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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 i

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 don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

maxehmookau 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.
- freedomben 3y ago
  What should the punishment be? Fines for layoffs?
  - toss1 3y ago
    Sure. There are all kinds of things that could be done to increase their consideration of moves like this and simultaneously benefit the people affected. E.g., rather than considering only percentages of unemployed/employed to set rates for Unemployment Insurance, they could also add a "capriciousness" factor for events like this. Or, they could also require funds be provided for continuing education for those laid off. Heck, they could also just make a basic adjustment for the inherent bias in the Unemployment Insurance rates against small biz, where a single layoff/firing has a huge negative effect on your rates, more than firing 100 people for a medium-sized company. But of course, for the "libertarians", this is evil regulation.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Your comment was pretty good, but didn't need the weird potshot at libertarians at the end. What your comment touched on though is how the companies already are "punished" in a way for it because it affects their unemployment insurance rates. That was established as a way to balance the needs of the company (unintended bad consequences happen to unemployment rates when you tie the hands of firing) with the needs of the people who are affected. Arguing that the balance is off seems like a much different argument than GP though.
ActionHank 3y ago
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.
- weebull 3y ago
  Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.
  - ActionHank 3y ago
    Thank you!
- rsanek 3y ago
  i feel like this is a pretty hard thing to assess without access to internal metrics
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Under What metric do you apply that? What goals did they have for his program? My understanding was the purpose of buying Joe Rogan was 2 fold, one of course is to bring in new users, but that was not the only goal (maybe not even the primary goal) the other goal was to get more of their current users to have more listen time on podcasts and less on Music, they pay far far far far less for podcasts (in many cases nothing) than they do for Music. If they were able to shift the total listen time it could have more than paid for Rogan even with out new subscribers The contract is up for renewal very soon so if they drop him we know he did not meet their objectives. Somehow I bet they renew
- bogomipz 3y ago
  They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June. I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver financially. See: https://archive.is/Hgh3V https://archive.is/Hgh3V
pm90 3y ago
> Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot. Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees from the team (and keep others on their toes). Until there are real consequences these companies will not change.
chasely 3y ago
I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."
- kamikaz1k 3y ago
  That is how it should be read, because this is how these companies operate. My company's CFO was talking about this as we pushed for profitability (since the market expectations changed) and rationale for investment was exactly like you said. "It's our job to grow, profitably, so if we think we can generate more than what we spend, we can invest. But if its not working, we will cut it." Unless you have a specific reason to believe it to be otherwise.
fullshark 3y ago
What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice? Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should. For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers and the cost cutting via offshoring/remote employee replacement / no backfill is probably just getting started.
- weebull 3y ago
  The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all. As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see which people worked out, I don't have a problem.
  - thinkingtoilet 3y ago
    >As long as they were hired in good faith I think that's the OP's point. They were not hired in good faith and I agree. This mass hiring/firing cycle is playing games with people's lives and, as always, the people at the top are unaffected by it, and in fact maybe rewarded for it. This isn't a game, this is people's lives. It's a little less horrible if it's a remote position but people upend their lives and move for jobs all the time.
    - zucked 3y ago
      I don't think there's any particular malice to the ups and downs - it's just the nature of work these days. Employers and employees have pretty much laid bare their view that the other is simply a cog in their machine. That being true, folks need to understand, plan for, and not be particularly surprised when these ups and downs happen. That means having a runway for lean times, and knowing your worth, how to communicate it, and being flexible when things go pear-shaped. People do move for jobs all the time, yes, but I hope that part of the planning for that involves asking the question - "what happens if this job evaporates?"
svarcoe 3y ago
And they were still hiring too! My first day was last Monday haha, last day today
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  That's so messed up when companies do that. Curious what your separation package was?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bogomipz 3y ago
  Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pgwhalen 3y ago
    I agree it's not a fun situation, but I'm curious what you expect to have happened instead. What would the "competent management" version of the situation look like?
    - bogomipz 3y ago
      In a competent management culture plans of impending downsizing would have been communicated to hiring managers and they would have adjusted their open reqs. It is not uncommon to be told during the interview process that a role has been frozen. It's personally happened to me on 3 occasions.
- Solvency 3y ago
  What team. What role.
falcolas 3y ago
You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some people."
gizmo 3y ago
Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work? There is a lot of opportunism out there.
- vkou 3y ago
  Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check. The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground. Any significant layoff that doesn't have a disproportionate number of people from those two groups thrown overboard is ass-covering. They are the ones who screwed up.
  - potamic 3y ago
    In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy. Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill management's agenda.
    - vkou 3y ago
      > In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of what actually happens in their firm. Middle management controls that - by deciding on what kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person director (who should at least vaguely know what each of their reports is doing this year) is.
emodendroket 3y ago
It’s hard to know what’s “responsible” when you’re operating a business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years without making money.
dsaavy 3y ago
A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot be replaced without the business collapsing. No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.
coredog64 3y ago
> In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have a well known company on their resume, and are being let go during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit. What’s not to like?
- michaelt 3y ago
  If they knew that was what they were getting into, great. On the other hand, if I hire a guy, he quits a secure job, he moves his family all the way across the country, and then 3 months later I fire him because I changed my mind about what I need? That guy is absolutely not going to thank me.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Yes, it depends on those factors. One other factor is what would have happened at his old job. I have a friend who went from one big tech company to another was then laid off recently. There's a good chance the result would have been the same either way, since the first company cut a lot as well. One factor that keeps people at a company is the knowledge that, all things equal, last hired is first fired. It's not hard and fast, but you tend to have fewer allies at a company you just joined, making you more susceptible. When someone decides to leave one company and join a new one, they know that they're giving up this advantage.
