Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 414 posts

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#181

Post by jhpriestley »

adamcstephens wrote: post #133
syshum wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only true in a non-remote work environment where people would have to commute into office building for work if everyone is commuting 5 feet to a home office then the efficiency of rural vs urban becomes less disparate Add in Solar power and it becomes even less so of course there still is some in the delivery of supplies, but even these can be some what mitigated to where the differences are minor

Per capita, rural and suburban are much less efficient and more costly. Infrastructure is orders of magnitude more expensive and resource demanding to build as distances spread. Water, sewer, electricity, internet, roads, etc. That’s without even looking at the supplies and movement of people. Sure, if you can afford to build yourself a self sufficient off grid home, you may perceive it as more efficient in day to da…

Walnut creek (suburban city near San Francisco) budget is about $1500 per resident, Contra Costa county, which contains Walnut Creek, spends about $3500 per resident. San Francisco is like $14000 per resident.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#182

Post by ownagefool »

nly wrote: post #20

Make hay while the sun shines. A true shift to remote work, should it happen, spells the eventual end of insanely high SF FANMAG salaries. Market forces will soon close these opportunities. My limited experience tells me people aren't prepared for homogenization of salaries across geographies: South East England, outside London: 1x London: 2x New York: 3x San Francisco: 6x On making hay: A friend of mine is currently…

The thing about London and the UK generally is the real money was historically in contracting. I reckon I was hitting the 6x.

The perm market here has always been silly.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#183

Post by solosoyokaze »

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #173
solosoyokaze wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I’d drop the one day a week in office requirement and make sure you’re paying market rates (e.g. £100k+ for mid level devs). Lots of good people looking to go fully remote right now.

£100k for web dev does not happen outside London in UK. Barely half that.

It's definitely the solution to the problem you're having:

> Recruiting is proving insanely difficult right now.

If you pay a competitive rate, people will work for you. You have to realize that now you're competing with 10X more remote first companies who will hire people who live locally to you.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#184

Post by steverb »

peteretep wrote: post #127
steverb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A radio play is around 9.5 cents per play. Assuming there are no royalty splits, then that would be 11 plays to earn a dollar. I think royalties of 1 to 3 cents per stream are completely reasonable. Subcent royalties are just platforms taking advantage of the content creators. Which is why most artists see all the streaming platforms as merely a way to advertise for live shows and merch. That's the only way to really…

Going from your original numbers (which I didn’t check), a play current pays out just under half a cent (1/230), and you’d like Spotify to pay around 5 times that (avg 2c). Spotify distributes about 70% of revenue to rights holders so you’re asking Spotify to pay out ... 350% of revenue to rights holders? Spotify could almost certainly be charging more, but it’s already incentivised to maximise revenue, and it has co…

From wikipedia: "Spotify pays royalties based on their "market share"—the number of streams for their songs as a proportion of total songs streamed on the service."

Regardless, Spotify is free to pay whatever they think is fair and artists are free to accept or reject that compensation as they will. But if you're an artist, Spotify (and the other streaming platforms, which mostly pay even less) are not going to be something that you can ever expect to be an income source.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#185

Post by steverb »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #164
steverb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A radio play is around 9.5 cents per play. Assuming there are no royalty splits, then that would be 11 plays to earn a dollar. I think royalties of 1 to 3 cents per stream are completely reasonable. Subcent royalties are just platforms taking advantage of the content creators. Which is why most artists see all the streaming platforms as merely a way to advertise for live shows and merch. That's the only way to really…

Assuming your number of 1 cent/stream, and considering that 7$ out of the 10$ subscription pays for the music, that gives an average of 23 streams/day for a subscriber. That's about 80 minutes of music per day, down to 50 minutes or less if you're sharing the subscription.

And somehow terrestrial radio stations, which have no subscription base manage to make it work.

As I said in the comment above, artists are free to NOT put their music on Spotify if they don't think it's a good deal, but regardless streaming services are only commercials for artists. Spotify is far from the worst offender. :-)

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#186

Post by sokoloff »

Smaug123 wrote: post #128
sokoloff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you find the work tedious or unethical and have arranged your finances such that you’re trapped into the bi-weekly drip of cash, I’d find that to be a problem.

I can't help thinking that in that case this really is your fault. Remember, we're talking about SF tech salaries being given to employees who aren't in SF here; many people get by comfortably on far less. (Obviously there are orders of magnitude more people who get paid much less than the sums we're talking about, and don't have enough to get by comfortably. But the question is specifically about people who have bee…

There is a type of chain that is "I'm seeking to FIRE in 10 years and if I quit this job, I can't do that."

It doesn't have to be yachts, jets, or nose candy causing the pressure.

[0] - FIRE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#187

Post by ironmagma »

rightbyte wrote: post #180
ironmagma wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, a company that was previously land-restricted to only the 98th percentile (top 2% minus top 1%) now has access to the top 1% and will be trying to compete, so there are actually more jobs available at the top.

You are forgetting that for each "land restricted" company that had 0% 99th percentile hires locally available there was x companies having more % somewhere else for it to eventually be an distribution. There is no way you can filter out top 1/100 candidates anyway.

All that implies is that the number of top 1% candidates remains constant. Of course it does. Some companies had more than they needed, but if you take luxury away from a man, he will seek it out because he is used to it.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#188

Post by ecf »

cumwolf wrote: post #160
throw14082020 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please embrace the visitors. You share this planet with them. Your fear of losing your resources is natural, but they weren't yours to begin with. If you still want your special benefits on Earth, well thats what politics is for.

sounds like visitors aren't the problem it's visitors who come and force an area to change to their liking, being disruptive to existing culture.

That’s just the nature of change at this point. I’d like to think the culture we value today wouldn’t be near what it is without prior generations moving around the planet and blending their beliefs with those of the locals.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#189

Post by np32 »

nly wrote: post #157
ironmagma wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that employers aren’t going to become less picky when switching to remote; likely, they will become even more picky and will want to improve their employee base since the supply has increased and that will be possible where it wasn’t before.

It doesn't matter. The top 1% of a large pool is still bigger than the top 1% of a small pool, so competition increases for the same number of jobs.

This assumes talent is geographically homogeneous. IMHO, Talent in top cities in the US is better than the one in the rest of the countries, and so it goes for other countries.

For top US firms, it may well be that there is a better pool for top talent, but not THAT much better. I believe it would be possible to do inferences from # of non-US citizen in FAANGs.

Re: Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while paying SF and NY salaries

#190

Post by ghaff »

solosoyokaze wrote: post #154
superbcarrot wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the reduced cost but I can't agree that remote leads to improved corporate culture (that's largely personal preference though). > Every new startup I’ve seen in the past year has been 100% remote since day one. Any reasonable company that had the option to work remotely has done so over the past year, it's hardly a trend that you can project into the future.

I’m saying that new companies that were remote from day one will never be non-remote. They’re not going to go buy a bunch of office space and force their disparate workforce to relocate. All hiring has been remote the past year, that’s not really reversible.

Instead, they'll do like Basecamp and get people together a couple times a year.

If you hired people on the basis of being remote and they're all over the place, if at the end of 2021 you tell them they all have to relocate to San Francisco, expect to hear a whole lot of big "Nope"s.

Post reply on HN