461–470 of 1001 posts
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.
I'm wondering what it is that they're doing all day. The spotify app randomly changes, and if so, rarely for the better. I'd wager spotify could benefit from X' style layoffs.
Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point, more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has like 25 employees that makes the service s…
Spotify has developed a huge surface area, because they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio. The thesis is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that's what they're selling to investors. That means there are countless bets they could be making at any one time, to compete with everybody else out there.
For a company of Spotify's stature, when capital is cheap, they can raise the money to do all the things, all at once. They don't have to make prioritization choices. Usually this means many dozens of teams, which each seem pretty lean if you zoom in. Like, I'm guessing there's a team of 3ish developing the in-app lyrics experience, or something like that. The scale is in how many of these bets are going at once.
The capital markets have changed, and now Spotify (like many others) has to constrain its bets. The thesis hasn't changed, but their capacity to try to prove it out isn't as limitless as before.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.
The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it. I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.
Why do these mass layoffs keep happening in the software industry? Or is this a global phenomenon that exists across all industries?
You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship like one feature a year if you average.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think the employees do? I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding, adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals. There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localis…
Yea I worked at groupon when it was taking off and we had around 200 sales ppl calling up and negotiating deals with local business. Everyone back then used to ask me the same question: Why does groupon have 500 ppl, isnt' it just a wordpress site.
>Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the p…
The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates the ultra wealthy from middle class.
With rise of AI and automation, that trend will likely accelerate. The top 10% hold more than 50% of wealth. It's likely in a few decades, the top 1% will hold more than 50% of the wealth. They already hold 28% of wealth.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/10/the-wealthiest-0-1-o...
Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…
> I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs
An apples-to-apples comparison requires looking at all associated costs of switching to on prem (salaries, hardware, etc...).
I've only been a part of this analysis at a company dealing with a cloud bill in the low tens of millions, nowhere near the scale of Spotify (and I'm still relatively new to all of this).
> And cloud has a lot more lock-in than most employees.
It's a shame there are not better abstractions to facilitate moving to and fro.
I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
As a scientist working in public health, this decision burned my faith in Spotify. They were taking down conspiracy theory podcasts daily while bankrolling Rogan to provide a platform with insane reach for cranks like Robert Malone. I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.