Spotify reducing employee base by about 6% | Hacker News Reader

Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

newsroom.spotify.com

294 pointsfilleokus476 comments

I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -39 million in net income. So while this move might take them into the positive net income, it's still only going to save them what? 0.1% of their revenue.

I realize it's much more complex than this, but I have been looking at it this way for nearly every recent headline/company and the savings are never really that significant. I'm not saying that people who don't contribute or people who are bad employees should be kept around forever because the company is healthy. I'm just observing the financial "cost" of these laid off employees compared against the companies revenue/net income.

Having been at a company that's doing layoffs and surviving multiple rounds of layoffs myself, the impact (in my opinion) on the remaining employees is quite significant. I have seen people constantly frustrated with losing team members, managers leaving once a few of their employees have left, good employees finding other employment, etc. I'm not sure what I would do in these companies positions, but it seems strange to just cut your workforce when the trend has been going up financially for your company. These types of layoffs just create negative, especially with the current state of the world. Are any of the board members taking a salary cut? Are any of the C level's taking a cut?

end rant, I need to get back to work so this doesn't happen to me.

Considering how generous the severance is (a good thing), I wonder if it will even save them much money this year (granted, there will probably be some resignations from people that disagree with the direction).

> I wonder if it will even save them much money this year

They also get to account for it differently. The severance payments can be written off as a one-time charge, so from that perspective they get to take the GAAP benefits this year.

Even though the cash flow is ~the same between letting people work for a year and then laying them off with no severance, doing it this way makes the business immediately look better.

Edit: I'm wrong looks like they can write it off.

The saving isn't that obvious because they might need to hire contracters (sometimes even the same worker) to make up for the lost workforce.

Also severance packages are expensive! In addition to all the costs associated with a big layoff plan like this one.

Probably more about sending a message to anxious tech-shareholders than anything else. 2023 is not the right year for a tech investment to appear to hemorrhage money.

> Probably more about sending a message to anxious tech-shareholders than anything else.

That's basically the whole deal.

You have to be seen to be cutting costs, to assuage the board and shareholders that you are performing your duty.

Layoffs are an incredibly easy way to do that.

My presumption is that it's both signaling to wall st to keep the stock price up (and for the C levels to keep their jobs) and also that companies did over hire in all sorts of weird ways in the last couple of years.

It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%. If you start figuring some of your moonshot ideas aren't hitting their OKR's, you have a few options:

* Just let them keep doing whatever without delivering what they claim they can

* Create new moonshots for them just because

* Move them to other products, but that doesn't mean they'll create more value as an org with (now) double the people

So what ends up happening is re-orgs which actually mean shutting down some failed ideas, moving the high performers to other products, moving low performers out of those products, then firing people who were left without a team.

Plus you need to take into the equation an assumption that because of how things look right now, natural attrition will be almost 0 in the next year or 2. If you're used to 5% of people leaving on their own per year, assume its closer to 0% for 2023 and 2024

This is way beyond the cynical claim that this keeps the stock up for another 2 months before it goes down again. There are teams delivering nothing. There are teams delivering 90% of the companies income. You can't just decide not to fire anyone, move 100% of the employees to the 90% income team, and think that income will grow just because more people work there now

Now, do these companies do it right? really finding the good people and keeping them, and removing the weaker people, thats up to debate

Presumably they already have performance processes that eliminate "dead weight". Be assured that layoffs never really mean that usual performance bases firings are paused. It's pretty much always happening on top of existing performance processes.

Layoffs like this mean you can blame external forces like the economy rather than saying, "our projects failed".

Some of these layoffs may have been coming anyway, but not the corporate statement about them is different.

I've seen this play out the consulting world which puts a much finer point on the process. There, work is all project-based. We build something for a customer and then maybe build another thing or otherwise move on to something else. There's basically no long-term value for our own business beyond unquantifiable things like reputation. When the pipeline dries up and there's not enough work to keep everyone staffed, layoffs happen. And as much as we tried to be meritocratic, being good at your job was less visible than being ok at your job while working on a valuable project. It was incumbent on managers to do emergency shuffling if they wanted to stash top performers on good projects or vice-versa, but it wasn't easy.

> It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%.

Pretty much my experience that when a company keeps growing, at some point most corporate employees will not actually be contributing anything.

Paradoxically, constraining teams with resources (but allowing them to make their own decisions) makes teams more efficient than if they had resources. Necessity is the mother of invention -- when people are forced to deal with the problem they will find a solution.

Corporations are worst possible places to be efficient -- not only you have the resources (and most people get lazy when they don't have to be inventive) but you are also typically not even allowed to be inventive as companies typically work towards centralising decisionmaking rather than allowing teams to steer themselves.

Same goes for hiring. I worked with teams which hired anybody because the manager was forced to hire quickly or loose budget. Or managers hired people just to enlarge their estates because headcount was how they decided who is more important.

So I completely understand why companies are laying off people. The only question is whether they are too optimistic about being able to identify who to lay off, exactly.

In my experience it is pretty difficult even for managers to understand who are best contributors in their teams. Get removed 2-3 levels from a line manager (2-3 levels is where the decisions would typically be made) and you can pretty much dream about understanding who to lay off, individually.

It is also naive to think layoffs effectively target dead weight. As more extensive layoffs are often decided by senior management rather than team leaders, such releases have a high signal-to-noise ratio.

Natural attrition will also not be close to 0 in the next year or 2. Even if the markets stay stagnant, there will be the usual musical chairs turnover (a Facebook employee joining Google replacing a Google employee who joined Facebook).

Layoffs are usually family within company graphs, with this family then naming the "guys" necessary for the departments to do there job. Means, you have dead weight forced to identify the vital organs, allowing to fire the "medium" weight. Yes, connections or talent are everything. No, its not fair.

> If you're used to 5% of people leaving on their own per year, assume its closer to 0% for 2023 and 2024

Strongly doubt this claim. Especially for employees of a sought-after firm like Spotify, there will always be people jumping ship either to other big co's or to join startups/start their own thing

>It's very naive to think these huge orgs don't have dead weight which is much bigger than 6%. If you start figuring some of your moonshot ideas aren't hitting their OKR's, you have a few options:

there's been so many versions of this low quality comment on every tech-company-mass-firing article. why is so little thought put into it? if the company feels it can save on salaries then:

1. close down projects that aren't effective/profitable/whatever

1. fire people who aren't effective/profitable/whatever

mass broad spectrum layoffs like these are not that, they're "oh, let's just randomly put holes in the org chart to save X% of salary and see how it goes". would you suggest saving data storage costs by deleting 6% of files? would you suggest reducing compute by turning off 6% of jobs?

edit: and presumably a counter argument to the above is "firing people in an optimal way is hard", to which I say lol of course it is? work harder, then, before firing people. "it's hard" isn't an excuse to do some random unrelated and useless thing instead.

Why do you think that mass broad spectrum layoffs are random holes? From what I've seen they follow exactly the structure you're describing - there's a company-wide search for projects that aren't pulling their weight, those projects are shut down, and the employees whose roles no longer make sense without the projects that will be shut down get laid off.

> would you suggest saving data storage costs by deleting 6% of files? would you suggest reducing compute by turning off 6% of jobs?

I would, and I've seen mandates like this achieve good results multiple times in my career. It's very rare to have a team that can't make do with 94% of their data storage footprint, but it's very common to have a team who would find it temporarily inconvenient or would rather prioritize other work over reducing it.

> Why do you think that mass broad spectrum layoffs are random holes? From what I've seen they follow exactly the structure you're describing - there's a company-wide search for projects that aren't pulling their weight, those projects are shut down, and the employees whose roles no longer make sense without the projects that will be shut down get laid off.

I’ve been through 2 companies with layoffs in the past year. What you describe is not how either worked. There were some targeted shutdowns, but many teams also just lost a member or two. In both cases my teams lost important people which have a really bad impact on the rest of the team.

? what are you talking about? The Google layoffs weren't like that, nor the Meta ones nor the Amazon, and I'm pretty sure the Spotify ones this article is about aren't either, though the post is very short.

I know quite a few people who were laid off at this point. I'm not seeing what you are. It's quite random.

As I mature in this industry I find it hard to agree, even though I draw my experience from organisations outside the FAANG if it’s still a thing. Dead weight, is in my experience no more than 2%, where I qualify dead weight as someone who cannot add value or is actively detrimental. Most people can add more value than they currently do. Many more people do not match their capacity, but that is mostly out of bad allocation of work etc. That bad allocation could be improved with restructuring but crowded and rigid management hierarchies are often the reason organisations don’t grow at the risk of diluting the self perceived value of upper-middle management. I think this round of layoffs will see a rebalance across sectors with banking etc. looking at huge resourcing demands that are inelastic (e.g. regulation) pulling in some of the talent. Similar to Covid layoffs outside tech, my prediction is the inversion will start soon.

I agree. But IME the number of "dead weight" varies heavily depending on some factors. I've definitely seen teams with >10% dead weight, because of a combo of bad hiring process, coupled with management not caring to check on them. Of course that might be a biased view: in the cases I know, the managers couldn't manage to get them back to speed, but those were managers that had failed on the hiring/day-to-day already.

After 1-3 years of tenure things start to look different imo. Sure you get bad hires, and you also get people who become lazy. But on any given project you tend to have some split of people who work on the wrong things, don’t work on anything, or fail to deliver. People who consistently hit one of these categories usually move on on their own - either because of culture fit or comp growth. It’s much easier and healthier to focus on retaining your best people. As long as someone is doing something, and isn’t a net drag on the team - firing seems to be more pain then the alternative in software.

Assuming that the industry returns to its standard 30-50% attrition year on year.

And those people become lazy because they put A LOT into the company those first 1-3 years. And after they coast a bit, they usual come back strong because 1. They are intimately familiar with the corporate culture and the internal software paradigm and 2. They have emotional investment. It's like getting divorced in your early 40s because things are not the same as a few years before, and not getting to the good part of a relationship.

Absolutely! I also didn’t quite see it when I moved around earlier in my career - but many of the more tenured folks simply know how to work efficiently in the organization.