hk1337 3y ago
I remember comments clamoring how great Spotify was going to be because of their European roots compared to Apple (Music) a U.S. company.
boringg 3y ago
If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap. I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future. I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.
mrcwinn 3y ago
There is still no crystal ball. You take the opportunities as they are presented, especially given that your competitors are doing the same. Where exactly was your commentary on Spotify's business when times were better, urging them to leave more people without jobs?
wesapien 3y ago
Put a cost to unwanted behavior and make people think twice with siding with Moloch
Aaargh20318 3y ago
> All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth' In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly. They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a job that somehow helps making the company money. As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the market and product (which as far as I can tell is not the case here), firing employees should result in lower revenues. After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees. This leaves me with a bunch of questions when I read things like this: 1) If the company can get by without these people, what were they doing in the first place? 2) If these people did not contribute to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) what was the point in hiring them? 3) If they did contribute, why let them go?
- yCombLinks 3y ago
  I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every single update has made the windows version worse at least. They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose benefit I don't know. Obviously that is just the app side part of the whole org.
  - butlike 3y ago
    The 2011 app with blatant iframes partitioning the sections of the app was peak Spotify Desktop, imo
  - sbarre 3y ago
    I feel the same way, and wonder if it's just product and UX teams justifying their existence? As a paying customer I don't appreciate being a beta tester for some random UI fiddling. Never mind that I have things forced on me like podcasts and audiobooks that I will never engage with on Spotify, and that I can't simply hide...
- andruby 3y ago
  > After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees. That is only true for profitable business and only true _on average_ across all employees. It isn't true for each employee individually. Some employees are a lot more valuable at generating money than others. This isn't necessarily the employee's fault. With layoffs and restructurings the business should be trying to improve that average profitability per employee.
crazygringo 3y ago
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 successful as they wanted, so they're keeping them but massively scaling back on future investment. Which means they don't need those employees anymore. Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive, and risk a competitor taking their place, and then go the way of Pandora? Do you think it's wrong to hire teams to build products when you hope the products will succeed but you can't know 100% for sure? This is just how normal, healthy business goes. You make bets, sometimes they succeed wildly, and sometimes they don't. When they don't, it often results in layoffs because there's not enough profit to keep paying those employees with, and there isn't immediately any new product for them to work on. Believe me, a company with profit margins as thin as Spotify's can't afford to "hire for the sake of hiring". That's just not how it works.
- jLaForest 3y ago
  >This is just how normal, healthy business goes 17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks
- jebarker 3y ago
  > Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And how does that help them make more money if they still have to always give the record label more money?
    - jebarker 3y ago
      How does innovation help them make more money? In the case of higher quality, they can charge more. There are premium services such as TIDAL doing that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
geodel 3y ago
> "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'... But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-awareness of the world. They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in people is some service to employees.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing, its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a architectural mess). Once more from the the top - to be let go in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.
hammock 3y ago
>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 don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot. I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of continued employment. Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are 8% we can only afford Y"
- notpachet 3y ago
  > They were being responsible at the time. Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.
  - hammock 3y ago
    Remember hindsight is 20/20. If capitalists were as risk-averse as some would like, we'd be stuck in the past forever
    - morelisp 3y ago
      > we'd be stuck in the past forever You say this like it's self-evident it's a bad thing, but it's not, even if I'm a middle-class white guy in 1975, let alone an Oneida in 1475.
    - notpachet 3y ago
      I get annoyed with comments like yours that reach for absolutisms to try and make a point. No, we wouldn't be stuck in the past "forever". We may just move more slowly into the future than you would prefer. Given our historic inability to predict the long-term externalities of present-day technologies, I'd say a more cautious approach is warranted compared to the current YOLO strategy. The only way the human race becomes stuck in the past forever is if it goes extinct.
paulddraper 3y ago
> don't fill up your task when gas is cheap Of course you should! > do doughnuts in the parking lot Of course you shouldn't! Did Spotify do that?
rPlayer6554 3y ago
You can't have your cake and eat it too. There are plenty of other lower risk companies that have way lower chances of layoffs, but they don't pay as well. Working at a company that tasks risks and has a high rate of return also has a higher chance of making the wrong bet and needing to cut you. If you want a perfectly stable job go work in the government: you'll be practically unfirable. - someone who was layed off from a FAANG corp. I was not done a disservice, I knew what I was getting into.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Or the public sector. Anyone who thought a money-losing company like Spotify was a safe ship to jump on board didn't think things through.
culopatin 3y ago
On the other hand, 17% of headcount had a job during that time. Which one is better?
smugglerFlynn 3y ago
Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and many tech companies are really in the drift racing business, not in "commute rationally" business. The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.
scarface_74 3y ago
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 support my addiction to food and shelter. Once either me or the company decide it isn’t on our best interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break up and I change my relationship status to “open for work” and put myself back out there. Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 And I planned accordingly from day 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302
- fragmede 3y ago
  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.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    That’s the first time I’ve heard my analogy to job - relationships being taken to its logical extreme.
lr4444lr 3y ago
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.

