not always, there are other ways to increase the share value besides profits.

Such as?

"Hype" is a common way for "modern" companies to drive up share price, see TSLA for a good example of that. Greenwashing is another, not as common approach.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#574

Post by mrkeen »

smus wrote: post #524
mrkeen wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Do you think that the non-coders have more time to do their actual work than the coders?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#575

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

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

Like it or not, that's how we primates work, yes.

Of course, in aggregate that distribution never changes. If you or your group gets lower status, someone else gets higher. It's a true zero sum game. And half of us will always be below average.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#576

Post by adam_arthur »

Hakeemmidan wrote: post #445

Why do these mass layoffs keep happening in the software industry? Or is this a global phenomenon that exists across all industries?

Software companies are pretty uniquely positioned such that they have far more employees than are operationally necessary.

Not to say that those employees don't provide value, but the spread between operationally stable employment levels and current headcount is far wider than other industries.

Thus, more potential for large cuts.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#577

Post by Solvency »

yibg wrote: post #562
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…

What in the absolute fuck are 10000 people doing at Spotify? Really try to crunch those numbers mentally here. It's insane.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#578

Post by adamhp »

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 don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way, but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of certain playlists and of the similarity scoring they are doing because my musical perspective has broadened tremendously since I regularly started listening to my Discover Weekly.

Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#580

Post by gtirloni »

querez wrote: post #543
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…

> 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 see, we ARE human resources I think that's just a normal process of growing older. Also: yes, of course you are a resource to your employer. An annoying one (stell or laptops don't usually talk back and has demands). I also don't think there's anything wrong with companies behaving this way. B…

> By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals, nothing more

That's exactly the opposite of what 99% of the companies sell to candidates. You must have seen stuff like this is a great place work, join the family, etc. So maybe you mean the hidden intent was that but that's not the message being broadcasted.

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