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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%

#661

Post by explaininjs »

kojeovo wrote: post #651
buro9 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They placed a bet, and that bet didn't pay off. But what I'd expect is for them to cut only a little (not 17%), because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive. To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore…

Interesting way to look at it, a bet. A bet involving people's livelivehoods.

A bet involving paying people a salary for as long as is feasible? Cool!

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#662

Post by butlike »

yCombLinks wrote: post #599
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth' In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly. They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a job that somehow helps making the company money. As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the market and product (which a…

I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every single update has made the windows version worse at least. They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose benefit I don't know. Obviously that is just the app side part of the whole org.

The 2011 app with blatant iframes partitioning the sections of the app was peak Spotify Desktop, imo

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#663

Post by smugglerFlynn »

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…

Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and many tech companies are really in the drift racing business, not in "commute rationally" business.

The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#664

Post by robertlagrant »

kojeovo wrote: post #651
buro9 wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They placed a bet, and that bet didn't pay off. But what I'd expect is for them to cut only a little (not 17%), because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive. To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore…

Interesting way to look at it, a bet. A bet involving people's livelivehoods.

> A bet involving people's livelivehoods.

Giving the employment market another livelihood option was the bet.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#665

Post by scarface_74 »

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 keep reading this.

I don’t know how much Spotify pays or if it pays above market. But I much rather have a high paying job - especially if it doesn’t require relocation and then get laid off than not have a high paying role at all.

A job is not a marriage, it’s more like a a semi serious dating relationship. I’ve had 9 jobs in 27 years and 7 since 2008.

A job is merely a method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

Once either me or the company decide it isn’t on our best interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break up and I change my relationship status to “open for work” and put myself back out there.

Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212

And I planned accordingly from day 1.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#666

Post by butlike »

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…

"a rising tide raises all ships." What happens to the ships when the proverbial glass runneth over?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#667

Post by eastbound »

TexanFeller wrote: post #479
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…

Things are probably just going back to normal. Companies went on hiring binges while unprecedented cash was pumped into the economy and interest rates were historically low. Now that all that is being walked back employment levels are going back to 2019 or a bit before.

How is that different than the IMF pumping cash in 1998 into the Russia economy, only so that private companies take the profits and create oligarchs and various lords, who then emigrated to the French Riviera with women who became widows there, empoverishing the Russian land even further, as shows by the economist Joseph Stieglitz in his book Globalization and its Discontents?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#669

Post by dbrueck »

fundatus wrote: post #611
dbrueck wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me in terms of where my streaming dollars go. OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.

> remembering my spot in a playlist Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.

It's the equivalent of an automatic bookmark in book reader apps. While playing songs in a playlist, there is a tiny bit of state information - primarily what song you're on. As soon as you play something else, that state is discarded. There's no way to automatically pick up where you left off.

For example, I really enjoy curated playlists, and some of them are really long. I'd love the ability to work my way through a playlist but also be able to take a break and listen to something else. Or to go to the gym and listen to other music while I'm there. Or temporarily stop and listen to a new song a friend shared. None of these scenarios work very well currently.

Spotify already stores and syncs playlist name/ID/owner/etc. All I want is for them to add 2-3 bytes of sync'd data - just store the current sort field, sort direction, and a song index. It'd be totally fine if it didn't remember playlist state if you're on shuffle play.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#670

Post by explaininjs »

bobthepanda wrote: post #654
lukeschlather wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly looking to move to a competitor because of their podcasting and audiobook efforts. Well, and I don't necessarily care about those things per se but Spotify used to be a focused music app, and they keep removing things from the app in favor of whatever new "growth thing" they want to do this year. I never know when I load up the app what is going to have changed and take me an extra 5 minutes to find wha…

FWIW I switched to Apple Music and the player is pretty good, plus the music is lossless.

There’s a lot about the Music app for Mac that makes me wonder how a trillion dollar company can produce such a crappy website (yes it’s a webview, not native), and the iOS app is jittery and buggy in its own way, but in the end I do agree it’s the best option around, and I’ve been a happy-ish paying customer for almost a decade now. (part of that time I had Spotify too)
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