maxehmookau 3y ago

I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.

freedomben 3y ago
What should the punishment be? Fines for layoffs?
- toss1 3y ago
  Sure. There are all kinds of things that could be done to increase their consideration of moves like this and simultaneously benefit the people affected. E.g., rather than considering only percentages of unemployed/employed to set rates for Unemployment Insurance, they could also add a "capriciousness" factor for events like this. Or, they could also require funds be provided for continuing education for those laid off. Heck, they could also just make a basic adjustment for the inherent bias in the Unemployment Insurance rates against small biz, where a single layoff/firing has a huge negative effect on your rates, more than firing 100 people for a medium-sized company. But of course, for the "libertarians", this is evil regulation.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Your comment was pretty good, but didn't need the weird potshot at libertarians at the end. What your comment touched on though is how the companies already are "punished" in a way for it because it affects their unemployment insurance rates. That was established as a way to balance the needs of the company (unintended bad consequences happen to unemployment rates when you tie the hands of firing) with the needs of the people who are affected. Arguing that the balance is off seems like a much different argument than GP though.

ActionHank 3y ago

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.

weebull 3y ago
Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.
- ActionHank 3y ago
  Thank you!
rsanek 3y ago
i feel like this is a pretty hard thing to assess without access to internal metrics
phpisthebest 3y ago
Under What metric do you apply that? What goals did they have for his program? My understanding was the purpose of buying Joe Rogan was 2 fold, one of course is to bring in new users, but that was not the only goal (maybe not even the primary goal) the other goal was to get more of their current users to have more listen time on podcasts and less on Music, they pay far far far far less for podcasts (in many cases nothing) than they do for Music. If they were able to shift the total listen time it could have more than paid for Rogan even with out new subscribers The contract is up for renewal very soon so if they drop him we know he did not meet their objectives. Somehow I bet they renew
bogomipz 3y ago
They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June. I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver financially. See: https://archive.is/Hgh3V https://archive.is/Hgh3V

pm90 3y ago

> Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot. Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees from the team (and keep others on their toes). Until there are real consequences these companies will not change.

chasely 3y ago

I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."