They tend not to pick up meaningless fights, or invest time in work that the org doesn’t care about, when their are debates - they can usually settle them.

In hindsight I spent too much time early in my career on work no one cared about. I spend less time on that stuff now and have better wlb and feedback to boot.

You also transform a good percentage of your high performers into low performers (until they leave and high perform somewhere else). I've seen it happen every time.

> Create new moonshots for them just because

This seems disingenuous? They're "moonshots" as they've low chance of succeeding. You could pick the most proficient engineers and out-of-the-box thinkers and put them working on a "moonshot" and they'd still fail. Giving that team a new lofty goal seems like a great idea since they have experience working on large problems and can likely prune good/bad approaches much sooner than a fresh team.

Revenue is irrelevant when looking at savings, you have to look at net revenue or gross margin. Majority of Spotify’s revenue goes to record labels. If you are making -40mm / yr then a $90mm swing is a huge deal.

Also, can’t just look at salary - employees cost a lot more than their salary. 10% employer tax, health care, other ancillary benefits, IT equipment / space, etc. A $150k salary probably costs the company $250k all in.

What does laying off 600 people do to their net revenue/gross margins?

The cost picture is as follows:

money saved on staff reduction - money spent on layoff packages - (temporary reduction in productivity, because of lower staff morale)

Research shows there is no long-term benefit of layoffs other than the short-term gain in cash flow. Layoffs are only beneficial if they are needed for survival of the company

Lower productivity is highly questionable.

I’ve really only seen layoffs boost productivity. Suddenly there is less overhead and fewer cooks-in-the-kitchen.

Morale hits are real, but tend to fade if people feel confident that they’ve survived another day.

Research shows layoffs result in a lowering of productivity:

https://www.boardoptions.com/Learning%20from%20the%20past%20...

https://pavestep.com/post/the-effects-of-downsizing-on-remai...

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-layoffs-cost...

https://garfinkleexecutivecoaching.com/articles/career-advic...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/radhikaphilip/2020/07/23/the-pa...

You arrived at this conclusion anecdotally. You can't do your best work with a constant cloud hanging over you, doesn't matter who you are.

Morale hits are real, but tend to fade if people feel confident that they’ve survived another day.

Layoffs result in a 30% increase in staff turnover. As markets tend to be more challenging, it can take some months before people actually leave. This can have a knock on effect, especially if senior and respected staff leave.

Where will the senior and respected staff go? To other companies where they won’t be senior and respected

Other companies tend to know that poaching season is at it's finest after a round of layoffs.

People who weren't pushed will be considering jumping.

I don't work for titles, I work for money.

No they don't, because you never know if you're next. I have a bunch of friends at Google (you know, one of the richest companies on the planet and 94% 'survived' another day). Many are scared. You don't know if there'll be another round and if you're in it. People aren't now magically more productive because they survived and their peers didn't.

The layoffs were literally two business days ago..

and?

They're calling for the next one already.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/01/23/google-staff...

Almost every round of layoffs I've seen has resulted in people doing pointless bullshit to "look busy" while not actually doing anything.

Can you link that research?

It is in the thread below.

Do Swedish companies pay a lot into health care? Can you recover the cost of the IT equipment already paid for since these are existing employees?

Health care is paid through taxes in Sweden and your access to it is not dependent on your employment. You can have a private insurance (and I assume a company like Spotify does) but it’s mostly for getting access to some private doctors offices with shorter queues to some things. We don’t really have privately run hospitals as the US.

My vague recollection from an HR person was employees are 1.5x or 2.5x (something like that) their salary as a cost to the company. So $250k sounds about in the middle.

The layoffs aren’t about actually saving the cost of those specific employees.

Instead, the threat of being laid off is being used as a stick to bring the remaining employees in line — productivity has been lower the last few years, and leadership has no real way to measure on an individual level or how to improve it, so putting the pressure on employees is a tried and true tactics.

Further, they can make lower TC offers to future employees, and give lower raises, pointing to the “need” to do so as demonstrated by earlier layoffs.

So you lay off 6% but freeze the wages of the remaining 94% (who are grateful to have a job rather than carping about wages not tracking inflation) — big savings.

Pretty sure layoffs decrease productivity of the remaining employees, unless you're a H-1B visa worker, no one "works harder" after layoffs. Morale is low, resentment over "now I have to do X as well" grows and productivity gets hit.

I don't stay after a big round of layoffs for the same reason I'd rather buy stocks when they look like they're going up, not down.

The company is signaling that it is not doing well - why shouldn't I leave for a company that is doing well?

The only way I'll stay is if you want me to be part of a real plan to turn things around. And my involvement in that has to be rewarded - not just at the successful end of that process, but immediately.

The thing is there is no important signal about a specific company here, everyone is doing layoffs, the same as in previous years that everyone was in a hiring spree ignoring the actual company fundamentals. You can't just leave a company which is laying off people because everyone around you is also doing layoffs!

I’m assuming that with the major tech companies all laying off it becomes difficult to find another gig.

I'm hoping I don't have to find that out any time soon, but I prefer staying in the space of unknown enterprisey, line-of-business backend orgs. FAANG/MAANG and adjacents seem to be allergic to these roles and I never see their resumes.

Mid size companies in the b2b space are still hiring. Companies that consumers will never have heard of.

Are they paying FAANG salaries at $300k+?

No, which is why I'm not yet too worried about them flooding the space and taking all the jobs away. I've never seen it happen before.

Nearly all major tech companies have announced layoffs in the last few months. Which companies would you say are "doing well" right now?

This is my main point from personal experience. I worked at a company that had almost yearly layoffs (caused by a late transition to the online world and competition). I knew whole teams that were reduced to a single person. Now that person has to do support 24x7, new feature requests, general information requests etc. Thank god I did not have to deal with that. Also it's very difficult to hire when people know the company is/has been doing layoffs.

I always assumed the rationale was this:

That employee now doing extra work accepts it because they are either scared of being laid off themselves, know they can't find a better job elsewhere, have irrational loyalty to the company, whatever. In any case the company benefits by exploiting the person.

If instead the person leaves, then the process fails and the issue rolls up the org hierarchy. Now the leadership evaluates if this process was actually necessary anyway. If not, let it die or let the shit roll downhill elsewhere. If it was important, invest in the refactor that everyone knew was probably necessary anyway.

For corporate leadership it's an easy way to either squeeze more out of the peasants, or force a reevaluation of priorities.

> productivity has been lower the last few years

Any statistics to back that up? I've read both narratives (this one and the one that conflicts it) countless times over the Internet the past few years. I have no idea what is true.

A lot of people defend work from home and say it makes people more productive/work more overall. If that were the case, why are some of the brightest companies like Google/Apple against it?

Not sure about stats, but it’s definitely the impression of companies leadership.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/10/31/productiv...

It's hard to be surprised by this.

The pandemic may have acted like a reset on how work could fit into one's life. There's no going back from a perspective like that. I suspect that the idea of a career ladder simply doesn't work as well on younger generations as it may once have, for it may assume that growth occurs (making room for people).

It also assumes that people trust institutions to take care of them.

A bunch of the recent layoffs aren't considering individual performance as a primary factor. Whole teams get cut if that project is no longer a priority. Roles get cut as part of a reorg.

When this happens, this doesn't push employees to do anything better; it sends the message that even if you're great at your job, you may be cut because the company changed its mind about what's worth pursuing.

Bingo! Not many people realize some firings actually increase productivity.

Source? Because there is actually research beeing put into these results, that it decreases productivity:

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-copycat-layoffs-wo...

Perhaps but not at any of the companies currently doing the layoffs.

You need to use the fully loaded cost of an employee when estimating opex savings, which includes health care costs, retirement funding, etc.

Rule of thumb is that fully loaded cost for US employees is approximately 2x yearly salary (although people who've actually run a company can correct my potentially stale or incorrect understanding).

2X is my understanding as well. Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer. Some other big employer costs related to employees you forgot include employment taxes, hardware/software expenses and licenses, and office space and related perks.

Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low. Spotify might be saving up to $500k all-in per employee let go.

> Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low.

Probably not low. It's an enormous salary for a developer outside of the Valley and Spotify has plenty of employees which are not in the USA.

TBH I think the average Sr. Developer is ~130k in the US. Of course this varies so much depending on the role and company.

Spotify pays significantly above the average, though. Not as high as the top-tier FANGs, but still high.

The average software developer (not sure that it's pertinent to constrain it to "senior" devs) is $120k in the US. In San Francisco, the median is $161k [1]

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1252.00

Levels.fyi supports me at least: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spotify/salaries

I commented above, whether the salary is 150k, 250k, 500k... the impact doesn't change 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.33%. Not sure it really matters. Again I'm not defending lazy employees or saying employers are bad for doing this. I feel there is a hidden cost of layoffs from my own experience of being at a company doing round after round of layoffs.

Agreed it doesn't matter much in this case, but it is a common misconception that employees don't cost nearly as much to employers as they actually do, so I wanted to step in and correct that.

I applied for an "entry-level" EM role with Spotify in 2021 and the base was 260-275, plus a generous bonus target and stock. TC would have been pushing $400k, for a fully remote USCAN-based role. I say that strictly as a calibration point - it's unlikely engineers are pushing half a million (maybe at the Staff+ level) but there's also not likely any engineers before $150k TC. I'd expect even mid-levels to be in the $200-225 ballpark but could be wrong.

I think $150k median is probably on the lower side of correct, but not enough to meaningfully impact any of the numbers anyone is discussing here. It's close enough.

The stock price has more then halved since 2021, and based on their business model and history of profit, as an employee, I would not value the stock portion of compensation much.

As far as I can tell, Apple/Google/Amazon will always provide the ceiling price for how much Spotify can charge its customers, hence capping revenue, and the 3 record labels will always extract just enough to keep Spotify operating.

In a similar situation to Netflix, Spotify’s play would have to be to create their own content to lower their costs, but that is much easier said than done.

That’s what they attempted with podcasts.

> Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer.

Hardware/Software expenses, office spaces, health insurance are fixed cost.

