Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17% • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#601

Post by ath3nd » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

matchbok wrote: post #460

1letterunixname wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Business theater. It's about stepping on the necks of working people to suppress wages and "teach them a lesson" they probably won't learn.

That's.... not how things work. (Maybe on DSA Twitter, but not in the real world lol)

This is, to an extent, exactly what is happening now, specifically to the group of people what Musk refers to as 'the laptop class'.

The high salaries and good benefits we enjoyed in the industry could only last so long. The pandemic came and it was then when the behemoths overhired and boosted their stock prices, and were happy that we managed to make them money remotely.

Now that the pandemic is over, they seized the opportunity to crack down on remote work, reduce their headcount, and one more time boost their stock price, while at the same time showing the pesky engineers who is boss. Oh, and when Twitter started with the layoffs, suddenly all of them were overstaffed, AWS, Microsoft, Spotify, you name it... The layoffs then suddenly meant a market that was hot and starving for engineers, was flooded with good and highly qualified people. And poof, went out bargaining power. The tech giants collectively benefitted from their collective actions, while we were left to compete with each other in a very difficult market.

I know that for many of the US based folks this is natural and somewhat acceptable, but things don't have to be that way, this is avoidable and preventable.

Strong unions world-wide, and good labor protection laws is the antidote to corporate greed, which, if left unchecked, will throw everything and everyone under the bus, just so they can temporarily squeeze out a point or two in their stock price before the whole world burns.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#602

Post by jzackpete » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

I hope they fired the person who came up with "smart shuffle" and thought tying the shuffle button to a successful network call was a good idea

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#603

Post by potamic » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #542

gizmo wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check. The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground. Any significant layoff that does…

In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy. Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill management's agenda.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#604

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

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.

They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June. I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver financially. See:

https://archive.is/Hgh3V

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#605

Post by jaywalk » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

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.

Unless you are pretty high up at Spotify, you have literally no idea how much Joe Rogan has brought in for them. His podcast has been number one on the platform since it launched.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#606

Post by sometdog » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

erellsworth wrote: post #447

mlrtime wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure how specific you want your criteria to be, but you can create a Spotify "radio" station based off of any song, band/artist, or playlist. Spotify's discovery capabilities are miles beyond Pandora, in my opinion.

They removed the ability to create "radio" stations off of playlists, which does make discovery somewhat more difficult.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#607

Post by delfinom » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #590

adam_arthur wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok but why?

During COVID, software companies massively overhired, because the executives in charge went all "hurr durr, digital is the future boys! Nobody is going outside anymore!". Not to mention the government was handing out money like candy through various schemes complete with low interest rates. I believe Facebook (as example) alone went from a headcount from 40k to over 80k employees in just 2 years of COVID.

2022+ was the "return to normal" with online trends quickly reverting back to pre-COVID levels. This resulted in a sudden drop in online economics (such as ad spend) that could justify the bloated workforces.

Drastically increased interest rates to fight inflation also cut off the cheap money flow to companies that would previously burn it like crazy on "R&D" and the like.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#608

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#609

Post by kredd » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #577

yibg wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Supporting half a billion constant users around the world, and staff dealing with local artists and bands from almost every single country. Even outside of engineering they need a ton of support staff — starting from marketing to lawyers. Every country is fairly different as well when it comes to “music style”, so there’s a significant tailoring I would say.

They’re doing whatever they’re doing pretty well as well. It’s basically the only subscription service at this point I wouldn’t consider to get rid of.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#610

Post by geodel » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

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…

> "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'...

But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-awareness of the world.

They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in people is some service to employees.