kamikaz1k 3y ago
That is how it should be read, because this is how these companies operate. My company's CFO was talking about this as we pushed for profitability (since the market expectations changed) and rationale for investment was exactly like you said. "It's our job to grow, profitably, so if we think we can generate more than what we spend, we can invest. But if its not working, we will cut it." Unless you have a specific reason to believe it to be otherwise.

fullshark 3y ago

What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice? Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should. For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers and the cost cutting via offshoring/remote employee replacement / no backfill is probably just getting started.

weebull 3y ago
The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all. As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see which people worked out, I don't have a problem.
- thinkingtoilet 3y ago
  >As long as they were hired in good faith I think that's the OP's point. They were not hired in good faith and I agree. This mass hiring/firing cycle is playing games with people's lives and, as always, the people at the top are unaffected by it, and in fact maybe rewarded for it. This isn't a game, this is people's lives. It's a little less horrible if it's a remote position but people upend their lives and move for jobs all the time.
  - zucked 3y ago
    I don't think there's any particular malice to the ups and downs - it's just the nature of work these days. Employers and employees have pretty much laid bare their view that the other is simply a cog in their machine. That being true, folks need to understand, plan for, and not be particularly surprised when these ups and downs happen. That means having a runway for lean times, and knowing your worth, how to communicate it, and being flexible when things go pear-shaped. People do move for jobs all the time, yes, but I hope that part of the planning for that involves asking the question - "what happens if this job evaporates?"

svarcoe 3y ago

And they were still hiring too! My first day was last Monday haha, last day today

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
That's so messed up when companies do that. Curious what your separation package was?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bogomipz 3y ago
Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pgwhalen 3y ago
  I agree it's not a fun situation, but I'm curious what you expect to have happened instead. What would the "competent management" version of the situation look like?
  - bogomipz 3y ago
    In a competent management culture plans of impending downsizing would have been communicated to hiring managers and they would have adjusted their open reqs. It is not uncommon to be told during the interview process that a role has been frozen. It's personally happened to me on 3 occasions.
Solvency 3y ago
What team. What role.

falcolas 3y ago

You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some people."

gizmo 3y ago

Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work? There is a lot of opportunism out there.

vkou 3y ago
Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check. The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground. Any significant layoff that doesn't have a disproportionate number of people from those two groups thrown overboard is ass-covering. They are the ones who screwed up.
- potamic 3y ago
  In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy. Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill management's agenda.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of what actually happens in their firm. Middle management controls that - by deciding on what kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person director (who should at least vaguely know what each of their reports is doing this year) is.

emodendroket 3y ago

It’s hard to know what’s “responsible” when you’re operating a business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years without making money.

dsaavy 3y ago

A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot be replaced without the business collapsing. No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.

coredog64 3y ago

> In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have a well known company on their resume, and are being let go during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit. What’s not to like?

michaelt 3y ago
If they knew that was what they were getting into, great. On the other hand, if I hire a guy, he quits a secure job, he moves his family all the way across the country, and then 3 months later I fire him because I changed my mind about what I need? That guy is absolutely not going to thank me.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Yes, it depends on those factors. One other factor is what would have happened at his old job. I have a friend who went from one big tech company to another was then laid off recently. There's a good chance the result would have been the same either way, since the first company cut a lot as well. One factor that keeps people at a company is the knowledge that, all things equal, last hired is first fired. It's not hard and fast, but you tend to have fewer allies at a company you just joined, making you more susceptible. When someone decides to leave one company and join a new one, they know that they're giving up this advantage.

hk1337 3y ago

I remember comments clamoring how great Spotify was going to be because of their European roots compared to Apple (Music) a U.S. company.

boringg 3y ago

If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap. I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future. I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.

mrcwinn 3y ago

There is still no crystal ball. You take the opportunities as they are presented, especially given that your competitors are doing the same. Where exactly was your commentary on Spotify's business when times were better, urging them to leave more people without jobs?

wesapien 3y ago

Put a cost to unwanted behavior and make people think twice with siding with Moloch

Aaargh20318 3y ago

> All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth' In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly. They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a job that somehow helps making the company money. As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the market and product (which as far as I can tell is not the case here), firing employees should result in lower revenues. After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees. This leaves me with a bunch of questions when I read things like this: 1) If the company can get by without these people, what were they doing in the first place? 2) If these people did not contribute to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) what was the point in hiring them? 3) If they did contribute, why let them go?