$150k employee vs 200k employee will have the same amount of fixed cost (assuming both are in the same function).

Understand 2x, I was also looking across all the jobs at spotify. There are some that go as low as 70k salary, a majority seem to be 170k+. It was just for ease of calculation. even if we take 500k that's still 0.033% of revenue -_-

Again, revenue is not really all that relevant for this kind of business. They’re a low margin business because they must pay huge bills to record labels. R&D doesn’t cut record label costs.

I'm having trouble understanding why 'revenue is not really all that relevant.'

If you're burning $40M a year, and you press a button to save $90M a year, yes your label costs are the same but how are you not now at +$50M a year?

Payroll is a cost, so it’s more relevant to think about a layoff in terms of its impact to profit (your example) than revenue. Lots of companies sell at a tight margin, so tiny cost savings as a percent of revenue can be a big difference in profit.

You aren't using percentages correctly, I think you mean 3.3% (and 1% in your original comment). Also, as pointed elsewhere, revenue is not really relevant, majority of that cash flows directly to artists/labels.

I think what we don't see talked about is the avoidance of continuing to take on debt when interest rates are much higher than in recent past. Companies can issue bonds to raise money instead of loans but both are based on interest rates.

Companies pulling back on growth investments will help their bottom line sooner. For tech companies their greatest cost is employees which also is where they invest for more growth in new products/services.

Cash flow is king when interest rates are high.

Cash flow is always king, as positive cash flow is what keeps a company default alive like forever, or rather as long as cash flow is positive.

And yes, I think high interest rates play role. Either because credit lines become more expensive or because investor and VC money is harder to come by.

this is partially about wage depression

Broadly speaking, my opinion is alot of businesses are getting the feeling that the next 6-12 months are going to be bad. Layoffs, decreased consumer spending, rates continuing to rise, banks tightening with lending, ad spending dries up. A vicious cycle is starting to accelerate. Some companies are just going to follow the trend, sure, but I just think there is probably alot of internal data suggesting a slowdown and its too much to ignore.

Spotify in particular, their revenue is Ads and subscriptions. Consumers can very easily cut a streaming subscription if money starts to dry up, same with companies purchasing ad space. They do have lots of cash on hand so I don't think they are anywhere near risk of going bankrupt. I'm curious to see their earnings release next week and any changes in cash flow.

Another thing to consider is the opportunity cost of spending 90 million, there might be other internal priorities in the short term like acquisitions or paying down debt that supersede any potential "brain drain". Not to downplay the layoffs of course but the dynamic of competing priorities and larger headwinds is just difficult to navigate.

Hey those 90 million will help pay for Joe Rogan's 200 million.

I thought the Joe Rogan deal was 100 million. Many people have been stating he was seriously underpaid but I think he was one of the first major deals so maybe there wasn't any strong metric to gauge what he is worth.

Furthermore, they play multiple ads during his podcast regardless of if you are a paying customer or not. This one really grinds my gears. If they haven't made back their money yet then I'd be shocked.

"two people familiar with the details of the transaction" told NYT that it was at least $200 million for three and a half years. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/arts/music/spotify-joe-ro...

oh I guess I was mistaken. I constantly heard 100 million but it was just a guess since the number was never disclosed officially.

If the end game is suppress salaries and increase control (by forcing people back to offices), maybe the morale hit is worth it over a couple years.

Aren't most of the employees based in Europe? In that case it's more like $100k or less.

Even in Sweden, where engineers earn way less than in the US, it's going to be over $100k.

On any salary you would have to add 30% payroll tax, and then maybe 15% or so in pension contributions.

I don't think it is that complex. Who benefits from these mass layoffs? Everyone at the top benefits, and everyone at the bottom suffers.

You are spot on when it comes to impact of layoffs. If you want to destroy productivity, firing people is a sure proof way of doing that. To your point, I can't take any executive seriously if they're not self reflecting on their own failure. Mass layoffs should equal a new board in my opinion.

> If you want to destroy productivity, firing people is a sure proof way of doing that.

Not as sure proof as paying people to do nothing. Or worse, paying people who are actively working against the interests of the company, intentionally or otherwise.

If I pay someone to do nothing, who is at fault? The person who shows up ready to work everyday or the person who made a bad hiring decision and doesn't have the work for that person? I'm not arguing against layoffs, I'm arguing that the people making the hiring mistakes are not accountable. If I as a CFO give the green light to increase the company's workforce by 10% and two years later make a full reverse, that CFO/Board should be let go too or since they're all about taking "personal responsibility" should step down.

Most companies employ a board of narcissists that only care about themselves and their wallet and they get paid the most so I'm not sure your analogy is hitting with me.

> Most companies employ a board of narcissists that only care about themselves and their wallet

My read is a bit different, in that the board optimizes to the stock price above all, which yes they benefit from but that just means their personal interests are in alignment with the interests of stock holders. I do not blame the leaders so much as I blame the model. Leaders who do not optimize the stock price are quickly expelled. When the stock market was flush with covid stimulus cash, and even before that whilst the market was hot, the name of the game was showing growth. Companies were incentivized to show growth even at the cost of burning cash. Companies took on massive debt and in many cases, either did stock buybacks and/or hired rapidly in an effort to scale their organization for growth. When the market fundamentals changed, and money started swinging back towards safer bets (cash flow positive companies), suddenly the game had changed and leaders needed to react accordingly.

I guess in summary, hate the game not the player.

I think you can dislike the behaviors being exhibited and the game simultaneously. I hear you, it's the reality of the situation we live in now, but it's not a good system for the vast majority of people.

This is extremely naive take. No one can predict the future.

If I hire a bunch of construction workers expecting to sell 100 homes and suddenly the housing market collapse and I need to only build 50 homes that I have contract for, I need to fire some construction workers.

It is as simple as that.

No one can predict business cycles and that is the fundamental driver of sales and input costs. If one can successfully predict business cycles, they can be a superior macro investor and make billions.

The entire HN crowd talks about as though they never made any bad future decisions.

How many of you invested in stocks in 2021 that is down 50%? Did you cut down on subscriptions? Why don't you fire yourself for making stupid decisions?

> I need to only build 50 homes that I have contract for, I need to fire some construction workers.

Just like during a boom when a carpenter can charge 3x his hourly rate, pick and choose his jobs, and anyone with a pulse can walk onto a construction site and get a paycheck.

Since people predict the future all the time, I'll assume you mean that it's a lot more difficult to make predictions in complicated systems like housing markets.

Assuming that's what you meant, let's consider the "I" in "If I hire..."

If you're hiring someone, whether it's for your home building business, or your tech company, you're not doing it unaware of the market you're operating in.

No real estate developer is ignoring potential futures. Those that do fail fast. That someone is hiring is evidence of that someone is making predictions. They're predicting at least one potential future where the person they hire helps the company achieve their goals.

Speaking from experience, when I hire people, I am most definitely thinking of the potential future that person helps steer a company towards. I'm also very aware of what will happen if I can't afford to hire someone. Sometimes it's worth risking potential market effects that'd make it so I can't afford to pay that person, but usually it's not.

> No one can predict business cycles

Happens all the time, and people frequently make accurate predictions.

> they can be a superior macro investor and make billions.

Tell me, how did the current crop of billionaires become billionaires? Certainly not by deciding that no one can predict the future.

Have you built a Billion $$$ company? If so your comment about your own hiring is worthless. Anyone can run a small business. There are literally millions of SMBs

For large companies with public investors, there is a risk of not scaling at the right time.

History is filled with failed companies that didn't scale during 2012-2022 and were conservative.

History is also filled with idiots who claimed bubble and predicting crash every year.

If I have limited ambition of staying a $10 Million company, I can absolutely play it safe and hire very conservatively.

Scaling is a Risk/Reward play and that's what the investors pay the premium and expect rewards

> Have you built a Billion $$$ company?

I was a cofounder and CTO of a company that, at its peak, had a valuation in the billions. So yes.

> History is also filled with idiots

No disagreements here.

> If you want to destroy productivity, firing people is a sure proof way of doing that.

In Spotify’s case, the business not making money, and hence not having a stock price that keeps up with the market, is also a way to destroy productivity. Higher productivity people are probably not going to want to work at a charity.

Have you ever seen some of the heavy hitters, programing game engines for open source? These guys do that, cause they want to recover some sanity after programing crap for companies all day. Sorry to say it, but great works will never flourish in some monpolistic mega cooperation with tribal infighting.

Spotify problem is that they are not a monopoly. Competition is brutal in music streaming.

I have no idea if Apple or Google are more profitable? Maybe someone can give an insight.

>Higher productivity people are probably not going to want to work at a charity.

Have you seen the things people create in minecraft entirely for free?

Replace with "higher productivity people in an organization like Spotify", which I doubt many people are "passionate" about like they would be Minecraft.

So I guess you really dislike people in the OSS space who are considered the most productive of us all and essentially give all their work away for free, kind of like a charity.

Spotify is a jukebox. You put money in and music plays. It's not a new concept in the slightest capacity. If they haven't figured out how to turn a profit now will they ever?

No, it was badly phrased. Rephrase it to mean that the proportion of people that are at Spotify who care a decent amount about competitive compensation is probably pretty high, and so they will be paying more attention to the business’s prospects when evaluating their options.

> If they haven't figured out how to turn a profit now will they ever?

The corporate entity Spotify will never turn a major profit, but that's by design.

Spotify made a deal with the devil to come to terms with the record labels, and is now fully baked into a "Hollywood Accounting" set of terms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) which ensure the real money goes to the power players of RIAA cartel.

It turns out, if you have good lawyers, you can structure a set of entities such that neither the artists nor the public shareholders of the streaming service get the money, but rather, the opaque production company or record label that sits in between it all.

There is no reason for conspiracy theories. Spotify simply made a bet in being able to be more than a commodified middleman, which has not yet (and may not) pan out.

Warner/Sony/Universal music groups are also not opaque, they are all publicly traded companies, just like Spotify. It just so happens that they have more negotiating power than Spotify, so they can dictate more favorable terms.

Also, artists are free to make deals directly with Spotify/Google/Amazon/Apple if they want to bypass the record labels.

