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Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#12I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
I think when you hire them they make themselves useful which is the problem. If you stay small you solve problems using solutions in ways that small teams can manage.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#13I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Me too. I’m not aware of a single change they’ve made in ten years. Offline still doesn’t really work. I’m sure there’s been tons of scaling work, but why does that require thousands of employees?
Scaling Spotify seems like it'd be much easier than a video based streaming platform. Maybe scaling their recommendation algorithm? Not sure.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#14I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Exactly. Just look at Telegram. They have a team of ~30 engineers who are managing ~900 million monthly active users. That's wild
What exactly? They didn't lay off 1500 engineers, I would imagine the bulk of Spotify employees handle all sort of licensing deals, talent management, ad sales etc. Telegram is a chat application that does none of this.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#15I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Me too. I’m not aware of a single change they’ve made in ten years. Offline still doesn’t really work. I’m sure there’s been tons of scaling work, but why does that require thousands of employees?
User facing changes are usually the tip of the iceberg for most mature companies. Feels very naive to judge a large company that deals with complicated licensing, sales, marketing by some pet peeve feature you are missing in the app.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#16I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
I‘m always blown away by HN commenters that think any sufficiently large company can be run by a few engineers.
Offices in many countries, licensing, marketing, sales, growth, data, design, engineering all adds up quickly.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#17I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Supplier management sounds crazy. How many artists and labels exist in how many countries? How many contracts?
I'd expect that to be a non-trivial, not-automatable business critical task that requires lots of bodies.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#18How does a CEO not understand the employment needs of his company? Oh, right, he's playing stock price games with the investors and doesn't give a shit about his employees.
This is about as close as you'll ever get to a CEO actually admitting that doing layoffs for the sake of the short-term (lol as if that even needs to be stated) stock price actually had a negative business impact.
I once worked for a public company that panicked if it looked like the company wasn't going to meet its quarterly earnings projection. All the actions that the company took--layoffs, getting rid of contractors (also layofs), making employees take banked PTO--for this short-term benefit negatively affected the company's ability to meet its longer-term goals. It was infuriating.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#19I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Exactly. Just look at Telegram. They have a team of ~30 engineers who are managing ~900 million monthly active users. That's wild
They don't have to deal with the legal aspects of licencing content, nor need to do marketing, nor sales, nor have specialised teams working for features in specific markets; They don't have to ingest content, match content with potential existing ones to pay royalties properly (if not you get legally fucked), they don't have to do any kind of recommendations, so on and so forth...
I think you have a very simplistic view of how businesses work since your comparison is not even wrong.
Re: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
#20I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Me too. I’m not aware of a single change they’ve made in ten years. Offline still doesn’t really work. I’m sure there’s been tons of scaling work, but why does that require thousands of employees?
Ten years ago was 2014, there's been a lot of changes to Spotify in 10 years, not even just in types of content (podcasts, audiobooks, music videos) but the whole recommendation system, daily playlists, discovery playlists, lyrics, even banal things like playlists folders didn't exist 10 years ago.
There's also a lot of scaling into new markets they didn't have presence in 2014 (which requires scaling in billing, legal, accounting, etc.).