5 ms·

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 f

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 slightly better every year while fixing obvious bugs. Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free.

danpalmer 3y ago
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 localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant. Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing. Honestly, where do you get "80%"?
- maxglute 3y ago
  >Honestly, where do you get "80%"? Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to engineer/design team.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    Well thanks for owning up to it! I agree that it feels like the product from an engineering perspective was "finished" a while ago, however when I think about it for a while I can come up with many things that will need ongoing engineering work. For example, bug fixes (no one ever finishes this), support for new devices/phones/smart speakers/TVs/cars, support for payments and authentication in new regions, scaling work to scale to users in more regions, reliability and operational work. And that's just the stuff that isn't about growing more. I think it's reasonable to expect that businesses want to grow, and this isn't always anti-consumer either, as it can result in services that appeal to more users and cost less. This means engineering work on the marketing funnel, onboarding, new markets like podcasts, and lots more.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts. Will not miss them.
  - maxglute 3y ago
    200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does. I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist. When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.
      - madeofpalk 3y ago
        Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a "hide from Discover Weekly" button.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345
- apwell23 3y ago
  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.
  - dmd 3y ago
    People who make CRUD sites think everything is just a CRUD site.
    - Gooblebrai 3y ago
      Engineering-bias at its best. Thinking about the product complexity but not about the business
  - makestuff 3y ago
    It is a shame for Chicago that groupon didn't continue to find success. I really think that if they had continued to grow the Chicago tech scene would be significantly larger than it is today.
    - boiler_up800 3y ago
      Absolutely agree. I’m not sure I can name another name brand Chicago tech company, which is devastating for their startup and venture ecosystem.
      - tempusalaria 3y ago
        Citadel. Chicago has been a big centre for developers for finance companies for a long time. Hedge Funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers etc.
        local_crmdgeon 3y ago
        Citadel is moving to Miami because Chicago government sucks - the move was due to "riots, an employee stabbed, and the attempted hijacking of his Ken Griffin's car" https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-headquarters-to-miami-from-chicago-2022-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-h...
- aerhardt 3y ago
  I find their algorithms for recommendation (song and artist “radios”) far inferior to 2000’s Pandora, so at least in that area I agree with GP that throwing 1000 times the resources at the problem doesn’t seem to be doing anything…
- mrkeen 3y ago
  > What do you think the employees do? Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music. If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw. But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!
  - smus 3y ago
    I think you're missing the point that coding isn't the only type of job
    - mrkeen 3y ago
      Do you think that the non-coders have more time to do their actual work than the coders?
      - danpalmer 3y ago
        I think your representation of a software engineer's work is made in bad faith. There may be some like this, but from anywhere I've worked and anyone I've spoken to in the industry, it's a small minority. I haven't worked at Spotify but I have worked with an ex-Spotify engineer who was very productive and one of the best engineers I've worked with. The representation is in bad faith because it overstates the balance of non-coding tasks, but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding.
        mrkeen 3y ago
        > but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding. I once walked out of an improv class (on company time)
- NickC25 3y ago
  Spotify had a large headcount. Let's look at some of your examples and see where things can logically be cut. >I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. This can be streamlined considerably through standardized contracts. I'd wager 90% of the inventory that said team gets is from niche artists, independent artists or small labels. Very few artists actually have the clout or resources to negotiate their own deals with Spotify. That's sort of the point of having executives - to handle the Taylor Swifts of the world. Your local band, rapper, singer-songwriter or producer doesn't matter to Spotify. Have a clear and straightforward tier system for compensation. You get a billion streams a year? You get $X. You get 10,000 streams a year? You get $Y. >There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant. You don't need a large team to curate playlists when you can have users curate playlists. In fact, they already do. You don't need a huge localization team either. Users already take care of the legwork for you. Same goes for algorithm tuning. >Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing. Spotify is kinda already there in terms of international expansion. Anywhere they aren't already, they probably won't get there for political reasons (such as China). More languages? Sure, but that doesn't require a massive team. Fortunately, there are a few dominant languages around the world, and Spotify has those covered. More payment methods? Let the creators of those methods handle that - that's their job. Credit Card companies or banks or whatever don't create their own payment platform tech and just say "now it's yours to try to implement", they have entire teams dedicated to that. More types of music publishing? Like what? There's only so many methods of publishing music, and I'd wager there's going to be very little (if any) innovation there for a while. Spotify doesn't really distribute any other forms of published music besides digital streams. They aren't selling records or CDs, are they? EDIT: you could also say Spotify has vastly overspent on the likes of Joe Rogan, no matter how popular he is. $200 million dollars to a company that isn't very profitable, no matter how large, is just bad business. He's worth nowhere close to $200 million.