OSS is amazing. But needs to figure out how to make money, otherwise it's not sustainable.

You ever hear the phrase 'theres no such thing as a free lunch'?

Who benefitted from the mass hirings? Stock holders, and also workers. Did the workers complain when the job market (esp in tech) was on fire and wages were increasing? No. Did they blame the people at the top for their new job and wages? No.

But, now they want to blame leaders when there are mass layoffs. I think the blame is misplaced. The root cause was the stock market, and better yet blame the fed. The incentive was to show growth at all costs, even at the expense of burning cash. Leaders who did not optimize to growth were fired in many cases. But the game changed when stimulus and endless money printing stopped.

> Did they blame the people at the top for their new job and wages?

Companies aren’t very upfront about over-hiring.

It wasn't over-hiring given the environment at the time. It was over hiring given current environment. It seems clear that companies who took a more conservative approach to hiring have come out better for it. Not all companies could be so lucky. Some had activist investors who aggressively pushed for growth or else pushed out leaders. Messy world we live in.

It was. It's naive to think that a boom economy will last forever.

I've been thinking about this question as well. Is it better to have not given these people a job at all rather than to have given a job and then fired? I don't know. There are a lot of ways to look at it that all could be right.

This - basically both decisions are driven by stock market charades - growth at all costs when interest was low - cost cutting when revenue drops.

All of these companies laying people off are claiming that they "over hired" or "over extended" themselves during the pandemic and now they need to tighten their belts.

Who made the decision to hire more workers than the company needed? Leadership. Who made the decisions to put the company in a position where it would need to lay people off? Leadership.

Who bears the consequences of those decisions? It's not the people who made them.

It's not like the workers forced the companies to hire them.

This is the problem I have with these layoffs. The leadership who made the strategic decisions that put the company in a position to need to lay people off should face significant economic consequences before anyone else. But that is not happening. That never happens.

And this also is where I push back on people who say that investors are the ones taking the risk (and should therefor reap the rewards of business). It's the workers who take a greater risk - because they have less information, less power, and less of a buffer if something goes wrong.

A working agreement is a contract between two parties.

Who made the decision to join a company that was seeing sudden, unsustainable growth ? Workers. Who made the decisions to place themselves in a position they maybe aren't that needed? Workers.

Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers

There are two sides to the coin here.

No there are not. There's a massive information imbalance. Most companies do not make enough information public for workers to truly assess whether their growth is sustainable or not. Public companies have to file a certain amount of financial information, but they are very good at playing games with that information to mask their true financial health.

Workers have no choice when it comes to positions where they might not be needed. That could be true of literally any job someone might take. And workers pretty much never have the information to accurately assess for themselves whether or not they think they are needed until they are in the job. Every job a worker takes is a risk in which they are asked to trust the company hiring them not to turn around and immediately fire them.

> Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers

Work from home and flexibility are mutually beneficial. Knowledge workers perform better when they are able to do their work in the way that best fits them. This is not some benefit the company pays to hand out, it's the company structuring itself in a way that most benefits it.

As for salary, tech workers are still underpaid. Tech work is not factory work. The companies revenues are entirely generated by the knowledge, skills, and work of the workers. There's no physical machine the company is adding that allows the workers to do their work which they couldn't themselves easily acquire. The very fact that profit exists in tech companies tells you that workers are being underpaid.

The only thing capital brings to the table in a tech company is the ability to operate in the negative - to scale head count (and thus to some degree productivity) faster than revenue. That is not something any tech worker needs, and most tech companies almost certainly could have grown far more sustainably by growing along with their revenue. That is something capital pushes, hoping for outsized returns on the grown on its investment.

So, again, who should be suffering the consequences when the economy turns down? Keep in mind, paper losses of a falling stock market are not true losses for investors. As long as they hold through the fall - assuming the company doesn't go under completely - they'll most likely recover everything and more, but losing a job and therefor income can be life changing for a worker.

I think there's probably a few things here that are worth a comment:

- Information imbalance: from people I've talked to in decently senior roles at even very large companies, it might be surprising to learn that information can be poor at every level, because generally the people who are responsible for hiring at even fairly senior levels are not directly also responsible for expenditure, especially when macro-economic conditions are responsible for those financial decision. Essentially, the person who is responsible for setting the hiring targets to enable 20% growth is likely not responsible for modelling what happens if the cost of short term debt goes from 2% to 10%. Probably this is most likely in the superscalers, and it's likely hardest in the companies from 2-5k people - with a tech org of about 1k, you're likely acutely aware of the impact hiring strong people can have on your product while lacking the numbers to approach the problem analytically and with a sophisticated finance org. Basically, the number of people who could reasonably be expected to consider 'if we hire too many people, we'll have to fire them' as a significant part of their brief is smaller than you might think.

- 'There's no physical machine the company is adding that allows the workers to do their job which they couldn't themselves easily acquire'. Ignoring the focus on the physical machine bit and focusing more on the creative part of 'what does the company add, what do the people add', your claim may be true in some parts of industry and if you're in that side of industry I lament your situation, but for large parts of industry it's unequivocally false. There's a huge amount of value add that the machinery of an engineering organisation adds. In the more creative spaces, anyone who's operated in a truly high performing culture will have observed that a lot of the culture of building comes from the grouping of people who've been very, very carefully hired for, who've been carefully placed on team together, where memetic techniques have been used to proliferate certain positive behaviours, raising people up. We succeed as a team and fail as a team. You can see this over and over in so many testimonials - the stories from those who worked at Xerox PARC, stories from the MIT LISP hackers, back 50 years, all the way through hearing about the work the M1 team was doing, seeing the companies that spawn hundreds of startups from their alumni. And that's not to talk about the companies who specifically use process and ritual to ensure that engineers are consistently at the bar across massive orgs, from Google's exacting bars for code quality all the way to the consulting arms of Oracle, CapGemini etc who can approach repeated problems and get the most out of their engineers in a space where it's arguably harder to hire talent. And this is totally forgetting the huge non-SWE parts of orgs required to enable success - sales, finance, marketing, etc etc.

- Tech workers are still underpaid - think there'll be a rude awakening coming for you I guess. People across the world get paid based on how much they can get in the market (and if you're already at the company, the switching cost). There's room for places that do it differently, but not much room. If a large number of qualified people join the labour pool, you can bet that the practical market comp goes down.

- Paper losses are not true losses and you can just wait for the price to go back up: Honestly, that's wrong on like every level. Firstly, at the company level, there's a very real risk for many of these companies that they go bankrupt. Spotify has something like $2.8B in cash equivalents, has revenue of $9B and expenditure of about $9B. If their revenue dips by 20% due to e.g. a global recession, that cash supply will last them about 18 months. Before they get there, they have to raise more money. If raising via equity, they're going to be raising at their new and lower valuation, so their investors take a huge haircut. If they raise via debt, they'll be getting charged a lot on interest (because their risk of default is nontrivial). My brief but non-zero insider knowledge of some of these debt deals make it very much sound like a sellers market. A smaller company might expect to see 15% interest demanded - if you need $150M, you're in trouble. The staff who Spotify are dropping today likely represent $300M over that same 18 month period. You can bet that they'll be making this cut after scraping the barrel everywhere else.

Now, for the actual investors - if you take a massive paper loss, you're basically not getting that money back on a reasonable timeframe. https://danluu.com/norstad/risk-time/ is a good article on this topic. The simple way to think about it is that if in the good years you get 4% a year ROI across your portfolio and then you take a 50% haircut once, it will take you 18 years to make that difference back. The people who invest in tech companies are in large part not rich billionaires looking to pay for their next yacht - they're institutional investors, mutuals, pension funds who are looking to maximise returns for their members.

I appreciate your reasoned and detailed response. I disagree with you and I'll take it point by point. In some cases I think the disagreement is based more in a [reasonable] misunderstanding of the point I'm actually making, or where I didn't make my point as clearly as I should have.

> Information imbalance

I have been that Director level manager responsible for scaling and hiring with out the full scope of information. When I said "people responsible" I mean, the people with the information. And yes, it is a smaller pool than many people might thing. But it is also a much more highly compensated pool. Those are the people who are ultimately responsible, and the people who should face consequences and accountability. I would include the investors (at the very least those who sit on the board and take an active role in the running of the organization) in that pool.

> There's no physical machine the company is adding

Here I fumbled my words. I should have said "capital" or the "investors". Yes, absolutely, the organization itself provides value. But that organization is almost entirely composed of workers and could be run entirely by the workers with out capital. Traditionally, in a factory setting, the value capital has been said to provide - and the reasoning for capital taking the returns - is the physical machinery necessary for workers to do their work. In a tech company, there is no such machinery.

The organization of a tech company is entirely composed of, and run by, workers. In the vast majority of cases, they don't need any physical machinery to do their work except for consumer grade electronics they probably already own or could trivially acquire. In the case of a fully distributed company, this is even more true.

NOTE: I am including management in the workers here. I'm using workers, as it is used in the context of worker cooperatives or employee owned business, as a synonym of employees. This is different from the traditional union or labor organizing context which separates "line workers" from "managers".

> Tech workers are still underpaid

In a traditional capitalist labor market, I think you can reasonably make this argument. This views workers as replaceable cogs and looks at how cheaply they could be purchased on the market.

But I'm looking at it from the perspective of "what does it actually take to produce the value the company produces". And all it takes is the workers time, skills, and knowledge. As I made in other points, capital brings very little to the table. In that case, the workers produce the entire value of the company. And from that perspective, many workers at tech companies (which, remember, I'm using as a synonym for "employee" here) are still compensated less than the value they create. In some cases by significant amounts.

> Paper losses are not true losses and you can just wait for the price to go back up

I'll grant you the wait for them to go back up point. That was a bit glib and not well formed, but also somewhat tangential to my larger point which I didn't make very clearly: which is that while those losses might hurt on paper if they represent wealth that is on paper then they have no immediate economic impact on the person losing it. There's no risk of hunger from a paper loss. No risk of homelessness. No risk of exposure to the elements.

