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

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#681

Post by dbbk » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #504

danpalmer wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the employees do? I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding, adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals. There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localis…

> 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…

A tiny part of Spotify's headcount is product & engineering.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#682

Post by rez9x » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

explaininjs wrote: post #657

rez9x wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts, audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate apps. I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into these new paths without any innovation in the music department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I don…

Congrats! Now you get to experience the glory of the deque. Your days of being restricted to stack pushing are in the past.

That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and something that had tempted me in the past. I have to relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to start).

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#683

Post by munksbeer » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:30 PM UTC

fullshark wrote: post #561

nyokodo wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

This is very true. I spend a lot of time thinking about work problems. On the one hand it does help me in some ways because those problems are there whether I like it or not and I don't seem to have the control to stop thinking about them. So it does help that sometimes I'll settle on a vague solution in my head before I fall asleep at night, but of course it would be better not to have to do this at all.

I have at times had idle daydreams about doing a job that ends at the end of the work-day and you literally do not have to think about it again. I'd say those sort of jobs are not well paid these days.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#684

Post by spaceywilly » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #371

spaceywilly wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would caution against drawing grand conclusions from these recent layoff rounds. Companies overhired during the pandemic, and now they are trimming that fat. It’s not necessarily a sign of any big strategic mistakes beyond “we hired too many people”

> Companies overhired during the pandemic, and now they are trimming that fat Citation needed

The original article

>ValueAct’s chief executive, Mason Morfit, said Spotify’s costs had “exploded” and that it was “built for the bubble”

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#685

Post by butlike » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:31 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #120

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…

> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free. The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface…

Those were the days. Winamp. The tiny media player that booted instantly, had such a low fingerprint you could safely have it playing while gaming. The media player you could re-skin. You could later hook into lastfm to "scrobble" your listens if you wanted them to persist after a WinXP reinstall.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#686

Post by code_runner » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

abkolan wrote: post #452

The Spotify inserted ads during the podcast makes a lot of sense now. They are really trying to make the books look good. Is this a leading indicator that the podcasts could go more towards the exclusives / originals route? For example: Like Joe Rogan.

Spotify is actively moving away from originals (or at least changing how they do it). Inseted ads gives them better tracking and with better reporting… $$$$

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#687

Post by morelisp » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #628

notpachet wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were being responsible at the time. Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.

Remember hindsight is 20/20. If capitalists were as risk-averse as some would like, we'd be stuck in the past forever

> we'd be stuck in the past forever

You say this like it's self-evident it's a bad thing, but it's not, even if I'm a middle-class white guy in 1975, let alone an Oneida in 1475.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#688

Post by buro9 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #658

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…

> because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive. Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change. Revolving loans might cost more to service, which also impacts R&D and product expenditures. It's very dynamic. > 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 con…

> Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change.

This is true, but I personally believe that the loss of knowledge and experience from within is a significant drag on momentum for when you do want to hire again... these people likely won't return even if the markets change, they've been burned, why would they return.

If it's possible to place the next bet, retain as much knowledge and experience as possible, and leverage that towards something new, then surely that is the best thing to do.

Could there have been other bets? Probably, if audio is the definition of the market and what you have at the moment is predominantly Western music, then stronger pushes into native apps for different markets? A classical specific app / flavour? A jazz specific app / flavour? Podcasts are good, but I think audiobooks are better... the audiobook market does not feel "done" at all, there's a lot more that could be done here too. Generational AI dynamic music could be a thing too, not streaming a file but streaming the basis of a constantly generated infinite thing, i.e. study aids, sleep aids, etc. Or how about audio app sync with video devices to enable the audio from your film to come out of your smart speakers or Hi-Fi even without a 5.1 amp?

A lot of these are smaller bets than "podcasts will be worth a gazillion dollars", but each is still significant, sticky, and leads to higher retention, and fights against the commoditization of music playback and the low margins there.

17% cuts does signal a lack of ambition despite "economic headwinds", it feels like a "we need to cut deep" rather than a "what are all the new bets we can make and then we are compelled to cut the difference".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#689

Post by cm277 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

adamhp wrote: post #578

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 t…

Same here. My Spotify Premium sub will is the last one I would give up (after Netflix, or Apple, or Google). I got thousands of hours per year listening (yes, including podcasts) and so do lots of other people I know.

Spotify is basically "audio" for hundreds of millions of people. Think about that: a single app that defines/owns one entire medium. Yet, they haven't been profitable, ever. That's the problem and should probably be fixed with regulation: to enable streaming, the music industry has made sure the streamers get a tiny slice of the value-add. Which leaves room for exactly one, barely surviving, pure audio streamer, and then a bunch of subsidized side-bets of the monsters (Apple, Amazon, Youtube).

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#690

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 4:33 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #596

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…

This is completely backwards. They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors? Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as succ…

> Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?

The people who made the decision could bear the brunt of the failed "bet". But I'm willing to wager that the CEO's year-end bonus isn't going to change radically in light of this.