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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%

#401
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.

Or stock market greed... of course, if you subscribe to the "greed is good" school of thought, you may also see that as positive.

Spotify stock has lost 10% per year relative to SP500 (riskless). It is crazy to call not wanting to lose 10% per year “greedy”.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a heavy user of spotify. Almost everyone I know uses it daily. I don't understand why they are not able to turn this much engagement into profit.

> Almost everyone I know uses it daily. Counterpoint: almost no one I know uses it. It was fun at first but became boring fast, a bit like Netflix. If I want to listen to music I use youtube.

Counter-Counterpoint: I got two teens in (American public) high school - they claim "everyone" uses Spotify and grumble about our YouTube Music/Premium subscription. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#403

But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!

This is the only valid question here. Bloated workforce is somehow a must-have byproduct of growing cash flow, someone could surely say why. Is it prestige? Is it managers gaining more power by commanding more teams and this workforce then remains? Is it to please shareholders with feature bloat? Is it an actual (one-time?) need to scale up globally? I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk mad…

> I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.

Xitter is massively tanking as a company with massive revenue losses since that brilliant idea. Its example proves literally the opposite of what you're claiming - after firings the company is in tailspin of financial losses.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#404
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over 1,000 employee-years of salaries.

I get what you are saying but you would be surprised how fast financial forecasts balloon at scale. 200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M $200M/$30M = 6.5 years

It’s also not $150k/year. Employees cost far more than their salary.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#405
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh. This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.

I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20? I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total. And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,... Don't know. I'd struggle to…

Also you just need rsync for dropbox, right? :P

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#406
post #7

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts in 2023. It has the biggest weekly audience in the US (Edison Research) and is estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

It is also the top podcast worldwide on Spotify. Second place goes to Crime Junkie, which has half the listener numbers.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relax, I was being hyperbolic. Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM? How's twitter working with 80% less employees? Sure it's worth less, but it works mostly fine. Yes spotify needs more than 10 employees, but did it need 10000? After these rounds of cuts, will it still need 7500 next year? I surmise it can settle much lower than what people expect, and maybe their service/product would have been bet…

> Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM? The difference is the person you’re responding to doesn’t claim to know the answer to something it’s almost impossible for either of you to know the answer (unless you have inside knowledge or have done a deep dive on Spotify). > How's twitter working with 80% less employees? Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money and it’s hemorrhaging users. Competitors are…

>Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money

Was Twitter in any way profitable before Musk took over, or was it coasting on zero interest investor money on the premise that "one day" it will be profitable?

>Competitors are arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half.

Competitors rise all the time, the question is which have the sticking power to beat Twitter.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#408

Super good time to announce layoffs, at the start of the month where everyone is preparing for time off and holidays.

Yep. Maximizing fuck-over of employees. Tech workers need to stop working for corporations they don't own, aren't seeing the profits of, and who will just throw them away at any moment. The solution are businesses in the form of employee-owned co-ops and organized labor.

Tech workers are one of the few W2 employees to see any profits from ownership, hence the compensation in RSUs and stock options. Also, anyone with investments in the public equity markets (like most tech workers earning high salaries) receives gains from the profits.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#409

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

Anyone who had a LinkedIn profile in tech with open DMs during that time will probably confirm this.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#410
post #7

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan. I don't get why people listen to him... He is not funny nor smart. It sometimes feels you get better value when watching morning tv shows...

> I don't get why people listen to him...

People have different tastes. That's OK.

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts, bringing in 11m listeners an episode. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

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