And I will grant you, yes, there are some investors who do expose themselves that much with their investments. But they are a tiny outlier. For the vast majority of investors, their investment is surplus far above and beyond what they need to live a comfortable life to a reasonable standard of living. In other words, they can afford to lose it while suffering no unreasonable impact to their quality of life. (Note, I would consider going from "can afford a private yatch" to "have to live an upper middle class life" a reasonable impact.")

To your point about institutional investors, the vast majority of those assets (80 - 90%) are owned by the top 10%. Who are, by definition, the middle upper class and above. They are perfectly comfortable. And they can afford a loss.

My larger point is about the risk actually being taken - not in terms of paper wealth - but in terms of real impact on quality of life. Investors aren't taking much. Workers are.

These details are not often not apparent to workers, and many times the folks doing the hiring actively hide this kind of thing from applicants. So it is not the workers fault.

> people who say that investors are the ones taking the risk

Those same people will tell you how the "free money era" is over. Take a look a labors share of the economy, if capitals share is so large due to capital risk, and capital is easier to get, why didn't investors share of the pie shrink?

Another point that is missed, is that many of these tech companies are now still net positive when comparing new headcount added during pandemic VS the 2013 layoffs.

You can see the data here for MSFT, Google, Amazon, Meta and Spotify. Yes, other companies did not exhibit the same pattern, but the point remains.

Recruiters have reached out to you from two different companies. Company A and Company B are both offering compensation greater than you're currently making (which is almost always true for most workers), and you ask questions about the viability of the company (hugely profitable) and the job (very much needed).

On what basis are you to know that despite being hugely profitable, Company A is going to get rid of 28,000 employees, while Company B is instead going to cut CEO compensation by 40%? How can you be sure whether you're joining Alphabet or Apple?

There is nobody to blame for any of this but the leadership making poor decisions for which they won't face any consequences.

> Company A is going to get rid of 28,000 employees, while Company B is instead going to cut CEO compensation by 40%? How can you be sure whether you're joining Alphabet or Apple?

As a recently ex-alphabet employee: apple never went on a hiring spree.

They had restraint the last few years, with a significantly smaller workforce, and the result is (hopefully) no layoffs.

Fast money moves quickly and it might move away from you.

We should also be talking about Yelp at the start of the pandemic, who was predictably in a precarious situation. They offered to employ people part time (and still do) instead of mass layoffs. You can work as an SDE at 80% time instead, which gives you a stable (but smaller) income in a scary time, and it gives the employer a discount to save without layoffs.

Personally, I would take 80% or maybe even 60% time at my old Google job over a layoff. Everyone comments about “rest and vest” anyways, so 75% may be perceived as appropriate anyways.

I'm sorry for you losing your job, since it sounds like it wasn't voluntary.

I understand why Apple hasn't done mass layoffs, but I'm still stuck on how you know that during the recruiting process. If Apple tries to hire you in January 2020, how do you know they are going to be more circumspect about hiring over the next three years? Apple hired a large number of people during the last three years, just as Google did. NOW we know it was a MUCH SMALLER "large number of people," but it was still quite a few. If you're talking to recruiters from each, how do you know?

I don't blame anyone for taking a job with Amazon, Google, or Facebook. I mean, I wouldn't personally work for any of the three for my own reasons, but I don't think it's fair to blame people taking jobs there for their own layoffs.

> I understand why Apple hasn't done mass layoffs, but I'm still stuck on how you know that during the recruiting process.

You can't truly know. But you can vaguely see how many employees there are from news/earnings reports/etc. There's a lot of data in the moment, but you can never know how to process it until after-the-fact.

That said, it may not matter. Like you said, you can't blame anyone for taking a job, and they pay well, and part of that money is "boom/bust" cycles. Its part of the industry IMO.

In this respect, I think that they're hoping that if they get enough experienced and higher income people laid off, that can compensate for the loss in productivity and the reduced workload with whoever remains.

if you expect a multi year recession it makes sense, especially when you aren't profitable and interest rates are rising

I think companies are doing it to tilt the balance of power back toward companies so they can force people back into the office. WFH is going to shrink back to a minority of the workforce.

While I can’t speak to the numbers, in general I think companies that so casually abandon employees by immediately announcing layoffs when times are tough cannot expect any loyalty or flex from the people that remain in times the economy picks up again.

Maybe they’re fine with that, and it’s all good. But if you sack people on a whim don’t be surprised if they walk out on you on a whim if some better opportunity comes along.

The savings are 1%, not 0.1%.

There's another side too. If those fired were overpaid underperformers, there can be an improvement in morale for those who weren't fired.

There’s also a micro-environment at play. Those 600 former employees likely worked across a bunch of different orgs for different product and management lines.

At that level, it probably represents some groups losing 25, 50 or even 100% of their team members.

So that 600 might not be consequential at the business level, but was probably devastating at the team level.

The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app.

- I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast.

- The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then "Jump back in", then "Recently played" and then "Recommended for today". There's no "here's some stuff you haven't listened to lately". I regularly enjoy an album, burn myself out on it (because it's always presented to me), don't listen to it for a week and then completely forget about it because Spotify never mentions it again.

- The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That means I have to consciously realise that I'm listening to the last song of an album and then queue up what I want to listen to next. It regularly gets confused especially if I connect it to a Bluetooth device mid-album, and will sometime decide to truncate my queue, chopping off the last few songs of an album or repeating a middle few songs that I've already listened to.

How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?

For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.

I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".

The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback.

Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out the previous episode you were listening to. Very user unfriendly

The whole offline / no data experience is absolutely terrible if you live anywhere like Canada where mobile data rates are small and expensive. The #1 complaint I've heard about Spotify for years is "I set it to not download music on data then didn't notice I was listening to a new playlist and now I'm out of data till next month". Also taking public transit like a subway without cell service was a pain. Hold on, let me open the settings in advance and flip the offline switch so I can keep listening to music on my commute. Ugh.

Offline is also weird on iOS, you often have to turn on airplane mode to get it into its offline state reliably.

Don't forget the part that you now have to "love" a song or an album in order to download it because there's no "Add to Library" anymore, completely ruining the concept of "likes". How would I know if I like something or not if I have to say I "love" it in order to download it so I can listen to it later? Do I really "love" every single song of an album or was I just forced to say so in order to download the whole album? There is no possible way you're getting the correct data points out of me like this.

There's three things I want out of Spotify:

* Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder;

* Find and play one song in particular by title – this is the only thing Spotify still does right;

* Download an album / playlist and be able to listen to it later on regardless of my internet connection status – besides the requirement to "love" it stupidity, the UI just hangs until it timeouts if you have a spotty connection. If you have the content, just display and play it! It's actually slightly better now when you have no connection, a while ago, if you were on a plane in Airplane Mode, it would hang for a few seconds "loading" until it gave up and displayed the album art it had downloaded - why?!

I just want Winamp with a search engine and a downloader built in. Is that really so hard? Is Electron really adding any value here, or just making problems far harder to solve than they should be across every single platform?

"Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder"

So much agreement here - of the most annoying things to me is that I can't just click on an artist and have an easy way to list every song by that artist.

I use Deezer instead of Spotify, I don't know if it's better or worse, but what I can tell you is that I miss Google Play Music everyday.

Deezer has a lot of interface problems too.

I think that Deezer is better because there is a button to 'don't recommend this track/artist'. I can filter the things that I dislike.

Another positive thing about Deezer is that it shows less popups and notifications than Spotify.

"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?"

Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation.

Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

Quite similar experience with the Netflix app where it seems every single day I have to wonder where they put my currently watching series.

Ironically, we look up to these companies for their engineering culture. We really shouldn't. It's a hot mess. Toy tech. Deeply unserious about quality and customers.

The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.

“She needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on that app and [insert app name here] doesn’t let her do that” must sum up at least 90% of user problems.

Not even episode syncing works (for me). I clearly finished watching an episode yet regularly on another device the next episode would be the one I already watched. Just one of many basic things that doesn't work.

I forgot to add that not only will they change "currently playing" every 3 secs, also the cover art of each series changes, as an A/B test. So if you use that as a visual confirmation, well tough luck.

In the case of Netflix, there's a reason for all of this. They don't really want you to go and sniff around the catalog in easy ways. You might discover its not great. Best to throw a bunch of random stuff in your face to give you the illusion of a fabulously rich and "dynamic" experience.

The distraction UX of Netflix is intentional. In the case of Spotify it's mostly incompetence.

Agree about the syncing - its not just you. I click on "Continue Watching" for a TV series that I have been watching - only to realize about a minute or so into it that I had already seen the episode the previous day. This has happened to me so many times that I would have wasted close to an hour just moving back and forth between episodes.

Exact same experience here. I even let episodes roll past the credits to the absolute end. And it still doesn't work.

Not going to defend it because I agree.

But if you are interested in the why of "currently watching" moving all over the place, you'll notice its harder to find the longer its been since you opened netflix combined with the faster you start looking for it.

Different part of Netflixes backend respond at different speeds. The call for "Top in the US" is likely cached and up to date, the call for "What did dataengineer56 stop watching" is probably cold and slow.

This leaves netflix with a few options, and what they seem to have settled on is "Show everything that has loaded, and quietly insert the stuff that loads later into parts of the screen the customer isn't looking at, so our entire app seems to load instantly"

Anecdotally I disagree. I think I have a pretty eclectic taste, and spotify has helped me discover tons of new songs, but also still keeps my daily mixes coherent. I find myself listening to their autogenerated ones most of the time since they are very easy to craft and extend.

I also love spotify as a general product. But the UX grievances are fair and representative of tge standard product thrash where far too many people are involved in making design decisions that ultimately end up punishing users

> Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

I would say that Spotify does not compete with traditional media players, it competes with radio.

If i want to listen to my favorite songs, there is no reason to use Spotify for that. But if i want something different-but-similar and i do not really know what, because i am not very interested in music, then discoverability of new music by Spotify is game-changing.

Spotify should serve both audiences: consistency and discover new ones.

I think Apple Music got it right. I like how you can start a radio of any song. Or just play your own favorites.

Spotify has always had "Song Radio".