piva00 3y ago
> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free. The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations. There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them. What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.
- maxglute 3y ago
  No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product. Where/when that point is of course highly subjective. But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500 employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.
  - Closi 3y ago
    Well I just googled and Valve has 1,139 employees, and Spotify will now have 7,800 - It's nowhere near 20x. Still a big gap, although I suspect they are very different offerings and companies. Differences include: * Spotify needs to sell ads (to support it's free tier). This requires engineering and people to sell the ads. * Spotify is in a more competitive market than Steam (who have a nearly de-facto monopoly) so more advertising/marketing effort is required. * Interfacing with the entire global music industry takes time and resource. There may also be differences to the extent these companies outsource and use contractors which could make it more difficult to see actual headcount.
surgical_fire 3y ago
[flagged]
- maxglute 3y ago
  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 better without having that many brains adding creep/degrading the product (subject to opinion) in the first place.
  - addicted 3y ago
    > 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 arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half. The point of having employees in a major platform based company isn’t just to “work fine”, but to out compete massive trillion dollar companies while at the same time fending off tiny 2-3 person startups which may come with a completely new idea or approach out of nowhere. Twitter’s reduced workforce only allows it to exist but has made it extremely hard to actually defend from those forces. And to the extent it is succeeding to retain any users it’s almost entirely because of the advantages built by the company when it had a much larger workforce. The only caveat I will add is that a lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic due to FOMO more than anything else, and we know this because most of their CEOs have said as much.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >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.
tarsinge 3y ago
If a company needs to fire people to prevent a product from degrading then it’s too late the company culture is rotten to its core.
Ajay-p 3y ago
When startups receive huge waves of investor cash it can seem like the runway is forever. Look at Twitter which had far more employees than it needed. When the cash seems infinite there may be a tendency to forget the principle of staying lean.
acjohnson55 3y ago
At every company I've worked at, there are things we want to do that nearly everybody think are a good idea. But we can't do them all, because we have limited capital. So we have to be very strategic. 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.
- varjag 3y ago
  10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?
  - SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
    Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.
    - varjag 3y ago
      Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time. My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.
yibg 3y ago
No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let’s assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year. 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 - 10000 employees, let’s round up and say 10,000 employees. If they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies. At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.
- Solvency 3y ago
  What in the absolute fuck are 10000 people doing at Spotify? Really try to crunch those numbers mentally here. It's insane.
  - kredd 3y ago
    Supporting half a billion constant users around the world, and staff dealing with local artists and bands from almost every single country. Even outside of engineering they need a ton of support staff — starting from marketing to lawyers. Every country is fairly different as well when it comes to “music style”, so there’s a significant tailoring I would say. They’re doing whatever they’re doing pretty well as well. It’s basically the only subscription service at this point I wouldn’t consider to get rid of.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      > Supporting half a billion constant users around the world I am sure curl does too, with one guy running it. Spotify is not a telephone company. The engineering work hardly scale with the amount of users. There should be a need for some extra sales staff, lawyers and translators per market. Their engineer staff numbers are just silly.
miyuru 3y ago
Spotify also has studios in multiple locations. https://spotifystudios.com/ https://spotifystudios.com/

danpalmer 3y ago

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 localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant. Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing. Honestly, where do you get "80%"?

