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

SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 455 posts

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#441

Post by tw352852 »

shallot_router wrote: post #184
dustinmoris wrote: post #22

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company…

It doesn't sound like they plan on running the company for very much longer.

This seems likely to me. Apparently the office staff and HR teams are down to 1 person each. Previously it was about 10-15 people.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#442

Post by dudadornelles »

comiCVomit wrote: post #439
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…

I heard that one brazilian guy who also worked for TW and now is working for DO was famous for advocating for hype techs such as Ruby and other shitty stuff and after a few years he was vomiting critiques about thoses things. He was also the lead architect for TW in a "Titanic" project in a publishing company in Brazil which of course sunk after the company spent millions on the project. It couldn't serve a handfull…

Heard people would disassemble his bed in hotels as retaliation

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#443

Post by tw352852 »

matclayton wrote: post #237
thirdsun wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that‘s exactly what they should have focused on. I never saw them as a service for listening to tracks and albums or storing my collection. It‘s not a Spotify or Apple Music competitor. It’s a great place for DJ mixes, sets and live recording, though I think Mixcloud is the better product - unfortunately I see way less engagement over there. That might change when Soundcloud goes down.

Mixcloud founder here, thanks for the vote of confidence. One key difference is we internally measure success or engagement in terms of minutes listened not play counts, and actively optimise for this. So often the visible play metrics don't actually respresent true human engagement. It's something we're thinking about a lot internally right now, and we might start exposing it shortly. I suspect most people will be v…

That is the same internal goal that SoundCloud has. Play counts is just what users want to see. All of SoundCloud's internal optimization is around listening time.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#444

Post by brapse »

brapse wrote: post #413
klangberater wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, former SoundCloud VP here. First I think it is highly inappropriate to use this sad event to blame certain nationalities/groups. I hope everybody agrees that SoundCloud is a much needed product and we all hope for its success. Some general points: Was there a lot of chaos at SC and were some people treated unfairly during that chaos? Yes, most certainly... I am not happy about it. But we were growing like crazy i…

Growing engineering organizations is simply not a reproducible science. Successful companies are so rare and the conditions which led to their success so exclusive that it's much easier to point fingers at the people you disagree with. I think the parent captures this. The backlash which is emerging now are really a products of pent up frustration. SoundCloud was never able to develop a culture which resolved differe…

s/political assassinations/political maneuvering.

Maneuvering is a far better less inflammatory word here. Nobody died from disagreement working at soundcloud.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#445

Post by parasubvert »

throwaway35813 wrote: post #340
throwaway52342 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a long-time SC engineer and can confirm, the influx of Brazilians and especially former ThoughtWorks folks was the inflection point in the destruction of the engineering organization. Conniving and intensely political, they absolutely ruined what was a compassionate, innovative, and productive culture.

I've met many decent people who work at ThoughtWorks, so it pains me to say this, but based off the interactions I've had with the organization professionally I've started to ask in interviews if the company does any work with TW (and a couple other firms, Pivotal has a poor track record as well). If so, the conversation usually ends there unless it's followed by a qualifier where the interviewer understands my retic…

This is interesting, as both these companies have high reputations and at times low reputations depending on your perspective. All consulting companies have their mix of failures and successes. Is this a correlation/causation thing, or do you truly think Pivotal or TW do something uniquely horrible to companies?

( I work for Pivotal but not Labs and am curious. )

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#446

Post by tripzilch »

creaghpatr wrote: post #137
kevinmannix wrote: post #51

SoundCloud is my go-to for music while programming. I've spent countless hours curating my likes, playlists, follows, etc. I'd be quite upset if the service shuts down, 1) for the artists that have gained large followings through the service and 2) for all the personal time spent that will in the end mean nothing. I think I'm reiterating what has been said before, but the reposting is horrendous. It's made the listen…

Same here. I pay for the subscription so I can cache mixes I find, if I lose those it's gonna be pretty devastating. Wouldn't be impossible to go rip them off the internet somewhere else but would require a lot of extra work etc. Soundcloud should have stuck with boosting amateurs rather than play for the big guys and funded with subscriptions from the bottom up in my opinion. Leave the professional track streaming t…

command line youtube-dl will download anything from soundcloud you point it at, tracks, playlists or users

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#447

Post by pje »

bm1362 wrote: post #384
dustinmoris wrote: post #22

They also laid off the entire New York team and at least some individuals in Berlin: https://twitter.com/pje_txt/status/882977097232338947 https://twitter.com/katalunia_/status/882992899893460993 > Well, SoundCloud just laid off all of its New York engineering > Literally the entire payments and subscriptions team, ads-eng, monetization engineering, everybody > Not really clear to me how the execs think this company…

I just quit the payments team with Pje a month ago and I can say no one saw this coming. The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned. Pje was a veteran but most of the team was The silver lining here is that recruiters are in a blood frenzy; I've had ~30 messages come in today.

thanks for your kind words, "bm1362". we'll meet again.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#448

Post by sockcymbal »

RickS wrote: post #135
acchow wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What caused you to quit SC?

Cultural and product focuses that emphasized engagement quantity rather than engagement quality. Comments would be littered with things like "hey, great, check out my stuff!" That type of shallow "like for like" culture is absolutely cancerous for what was previously a very maker-heavy audience.

What would be your solution to this?

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#449

Post by brodock »

legohead wrote: post #291
cyphunk wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use this desktop app, opensource and cross platform, constantly https://github.com/Soundnode/soundnode-app

I was aware of that, but if a company fails to understand it's users' needs, I don't have much faith in them, so I just move on to something else.

Not to mention that the limitation in the API usage made the soundnode app useless, as it hits the API limit in a few hours of use.

They are failing not to provide an alternative and to prevent you from using an alternative.

Re: SoundCloud cuts jobs, closes SF and London offices

#450

Post by pingpongpung »

agilildo wrote: post #357
thowaway999 wrote: post #185

I was a director of an engineering department for SoundCloud for a time and left several years ago. Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying e…

Digital Ocean was smart to cut this short (the flock of brazilians from SoundCloud migrated there). Not all brazilians are like this tho - only the agilists.

Why were they smart to cut that short? What was wrong with those specific group?
Post reply on HN