For me song radio simply plays songs that I've already listened to but are similar to the current song. Completely useless for discovering new music.

The most frustrating one for me is that saving an album doesn’t add the Artist to your artists list in your Library.

You have to ‘follow’ the artist by going to their profile and clicking ‘follow’. I much prefer this functionality because liking an album or a song does not mean I want to be exposed to all new music by the artist.

It makes the library a bit useless though. If I'm offline and want to look for a specific artist's music I have downloaded, if I can't remember the name of the album it's not easily findable.

> Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience.

Which is particularly surprising since they have multiple teams of highly compensated product people who are supposed to be guiding the overall product direction and preventing just that kind of incoherence.

Yes, I forgot to mention that. They have cross cutting orgs too. Which means they reinvented the matrix organization which is the worst of all organizations.

+1 on Google Music, I really miss that.

It's algorithm is really dumb. That's why these companies need to stop with these so called "algorithms", we should only select the genres of music we like and our front page should be a reflection of it.

I still remember when my girlfriend searched for a fart noise podcast as a joke and then I kept getting suggestions based on it for weeks.

Songza(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songza) really brought a lot of value to GPM. RIP

I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do.

Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable.

It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?

WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?

They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…

WTF!!! Same here, the playlists are now public

They probably made a good chunk selling your now public playlist music preferences to advertisers.

It's so they could sell your music preferences. You got got.

Damn, I just noticed all my playlists are public too.

Thanks for the heads up. And screw Spotify!

You still cant search for a song in your playlists only either.

Podcasts are interesting for Spotify because they keep the listener attached to the service while their (royalty and license) costs are minimal. Just like they inject all kinds of cheap music from unknown artists in your recommendations.

Google Play Music was designed in a pre-streaming world, when albums were much more popular.

Unfortunately, very few people use streaming services to listen to albums.

It is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but given the minuscule usage of albums by users, it’s not worth Spotify’s time to optimize the album playback experience. (Same goes for Classical music.)

Your problem with a static, duplicate list of suggested music sounds like a bug. Somehow Spotify’s recommendation algorithm has run out of ideas of what to show you, so it just shows you the same thing several times.

I am just waiting for the personal I formation train to get to include my listening history and like/dislike behaviour.

There should be an XML/JSON standard to store, download and share that information. I've got a listening history in last.fm, another in spotify, another in Tidal an finally in youtube. I should be able to use them together in any platform. My listening habits is also my personal information.

I just went back to Spotify after trying a 6 month Apple Music trial for only 3 weeks. Apple Music is even worse. First of all they don’t support handoff between my mac and iPhone. A feature that Spotify supports a lot better. There is no way to go back to the previous song. The mac app constantly fails to resume playing a song after a short while paused. And sometimes I have to go to a song or playlist again to get it to start playing music again. Searching for song has horrible ux. I haven’t found a way to get to the playlist I’m currently on.

While spotify has its issues I’m now a lot more happy with it after trying an alternative.

> The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue.

That's precisely why I chose Tidal over Spotify when GPM died

And yet, people still pay for crap experiences. For me, even a slight annoyance means I'm out, with a quick email to 'contact us' explaining exactly why. Never heard back from several and they dont receive my $$ anymore.

After using plexamp for the last year, it just reinforced my impression that the UX of Spotify is cosmically bad. Plexamp feels a lot like winamp, it is a nice pared down experience that just works and is fast.

But I guess I'm just one data point. Spotify has enough users that they have no incentive to make any kind of radical change.

There are plenty of dedicated podcast apps that offer a better experience with no or very little algorithmic recommendation system.

I've used PocketCasts for years and it's been perfect and doing exactly what it needs to do and no more. The main page is just a grid of podcasts I'm subscribed to, and I can go into a list of all unplayed episodes of all my podcasts sorted chronologically. There is a "discover" tab that has featured/trending podcasts, but I never touch that other than to use the search (which doubles as an entry field where you can paste an RSS link to subscribe that way)

Why does every thread about a consumer app company like this turn into off-topic feedback about the product?

I think we've gotten into this weird spot where tech companies are almost goading each other into layoffs. I don't doubt that there was some overexpansion during COVID, but it seems to have shifted. Tech companies have signaled to the market that staffing numbers were too high (regardless of profitability), and that investors want to see them brought back down. These layoffs don't really seem to be an indication of company strength, and the golden parachutes that a lot of these companies are offering can't really be that helpful to the bottom line (5mo + unused PTO + benefits in this case for Spotify). It's just playing things up for a certain audience while the general public is largely distracted.

If not goading, they're at least providing some cover for each other. If a company is looking to cut some percentage of staff, it's best to tuck that into the news cycle when many of your peers are doing the same thing.

I think everyone trying to attribute some kind of 4D chess maneuvers to these actions is massively overestimating tech CEOs.

A previous HN article called them "copycat layoffs"[1] which makes the most sense. This is reactive panic from "leaders" looking at each other for hints of what to do. A lot of companies determine their product and engineering strategies this way too. An exercise to the reader: Think about the major decisions your company has made since you've joined... How much of it was simply because competitors or bigger example companies were also doing it?

EDIT: 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480314

It’s not a deliberate plan but more like FOMO. It seems reasonable that execs hang out in similar social groups and have similar viewpoints and predictions. Once a specific idea has taken hold, company leadership has to either fight it or give in.

100%

People regurgitate “they overhired during COVID and now they’re making the prudent decision to cut costs”

The first part of the sentence implies poor decision making by weak leaders, so they lose the benefit of the doubt they’re capable of prudent decisions.

You can’t have it both ways - they made a stupid copycat decision to overhire but now layoffs are smart and thoughtful.

Occam’s razor - they made stupid copycat decisions both times because in both cases execs act with a herd mentality.

I can’t tell you the number of times the “leaders” of big tech companies I’ve worked at cited decisions by researching “peer companies”. Management wants to self identify as leaders but their decision making is literally based on following the same decisions of other companies. They think “if company A is doing it, it must be smart “ the only problem is that the peer companies they’re copying are themselves copying others.

All of these big tech companies have been overtaken by professional politicians incapable of leading , with perhaps Apple as the lone exception.

This is a golden time to launch a startup as the big companies are putting their lunch money on the table and cowering in fear.

This is a bubble imploding, this is serious.

The value of money has shifted for good after a decade of excess, there is rampant inflation and there is a recession incoming.

These companies have seen the writing on the wall and are making the first of many layoffs to address this. This started last year and will last another year at least, possibly a few years.

Apparently most eases of this sore are still in denial about it but the reasons are real and presssing.

The other thing this paradigm shift in rates impacts of course is profitless startups which are now worth zero if they can’t turn a profit within a year. Those that can’t will go bust and lay off all employees, thus making the recession deeper.

Why do you say it has shifted "for good"? The Fed itself plans to bring interest rates back down actually fairly quickly [0], following a half-year of decreasing inflation rates [1].

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/fomcprojtabl20...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthl...

The Fed is infamous for being wrong, both in projections and in reactions.

In fact a good case could be made for their policy mistakes leading them to this dilemma where they must choose between causing inflation or recession.

My experiences around bubbles popping were substantially more violent and sudden.

This feels a lot more like a normal ebb. I doubt this layoff trend continues past June, and other companies are still hiring.

Okay but if that was true, these companies wouldn't also be issuing massive stock buybacks at the same time. It's normal ebb to someone with decades of time in the industry.

> These layoffs don't really seem to be an indication of company strength

They never were.

I'm old and completely fucking puzzled by this assertion from Millennials that strong companies wouldn't do layoffs.

I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off.

Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself. Spotify is stingy AF with the artists that drove people to the service, and then firehoses Rogan with cash and tries to shove podcasts down people's throats. I was a happy Spotify subscriber for a long time but they just kept making the service worse while ratcheting up prices.

But Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly, the deals are with the record companies.

The real issue here seems to be over-hiring and a lot of acquisitions for all sorts of marginal stuff like video podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks?

>If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks?

Where does OP say that Spotify is "morally obligated to keep writing paychecks"?

He didn't, hence why my comment has a question mark.

>He didn't...

>... would you still say...

What does a recession have to do with the amount of work you have for employees to do? If a recession causes 5% of their subscribers to cancel, it’s not like there’s 5% less work to do company wide.

If the company hired more people than they have work for, it likely has little to do with a possible recession.

In the case where it is true that they have too many employees, I think there is a moral responsibility to attempt to find profitable work for those employees. Or to at least ride it out and make a smaller profit in the lean years if it doesn’t seriously endanger the health of the company.

Corporations aren’t merely groups of people, they have been granted additional legal rights like limited liability. I’m fine with laws that say something to the effect that in exchange for limited liability, corporations over a certain size must give some consideration to the employee welfare. Many countries require that workers have board representatives.

> I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off.

One of the people specifically called out is Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff, who "decided to depart," which is how you phrase C-level firings when they coincide with layoffs.

I imagine that the disastrous podcast deals with the royals and Obamas had something to do with that.

That's good but hardly good enough. No way they drove those deals without the CEO's buy-in.

I confess I don't get the big ticket podcast exclusives. But, then, I basically never listed to any of the "big name" talk radio shows either (and even actively avoided them).

What's weirder to me is how I can't remember even seeing them advertised within Spotify. I know there are some really need content Spotify is producing, but the ones I'm aware off I've generally found by accident somewhere on the Internet, never through their own UI.

Can we switch accounts?

I have listened to exactly 1/2 of one episode of a podcast on Spotify and now have to actively navigate away from the main page of the app if I want to do what I do the other ~99.9% of the time, which is listen to one of a handful of playlists or try to find other similar music.

Streaming music has always been a very bad business. No matter how much Spotify grows, it will only make 30% gross margins. Almost the definition of a tech company is one that has high fixed costs and low to almost 0 marginal cost and can take advantage of scale. Spotify doesn’t have that.

At least with podcasts, they don’t have to pay a third party for each additional user.

Spotify suffers from the “Dropbox problem”. Streaming music is a feature not a product.