maxglute 3y ago
>Honestly, where do you get "80%"? Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to engineer/design team.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Well thanks for owning up to it! I agree that it feels like the product from an engineering perspective was "finished" a while ago, however when I think about it for a while I can come up with many things that will need ongoing engineering work. For example, bug fixes (no one ever finishes this), support for new devices/phones/smart speakers/TVs/cars, support for payments and authentication in new regions, scaling work to scale to users in more regions, reliability and operational work. And that's just the stuff that isn't about growing more. I think it's reasonable to expect that businesses want to grow, and this isn't always anti-consumer either, as it can result in services that appeal to more users and cost less. This means engineering work on the marketing funnel, onboarding, new markets like podcasts, and lots more.
madeofpalk 3y ago
There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts. Will not miss them.
- maxglute 3y ago
  200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does. I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist. When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a "hide from Discover Weekly" button.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345
apwell23 3y ago
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.
- dmd 3y ago
  People who make CRUD sites think everything is just a CRUD site.
  - Gooblebrai 3y ago
    Engineering-bias at its best. Thinking about the product complexity but not about the business
- makestuff 3y ago
  It is a shame for Chicago that groupon didn't continue to find success. I really think that if they had continued to grow the Chicago tech scene would be significantly larger than it is today.
  - boiler_up800 3y ago
    Absolutely agree. I’m not sure I can name another name brand Chicago tech company, which is devastating for their startup and venture ecosystem.
    - tempusalaria 3y ago
      Citadel. Chicago has been a big centre for developers for finance companies for a long time. Hedge Funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers etc.
      - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
        Citadel is moving to Miami because Chicago government sucks - the move was due to "riots, an employee stabbed, and the attempted hijacking of his Ken Griffin's car" https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-headquarters-to-miami-from-chicago-2022-6?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-h...
aerhardt 3y ago
I find their algorithms for recommendation (song and artist “radios”) far inferior to 2000’s Pandora, so at least in that area I agree with GP that throwing 1000 times the resources at the problem doesn’t seem to be doing anything…
mrkeen 3y ago
> What do you think the employees do? Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music. If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw. But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!
- smus 3y ago
  I think you're missing the point that coding isn't the only type of job
  - mrkeen 3y ago
    Do you think that the non-coders have more time to do their actual work than the coders?
    - danpalmer 3y ago
      I think your representation of a software engineer's work is made in bad faith. There may be some like this, but from anywhere I've worked and anyone I've spoken to in the industry, it's a small minority. I haven't worked at Spotify but I have worked with an ex-Spotify engineer who was very productive and one of the best engineers I've worked with. The representation is in bad faith because it overstates the balance of non-coding tasks, but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding.
      - mrkeen 3y ago
        > but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding. I once walked out of an improv class (on company time)
NickC25 3y ago
Spotify had a large headcount. Let's look at some of your examples and see where things can logically be cut. >I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. This can be streamlined considerably through standardized contracts. I'd wager 90% of the inventory that said team gets is from niche artists, independent artists or small labels. Very few artists actually have the clout or resources to negotiate their own deals with Spotify. That's sort of the point of having executives - to handle the Taylor Swifts of the world. Your local band, rapper, singer-songwriter or producer doesn't matter to Spotify. Have a clear and straightforward tier system for compensation. You get a billion streams a year? You get $X. You get 10,000 streams a year? You get $Y. >There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant. You don't need a large team to curate playlists when you can have users curate playlists. In fact, they already do. You don't need a huge localization team either. Users already take care of the legwork for you. Same goes for algorithm tuning. >Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing. Spotify is kinda already there in terms of international expansion. Anywhere they aren't already, they probably won't get there for political reasons (such as China). More languages? Sure, but that doesn't require a massive team. Fortunately, there are a few dominant languages around the world, and Spotify has those covered. More payment methods? Let the creators of those methods handle that - that's their job. Credit Card companies or banks or whatever don't create their own payment platform tech and just say "now it's yours to try to implement", they have entire teams dedicated to that. More types of music publishing? Like what? There's only so many methods of publishing music, and I'd wager there's going to be very little (if any) innovation there for a while. Spotify doesn't really distribute any other forms of published music besides digital streams. They aren't selling records or CDs, are they? EDIT: you could also say Spotify has vastly overspent on the likes of Joe Rogan, no matter how popular he is. $200 million dollars to a company that isn't very profitable, no matter how large, is just bad business. He's worth nowhere close to $200 million.