yCombLinks 3y ago
I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every single update has made the windows version worse at least. They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose benefit I don't know. Obviously that is just the app side part of the whole org.
- butlike 3y ago
  The 2011 app with blatant iframes partitioning the sections of the app was peak Spotify Desktop, imo
- sbarre 3y ago
  I feel the same way, and wonder if it's just product and UX teams justifying their existence? As a paying customer I don't appreciate being a beta tester for some random UI fiddling. Never mind that I have things forced on me like podcasts and audiobooks that I will never engage with on Spotify, and that I can't simply hide...
andruby 3y ago
> After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees. That is only true for profitable business and only true _on average_ across all employees. It isn't true for each employee individually. Some employees are a lot more valuable at generating money than others. This isn't necessarily the employee's fault. With layoffs and restructurings the business should be trying to improve that average profitability per employee.

crazygringo 3y ago

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 successful as they wanted, so they're keeping them but massively scaling back on future investment. Which means they don't need those employees anymore. Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive, and risk a competitor taking their place, and then go the way of Pandora? Do you think it's wrong to hire teams to build products when you hope the products will succeed but you can't know 100% for sure? This is just how normal, healthy business goes. You make bets, sometimes they succeed wildly, and sometimes they don't. When they don't, it often results in layoffs because there's not enough profit to keep paying those employees with, and there isn't immediately any new product for them to work on. Believe me, a company with profit margins as thin as Spotify's can't afford to "hire for the sake of hiring". That's just not how it works.

jLaForest 3y ago
>This is just how normal, healthy business goes 17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks
jebarker 3y ago
> Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  And how does that help them make more money if they still have to always give the record label more money?
  - jebarker 3y ago
    How does innovation help them make more money? In the case of higher quality, they can charge more. There are premium services such as TIDAL doing that.

deleted 3y ago

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geodel 3y ago

> "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'... But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-awareness of the world. They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in people is some service to employees.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing, its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a architectural mess). Once more from the the top - to be let go in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.

hammock 3y ago

>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 don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot. I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of continued employment. Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are 8% we can only afford Y"

notpachet 3y ago
> They were being responsible at the time. Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.
- hammock 3y ago
  Remember hindsight is 20/20. If capitalists were as risk-averse as some would like, we'd be stuck in the past forever
  - morelisp 3y ago
    > we'd be stuck in the past forever You say this like it's self-evident it's a bad thing, but it's not, even if I'm a middle-class white guy in 1975, let alone an Oneida in 1475.
  - notpachet 3y ago
    I get annoyed with comments like yours that reach for absolutisms to try and make a point. No, we wouldn't be stuck in the past "forever". We may just move more slowly into the future than you would prefer. Given our historic inability to predict the long-term externalities of present-day technologies, I'd say a more cautious approach is warranted compared to the current YOLO strategy. The only way the human race becomes stuck in the past forever is if it goes extinct.

paulddraper 3y ago

> don't fill up your task when gas is cheap Of course you should! > do doughnuts in the parking lot Of course you shouldn't! Did Spotify do that?

rPlayer6554 3y ago

You can't have your cake and eat it too. There are plenty of other lower risk companies that have way lower chances of layoffs, but they don't pay as well. Working at a company that tasks risks and has a high rate of return also has a higher chance of making the wrong bet and needing to cut you. If you want a perfectly stable job go work in the government: you'll be practically unfirable. - someone who was layed off from a FAANG corp. I was not done a disservice, I knew what I was getting into.

ghaff 3y ago
Or the public sector. Anyone who thought a money-losing company like Spotify was a safe ship to jump on board didn't think things through.

culopatin 3y ago

On the other hand, 17% of headcount had a job during that time. Which one is better?

smugglerFlynn 3y ago

Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and many tech companies are really in the drift racing business, not in "commute rationally" business. The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.

scarface_74 3y ago

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 support my addiction to food and shelter. Once either me or the company decide it isn’t on our best interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break up and I change my relationship status to “open for work” and put myself back out there. Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 And I planned accordingly from day 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

fragmede 3y ago
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.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  That’s the first time I’ve heard my analogy to job - relationships being taken to its logical extreme.

lr4444lr 3y ago

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.