Anyone can build and add Dropbox-like functionality to their product suite (and I was even involved in a couple such efforts a while back)... but Spotify is not at all like that, in that not only is having the music licenses they have more than just some engineering work, people bring their music to Spotify, and so you can't even have a few ins and a major investor and then try and quickly get the same licenses to have the same service as you would still be missing essentially all of the music I listen to on Spotify.

Very few actually feel good about bringing their music to spotify.

Other than the very few giant artists getting the sweetheart deals with guaranteed payouts most feel like they're forced to bring their music to spotify even though they know the whole thing is just bad.

I don't understand how this detail changes anything: you still can't just build a competitor to Spotify and magically have all of its music.

You don’t need all of its music.

You need the three major music producers and the rest will come.

But that’s not the point. The “feature not a product” saying means that a major company has your entire reason for existing as a feature in their product.

Streaming music is already just a feature for Apple and Amazon.

Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s.

> You need the three major music producers and the rest will come.

This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22.

This is similar to why live video also isn't just a feature and YouTube is having to go to war with them to bring streamers to their platform (though as Twitch isn't really about a "back catalog", Spotify is actually in a much better position than Twitch). Social networking is another example of a thing that isn't just a feature you can throw together, even if it looked like that to a lot of companies.

Essentially, anywhere there is either a catalog or a network effect to be had (these are related concepts), you have to provide something that isn't just equivalent but fundamentally new to build a user base that can pull in the new market participants, or people are going to keep using the old service even if they hate it because it has a better library.

(The alternative is you have to do something explosively better for the content producers, enough that they want to get on the ground floor. The most obvious way to do that is by just handing them free money with massive subsidies due to VC raises, which was certainly a lot easier a few years ago than it is today.)

I was the developer behind a major content marketplace that had tens of millions of users and which was able to operate for over a decade despite tons of people trying to build competitors. Hell: my software was open source! I only shut it down because the entire market I was in stopped being technologically viable (resulting in my lawsuit against Apple), and it still took years for the content to become stale enough for people to move on (which doesn't happen as quickly for music). I am speaking from direct experience.

> Just like today, you wouldn’t create a separate spell checker application like in the 80s.

Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage.

> This isn't how the market works. I know musicians, and they don't care that you are playing licensing monopoly/bingo and have 3 key squares and now they clearly are going to waste their time uploading their music to your service. You need to essentially already have the subscriber count to provide them a new revenue source that is greater than the pain of dealing with you... which forms a brutal catch-22.

You keep acting as if there aren’t two trillion dollar market cap companies that don’t already have streaming services that don’t have to be profitable.

You also act like the day that Apple announced “Apple Music” every musician wasn’t scrambling to get on the platform.

> Spell checking, like Dropbox, has no network effect and no first mover advantage.

If Facebook announced tomorrow that they were going to release “Facebook Streaming” they already have an audience. We aren’t talking about Joe Bobs Music streaming service.

That’s not the concept behind “a feature not a product”. The entire idea is that a major company can add streaming as a bullet point to their ecosystem - like Apple and Amazon - and doesn’t need to be profitable by itself.

That is the “DropBox problem”. DropBox is trying to be a sustainable company while Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe and Amazon just throw it in as a feature in their portfolios.

This is the same with the movie studios in 2023. In 2006 when Apple first approached the movie studios, the idea of VOD digitally was new. Now the studios have a standardized process for it. There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses.

VOD = Video on Demand where you pay to rent or buy each individual film.

There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about.

The smaller labels will come along

The business of Spotify isn't "streaming music": it is "music licensing"; and, even there, it isn't like most of the music was due to Spotify going out of their way to contact people and get their music on their service: people--not even "labels", but people--upload their music directly to Spotify.

You can compete with that, but it is a massive uphill battle; it is similar to trying to create a new app market competitor from scratch and assuming that all of the apps which exist on someone else's platform--many of which might not even be maintained by people who give a shit anymore--are somehow going to appear on your platform.

> There are a dozen VOD services with the same library because the industry has standardized licenses.

This is entirely untrue... hell: Apple doesn't even have a lot of the content that exists out there anymore, as numerous titles now can only be purchased from Amazon, as it was essentially uploaded directly. I wish I could obtain all of the movies/TV I consume from Apple, but that just isn't how this industry operates.

> There are only three major record labels and if you can get deals with those, you cover most of the music people care about.

This wouldn't be sufficient to cause most users to switch from Spotify. It certainly wouldn't get me to switch from Spotify, and I don't even like Spotify!

> The smaller labels will come along

The long tail of music doesn't even involve "labels" :/.

Why are you even arguing this? There already exist two major competitors that are treating streaming music as just an insignificant portion of a multibillion dollar business - Amazon and Apple. Also to a lesser extent Google/YouTube.

As far as the content that’s unavailable - it doesn’t matter.

The long tail theory has been debunked decades ago (https://mackinstitute.wharton.upenn.edu/2018/long-tail-theor...). You can’t make money at scale with out having the most popular content.

> This wouldn't be sufficient to cause most users to switch from Spotify. It certainly wouldn't get me to switch from Spotify, and I don't even like Spotify!

You’re a geek posting to HN (as am I) you don’t represent the mainstream and it doesn’t matter if people switch or not. Spotify needs to be profitable as an ongoing concern and it isn’t and will never be extremely profitable. Its competitors don’t have to have a profitable streaming service.

> Amazon, as it was essentially uploaded directly. I wish I could obtain all of the movies/TV I consume from Apple, but that just isn't how this industry operates.

Again, a successful business doesn’t depend on the long tail - that’s been debunked by every single market - app stores, music, movies, etc. the vast majority of money is made from hits.

You’re also failing to realize that Spotify’s issue of trying to be profitable just streaming music while its competitors can sell at cost to prop up other businesses.

> Why are you even arguing this? There already exist two major competitors that are treating streaming music as just an insignificant portion of a multibillion dollar business - Amazon and Apple. Also to a lesser extent Google/YouTube.

Amazon, Apple, and Google (to their lesser extent due to YouTube) are also in the content licensing business... the same business Spotify is in. Are you saying that iTunes, or Amazon.com, is also a shitty business? I'm betting you aren't. If you are, I recommend looking at how much money Apple makes on iTunes: it is sufficient to have let them subsidize sales of the iPod.

The reason Spotify is in a bad place is because they have bad contracts for their core content (vs. Apple) and a lack of vision for how to change up their business model (maybe by having a feature similar to Amazon Prime / Hulu where you have to pay for add-on subscriptions for various artists), not because "music streaming is a feature": their business isn't "music streaming".

> Again, a successful business doesn’t depend on the long tail - that’s been debunked by every single market - app stores, music, movies, etc. the vast majority of money is made from hits.

I am not saying the vast majority of revenue comes from the long tail, I am saying having access to a large catalog matters and prevents even large companies from being able to just shut you off as I do believe that people--yes, actual people, like my customers--actually care about access to the long tail, even if it isn't most of their usage or where you book your revenue.

> You’re also failing to realize that Spotify’s issue of trying to be profitable just streaming music while its competitors can sell at cost to prop up other businesses.

They aren't, though! iTunes is profitable. It has tried (and succeeded!) to add Spotify as a feature, but Spotify can and should respond by adding track sales or artist-specific subscriptions as a feature. There are tons of things they could be doing--because their business is not music streaming: their business is content licensing--to become profitable. Why don't they at least have a built-in Patreon mechanism where people can pay arbitrarily more for their subscription and have it (after they take a cut) doled out to their streamed artists?! They are just dumb.

They certainly aren't Dropbox: Dropbox's entire business is just a technological feature and fundamentally continued to be a feature forever. There is no real reason to use their feature over someone else's implementation of that feature except code quality (and I have a queued article to write about how Dropbox is broken ;P). There absolutely is a moat that Spotify has here, and to ignore that is extremely strange. They may be squandering their ability to compete, but they aren't "just a feature". Being a dumb company that needs better leadership to establish a better business model is not the same as being a feature.

> Are you saying that iTunes, or Amazon.com, is also a shitty business? I'm betting you aren't.

Yes, it is a shitty standalone business. The purpose of iTunes was to sell more iPods - the whole “commoditize your complements”.

The purpose of Apple Music was to be a “feature” to sell high margin Apple Watches, AirPods, HomePods, to integrate tightly with Siri, etc.

> If you are, I recommend looking at how much money Apple makes on iTunes: it is sufficient to have let them subsidize sales of the iPod.

That’s not what happened. SJ himself said that the purpose of iTunes was just to break even to sell iPods. iPods were high margin businesses. By the time Apple paid the labels 70% and then paid the credit card processing fees, it wasn’t make much selling 99 cent songs.

Blame music publishers. They are the ones raising prices and paying artists pennies. Spotify has no power to change this.

Spotify is/was spending heavily on podcasts to try to create a new revenue stream with better economics.

Spotify has plenty of power to change this and it's disingenuous to argue otherwise. Spotify has lobbied hard to affect royalty rates for music / songwriters and keep them low. Certainly the music publishers / labels are also to blame, but Spotify isn't innocent.

Also - Spotify wanted Podcasts so they went to the podcasters and made deals. Spotify is apparently paying to create royalty free music it can insert into playlists. Spotify could just as easily be making direct deals with, say, indie music artists or wooing bands away from major labels if it wanted to focus on music.

It's not. It's aiming for the streaming service equivalent of reality TV instead but paying big money for them instead of to musicians.

I forget where I heard this, I think it was on Breaking Points, but I think Rogan's audience is bigger than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News combined. I doubt they regret the Rogan deal.

Apropos of little, I cancelled my family Spotify plan because of the Joe Rogan deal and moved to Apple Music. Totally forgot that’s the reason I moved us until your comment.

I moved when Rogan hosted Roger Waters, who kept saying anti-semitic things with no push back at all.

Spotify aligning themselves with content, any content, made them a publisher and not a software company. That's their biggest mistake.

> Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself.

Especially when you still get ads on podcasts. Listening to any podcast on Spotify is so frustrating because I pay for the service and STILL get a half dozen ads an episode.

Right, it seemed like a greedy move. Apple podcast app is just fine imo.

Sorry but how's Spotify's service worse?

