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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#351

Post by mynegation »

oblio wrote: post #268
byyll wrote: post #248

Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.

Well, this is another version of the classic "I could build this in an weekend" trope. 9500 is probably excessive, but think of it just this way: 1. Spotify has a worldwide presence, apparently 184 markets; that probably entails a legal presence in many of those jurisdictions, sales, marketing, support, localization, etc.; at a conservative 2 persons per market, just that's going to generate about 400 jobs; now, most…

That, and people often forget that - even if we stay on the engineering side of things - Spotify has tools and apps for artists, creators, and advertisers that most users never see.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#352

Post by dboreham »

notRobot wrote: post #332
cedws wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm bullish about Oxide (who are building hardware to make it easy to essentially run your own cloud.) Nobody wants to deal with the nasty parts of running servers but if a company can take some of that complexity away, you could save a tonne of money over AWS.

How is running your own cloud different than traditional bare metal?

More automation.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#353

Post by relativ575 »

thelastknowngod wrote: post #145
Epa095 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The severance package seems quite generous as well. I guess it depends a bit what they mean by `the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance` (and also where you are seeing it from, maybe its seen as more generous when seen from the US). In Sweeden the notice period for the employer is between 1 and 6 months, depending on how long the empoyee has worked there. If they count that period in a…

Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has to offer anything. There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has…

> There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice.

You can also leave the job at any time, which as a frequent HN user I'm sure you know and may have used it to your advantage.

> There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth

They were also in a hiring spree 2 years ago, like many tech companies. Many of the current employees wouldn't have a job otherwise.

The CEO is also the founder of the company, who built it over time from scratch. There have been many ups and downs during their 17 year history. 10,000 jobs didn't appear overnight. We hardly hear when company hire, only when they let people go.

> and when they are well known for not paying their suppliers (the artists) a fair price for the content they create.

Apparently they don't make big fat profit given this layoff

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#354

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

"..Spotify had taken advantage of cheap borrowing during 2020 and 2021, when central bankers cut interest rates sharply in response to coronavirus pandemic lockdowns"

> “Embracing this leaner structure will also allow us to invest our profits more strategically back into the business,”

> invest our profits more strategically back into the business

why didn't they do this in 2020 when they got zero interest loans and free money from the government?

profits are for "strategic" investment but loans are for un-strategic and unsustainable hiring? got it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#355

Post by [deleted] »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #343
blcknight wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design). They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.

TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#356

Post by dijit »

ctvo wrote: post #344
dijit wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost's don't exist in a vacuum. it's easier to lay people off than to save millions in cloud spending when you've already committed to $x-billion over 5 years.

A single engineer is 400k in total costs, and they hired thousands for initiatives that didn’t pan out. Thinking cloud costs come anywhere close to being a factor here is nonsense and not supported by anything in the article. You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like podcasts, which haven’t had the expected returns. You did this in an attempt to…

Five things wrong

1. I didn't edit my comment to remove anything like that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting.

2. I didn't perceive injustice, I thought it was a bit brainless to not associate company costs with long term survivability.

3. An engineer being 400k TC is an anomaly, Spotify does not pay any of it's Swedish engineering force nearly that much, and since we don't know the demographics of the layoffs it's hard to argue engineers anyway. (Citation here says the avg was 125.000[0] which is still very high if these were europeans)

4. Their cloud bill would still be roughly 500 people based on that TC based on committed use alone.

5. Costs = Costs. Overspending in many areas = no more money. I'm merely suggesting that they overspent in one area that is now affecting another area indirectly. Yes, I drew a line.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38516794

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#357

Post by lotsofpulp »

crote wrote: post #336
pachico wrote: post #304

Firing people is business as usual. I don't know why this is usually taken with such surprise. It's part of the life cycle of many companies to hyper-hire when money flows in, and cut lots of jobs when they "re-adjust". I don't think this is good, I personally don't like it, but I learned not to be surprised anymore. We like cloud because it scales in and out: often management don't see workforce differently.

Mass firings like these are not normal. In countries with functional labor laws, it's straight-up illegal unless you're basically going through bankruptcy. Mass firings should only happen if either 1) there's a very significant economic crisis going on, or 2) the company is doing so poorly its immediate future is uncertain. The Silicon Valley style mass-hiring followed by mass-firing style of management is indicative…

Or, if you want to win big, you have to make big bets. This applies to both employers doing mass hiring and employees choosing to work at employers aiming for explosive growth.

It is not poor management, it is simply a different tactic. Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don’t. The fact that Silicon Valley has succeeded in producing the most profitable companies in the last few decades seems to be relevant.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#358

Post by throwboatyface »

notRobot wrote: post #332
cedws wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm bullish about Oxide (who are building hardware to make it easy to essentially run your own cloud.) Nobody wants to deal with the nasty parts of running servers but if a company can take some of that complexity away, you could save a tonne of money over AWS.

How is running your own cloud different than traditional bare metal?

Traditional bare metal involved complicated packaging and release processes. You would literally have a diagram of "these are the physical servers running this service (LB, web server, etc.)" and be able to point to them. You could overprovision workloads to tolerate failure but not just shuffle a service from one machine to another.

When I used to work in a similar environment we would develop code, then we would give it to a QA team. They would test it and give it to an Ops team. The Ops team would schedule a maintenance window and roll out the new code on each server. This happened maybe once a quarter because testing and releasing was a week-long process.

Racking new servers and provisioning them also required some manual labour. We had a process to use PXE to provision the machines but it was still toil. Virtualization was a big benefit because you could at least create and blow away VMs without having to re-image a whole server from scratch.

"Running your own cloud" implies that developers can treat instances like cattle and interact via an API. But it also means there's a standard set of tooling for fleet management. None of this stuff is entirely new but in small or mid-sized orgs it was out of reach 10 years ago.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#359

Post by hiddencost »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #343
blcknight wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design). They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.

TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.

TikTok has 100k employees and shoes shits money.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#360

Post by cbozeman »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #343
blcknight wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design). They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.

TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.

> Infra isn't magic.

No, but you're definitely dealing with the Arthur C. Clarke quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

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