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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%

#711

Post by epistasis »

jamesblonde wrote: post #77
epistasis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a semantic difference in the terms: > In the past, layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved. An RIF, on the hand, did not come with such an expectation; it usually meant that a certain position or an entire department was being eliminated. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/r…

That "semantic difference" is justification for using the word, but the intent behind using RIF is the usual - water down the harshness of the thing. I don't buy we need a new word for this. Particularly this justification is nonsense - "layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved" Who said this is true? Lik…

Language is not the same thing to all people. Having two different terms, one for permanent changes and one for more temporary changes, seems useful and beneficial to the language.

For you, the distinction in terms apparently does not exist. But for some, including me, this distinction exists. Would it not be better for us all to adopt the distinction?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#712

Post by fragmede »

scarface_74 wrote: post #665
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

I keep reading this. I don’t know how much Spotify pays or if it pays above market. But I much rather have a high paying job - especially if it doesn’t require relocation and then get laid off than not have a high paying role at all. A job is not a marriage, it’s more like a a semi serious dating relationship. I’ve had 9 jobs in 27 years and 7 since 2008. A job is merely a method to exchange labor for money to suppor…

Nine serious relationships in 27 years, but no marriage? I bet you live in one of those heathen countries where sex before marriage is legal, don't you? If you weren't allowed to have sex before marriage, would you still be unmarried after 27 years of relationships? Sweden, where Spotify is headquartered, is 8,600 kilometers from the San Francisco VC-backed tech scene, and is just as culturally removed from it as well.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#713

Post by jLaForest »

crazygringo wrote: post #596
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

This is completely backwards. They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors? Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as succ…

>This is just how normal, healthy business goes

17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#714

Post by dangus »

crazygringo wrote: post #596
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

This is completely backwards. They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors? Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as succ…

I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk.

Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's it. It's an at-will arrangement.

I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most companies acutally take too few risks. It's not hard to understand why when you start doing some the math: if you invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then your investment broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure rate and want to be more conservative with our investments. Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more conservative with our money, but because we didn't take enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even. This hypothetical thought experiment is why many companies should be over-hiring and taking risks.

If you make a mistake, so what? You lay off the workers and you immediately stop paying for that cost, and you might even have something to show for taking the risk.

Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few years is a completely valid strategy.

If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this but only for large employers making large cuts.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#715

Post by [deleted] »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #40

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse. Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them yea…

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#716

Post by lr4444lr »

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

Hot take: it's a life skill to look at a company beyond the salary they offer you and get at least a basic sense of whether they are over staffed, well managed, offering a valuable service, and not in a dying industry - or at least be sure your role there is doing something high value to the critical service provided. Too many employees IME are just too comfortable with ignorance about their employer outside of their team and the other teams they work with directly.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#719

Post by [deleted] »

ActionHank wrote: post #505
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them. Did they retrench the people who made that decision? Did they retrench the management who approved that contract? Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching, but they still gave Joe the bag.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#720

Post by happytiger »

izacus wrote: post #400
happytiger wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But for perspective it’s approximately 1/40th of the number of people that were employed at the peak of the Apollo moon landing missions (400,000 people) and that required the support of over 20,000 firms and universities. It’s a LOT of humans for streaming music service.

Last I checked Apollo didn't have to deal with worldwide music licensing or have an audience of 500 million people across the world it needs to serve. This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?

Well the evidence sure seems strong they could have done the same job with at least 13% fewer people. I wonder how many of the remaining are also absolutely essential for the service to operate and grow?

Music licensing, streaming and revenue sharing is hardly a “go to the moon in the 60s” complexity problem. And having a lot of end users doesn’t mean you need massive employee head counts in digital service delivery, it just means you have a lot of customers and need to build your digital delivery systems to handle a larger scale which is generally expressed as a modest pressure on engineering groups to build most scalable systems and not a rocket science level problem.

The high head counts are always present at the end of boom cycles, but a LOT of what companies are doing at the end of these cycles is simply busywork.

The busywork problem exists because managers equate business with productivity, and their organizations reflect that.

The perception is not just that a busy worker is engaged and making an effort, but even that their industriousness gives them a higher value than their less busy colleagues. But really only a relatively small number of employees do the vast majority of the work (Pareto principle). The whole corporate management theory sets up a dynamic in which two office workers completing identical tasks can be judged on their busyness, rather than their results. Who appears to be more engaged: the busy worker who skips lunch to get things finished, or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses the time saved to buy groceries online?

This, when applied at scale, leads to highly staffed organizations with a LOT of busy people who don’t really do that much compared to their potential for output.

If you don’t see the metaphor between a large engineering project and an engineering organization that seems over staffed, that’s fine. But do try to have the social grace to not call people dumb. There is just no call for insults here.

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