piva00 3y ago

> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free. The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations. There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them. What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.

maxglute 3y ago
No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product. Where/when that point is of course highly subjective. But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500 employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.
- Closi 3y ago
  Well I just googled and Valve has 1,139 employees, and Spotify will now have 7,800 - It's nowhere near 20x. Still a big gap, although I suspect they are very different offerings and companies. Differences include: * Spotify needs to sell ads (to support it's free tier). This requires engineering and people to sell the ads. * Spotify is in a more competitive market than Steam (who have a nearly de-facto monopoly) so more advertising/marketing effort is required. * Interfacing with the entire global music industry takes time and resource. There may also be differences to the extent these companies outsource and use contractors which could make it more difficult to see actual headcount.

surgical_fire 3y ago

[flagged]

maxglute 3y ago
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 better without having that many brains adding creep/degrading the product (subject to opinion) in the first place.
- addicted 3y ago
  > 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 arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half. The point of having employees in a major platform based company isn’t just to “work fine”, but to out compete massive trillion dollar companies while at the same time fending off tiny 2-3 person startups which may come with a completely new idea or approach out of nowhere. Twitter’s reduced workforce only allows it to exist but has made it extremely hard to actually defend from those forces. And to the extent it is succeeding to retain any users it’s almost entirely because of the advantages built by the company when it had a much larger workforce. The only caveat I will add is that a lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic due to FOMO more than anything else, and we know this because most of their CEOs have said as much.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >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.

tarsinge 3y ago

If a company needs to fire people to prevent a product from degrading then it’s too late the company culture is rotten to its core.

Ajay-p 3y ago

When startups receive huge waves of investor cash it can seem like the runway is forever. Look at Twitter which had far more employees than it needed. When the cash seems infinite there may be a tendency to forget the principle of staying lean.

acjohnson55 3y ago

At every company I've worked at, there are things we want to do that nearly everybody think are a good idea. But we can't do them all, because we have limited capital. So we have to be very strategic. 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.

varjag 3y ago
10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?
- SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
  Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.
  - varjag 3y ago
    Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time. My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.

yibg 3y ago

No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let’s assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year. 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 - 10000 employees, let’s round up and say 10,000 employees. If they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies. At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.

Solvency 3y ago
What in the absolute fuck are 10000 people doing at Spotify? Really try to crunch those numbers mentally here. It's insane.
- kredd 3y ago
  Supporting half a billion constant users around the world, and staff dealing with local artists and bands from almost every single country. Even outside of engineering they need a ton of support staff — starting from marketing to lawyers. Every country is fairly different as well when it comes to “music style”, so there’s a significant tailoring I would say. They’re doing whatever they’re doing pretty well as well. It’s basically the only subscription service at this point I wouldn’t consider to get rid of.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    > Supporting half a billion constant users around the world I am sure curl does too, with one guy running it. Spotify is not a telephone company. The engineering work hardly scale with the amount of users. There should be a need for some extra sales staff, lawyers and translators per market. Their engineer staff numbers are just silly.

miyuru 3y ago

Spotify also has studios in multiple locations. https://spotifystudios.com/ https://spotifystudios.com/