Not to mention their podcast deals are bad for the consumer- Spotify was and is great because people _wanted_ to pay a monthly fee for access to (nearly) unlimited music instead of buying albums.

Podcasts on the other hand already worked great before Spotify started taking them exclusive.

This is probably the least tactical message amongst all the companies that have laid off people. Ek's spent most of the time rambling about efficiency and organizational changes to leadership positions who'll be least affected by the layoffs.

Then comes the layoff news. It's almost as if he's rectifying someone else's mistake and everyone getting laid off should be thankful about it.

I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf.

It always helps to remember that people, generically, are idiots who don't mean to say what, literally, they say; have no idea how to say what they mean; and are otherwise just struggling to create an impression of being in control and knowing whats going on.

The first paragraph of this article reads this way to me: a person flinging around cliches because they've no idea what they're supposed to say, or how to say it.

This, indeed, may be more acute if the author is actually distressed.

I'd be more empathetic if this was a response in a live Q&A like situation. For something that's meant to be PR speak, this is abysmal.

>I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf.

What kind of emails are you referring to? I haven't worked at a tech company in a long while

Yeah, starting of a note about layoffs talking "reiterating" about the "most defensible business strategy" is extremely tone-deaf.

It did seem a bit tone deaf but five months baseline severance is no joke.

The whole email was just so off - I know they build up to these things, but am sure the announcement of the re-org could have waited, and could have led with the most pressing news, especially since it came in the middle of day and people had already been let go by that point.

> I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf.

I highly doubt CEOs write these posts.

Seriously.

If you're laying people off in an email it needs to be in the first paragraph. Don't bury the lede.

Not only does he bury the ledge in his self-referential philosophical drivel but he closes the layoff announcement with:

>"Finally, I hope you will join me tomorrow for Unplugged."

He seems like a caricature. Tone-deaf seems to be his default. As a reminder:

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/spotify-boss-blames-mus...

No mention of who is taking full responsibility for the situation!

Edit: The CEO takes full "accountability" instead, further down the original announcement[0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230123124201/https://newsroom....

The actual statement by Ek contains: "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today."

Interestingly, responsibility is usually used as a get-out-of-jail-free phrase, while accountability literally means that you will take consequences. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the literal meaning of otherwise similar words.

The dictionary definition of accountable says nothing about consequences.

From Merriam-Webster

1) subject to giving an account : answerable 2) capable of being explained : explainable

You're right. Though checking their synonym guide [1], there is this:

> accountable suggests imminence of retribution for unfulfilled trust or violated obligation.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountable

It sure does imply consequences. Click on that link in "answerable".

The most relevant definition seems to be "1: liable to be called to account : responsible"

I still don't see any implication of consequences.

It is a get-out-of-jail free card only if you've squared it with the board of directors beforehand.

Given how much all of the accountability statements are getting sneered at and used for media/social media outrage bait, I wouldn’t blame companies for going back to simple just-the-facts announcements.

In the current climate where every word and every sentence is picked apart, saying as little as possible might be the only strategy that minimizes outrage, ironically.

I think just dropping the free accountability statement would help. It's not so much the lack of responsibility, it's the accompanying false humility that annoys people.

Or even better, back your words with actions. Like the Nintendo executive team did a decade ago.

They're all meaningless buzzy catchphrases. Until a CEO takes responsibility by resigning themselves, or forfeiting their pay, or something else meaningful, it's all just words.

I disagree, adults speak in language of responsibility which doesn't imply throwing yourself on the sword.

When you get a speeding ticket, do you blame the cop, the car, the state, anyone but yourself? Or do you say "yup, I am the one behind the wheel so I am responsible"

It doesn't mean you will never allow yourself to drive again or to only go 10mph from now on as self punishment. It just means you acknowledge your part like an adult instead of finding a way to appear blameless.

or: We had a prod outage, I was the code reviewer. "yup, I am the one who fucked up. It's my responsibility". Doesn't mean I am going to forego salary for the next 10 years to make the company whole for the outage.

I wonder if people confused by the 'responsibility' language themselves take responsibility for things in their lives, because they seem literally confused about what it means.

> When you get a speeding ticket, do you blame the cop, the car, the state, anyone but yourself? Or do you say "yup, I am the one behind the wheel so I am responsible"

If you admit you're the one who was behind the wheel and thus responsible, then you DEAL WITH THE PENALTY, which includes paying a fine, points on your license, potential driver's ed, etc.

These CEOs aren't facing any actual consequences here. They're just parroting the empty words "I take responsibility".

> or: We had a prod outage, I was the code reviewer. "yup, I am the one who fucked up. It's my responsibility". Doesn't mean I am going to forego salary for the next 10 years to make the company whole for the outage.

Complete red herring. I'm struggling to believe that you're arguing in good faith here, actually. You really can't see any difference between thousands of people being laid off and making a bug in a code review??

>> you really can't see any difference between thousands of people being laid off and making a bug in a code review??

Thank you for engaging. I intentionally picked something small like a production outage because - unlike hiring/firing 10k+ people - it's something more of us can relate to.

The topic at hand is - what does it mean to say "I am responsible?" I am using the relatable examples to explain it - it means as an adult I am saying "I am not blaming someone else, I am the one in charge here, and this happened on my watch / I made the decision."

This is in contrast to saying things like "the market is forcing our hand, I am powerless here" or "people under me made bad hiring decisions, I had no idea" - you are acknowledging that what happens on your watch, good or bad, is ultimately on you.

It's a separate concept from punishment. If you keep making bad decisions, your employees can chose to punish you by quitting, your boss (the board/shareholders) can punish you by asking you to resign, etc. Acknowledging responsibility over the decision doesn't imply you have to fire yourself.

CEOs will never really take the same responsibility. They're all rich. Even if they resign they'll have another job easily.

The problem is the system. With an adequate social safety net, these layoffs matter much, much less.

Sure, next time you introduce a bug in your code, you'll immediately resign, right?

In the tech sector, "taking responsibility" means admitting your decisions led to the situation yet you'll externalize the consequences to employees.

In other words, it means nothing.

Taking actual responsibility could include stepping down, canceling bonuses, reduced compensation for leadership. It could include steps to become better at forecasting rather than randomly guessing. It could include ironing the business model to become less dependent on the whims of advertisers. It could include re-education and internal placement of the excess employees or reducing their hours rather than firing them.

Why would you do that though when not only can you get away with doing nothing, the market rewards it.

You nailed it! I'm always wondering how someone takes responsibility and then absolutely nothing changes for him personally.

Tim Cook had his compensation cut, and Reid Hoffman left the CEO role (becoming exec chairman). AFAIK, all other bigco CEOs did the 'taking responsibility' thing of doing absolutely nothing.

I can see why Spotify is reluctant to dump the CEO. Theirs is a business model that's never been profitable anyway, so keeping the founder on couldn't make things any worse.

I'm sure you took responsibility for your bad stock markets returns in 2022 by saying you'll never make investment decision ever again and hand everything to your partner, right?

I've never in my life owned a single stock, nor has my partner.

> yet you'll externalize the consequences to employees.

If a F1 driver admits his driving led to them loosing the race even though engineering did everything right, it's still the entire team that doesn't get the price. And if the entire team doesn't get enough funds in from their endeavor they might have to carry out layoffs. And you can be sure they'll lay off one of the 40 engineers before they lay off the driver.

That does not mean the driver can't mean it when he says he's sorry and taking responsibility. Trust me, he would rather be on the podium than loosing.

The mob mentality of "fire the driver first" will only leave you with 40 engineers starring at a car in a lot. You might say they need to change the driver, and that's certainly what's going to happen if management sees an opportunity for a better driver, but they can't just switch drivers between every race, imagine the spectators outrage at this team that's completely unpredictable and only ever keeps a driver for multiple races when he's first on the podium. And what driver would ever want to sign such a contract? Leave which ever team they are on for the chance at a higher pay, conditioned on getting 1 every time, otherwise the contract is void.

I think this analogy fails in a number of ways, the biggest being that the assumption is the driver has "just started" and fails "one race". Neither are true for the executive in question.

Not only that but the analogy even fails for F1 because there are reserve drivers and an infinite number of people who want to be F1 drivers, there'll never be an "empty seat"

>Not only that but the analogy even fails for F1 because there are reserve drivers and an infinite number of people who want to be F1 drivers, there'll never be an "empty seat"

Plenty of people wanting to do the job, but how many can actually do the job.

Do we have to have this same conversation on every single one of these threads?

My comment was posted mostly in jest - my stance on it is mostly neutral, but considering the level of engagement it still generated even though this meme is admittedly getting old, there is or was clearly more to be said on the subject.

Sounds like a great time to reduce my monthly payments to Spotify by 100%. I overspent during the past two years and based on the macro economic conditions I need to increase my personal finance efficiency.

But do you take full accountability?

> Ostroff helped shape Spotify's podcast business...

If that means that they're paddling back on shoving that podcast bullshit into your face and return to focusing on music streaming, then there's at least a silver lining. Reading how podcasts have higher "engagement" that's probably wishful thinking though.

12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.

They do it because they can. Because most employees are spineless and will fall in line.

People making the money we make in the tech industry should be living well below their means, saving, and supplanting the tech giants with worker-owned coops and guilds. If all tech workers united into guilds the corps would come begging us for technical contributions, and we would collectively charge up the ass for it — and all make 100% of the profits.

I agree. However, it's easy to post on HN, and much harder to do in practice. Do keep us posted if you make some progress in this direction. (This isn't sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested in that model.)

Agreed.

Generally, I think that the strategy will be some combination of technology, coop ownership, and worker insurance.

Technology, for making corporation killers. Making alternative tech stacks that make existing corporate offerings irrelevant and requiring a sort of ransom to keep the licenses non-competitive. This provides nuclear leverage.

Cooperative ownership to align the organizations objectives with individual workers. The profit is distributed in a relatively fair way without these 100x pay differences, in a manner members can all agree with, and planets away from only caring about enriching investors.

Worker insurance where the coop offers healthcare and minimum income guarantees between jobs with corps. When a member is working for a corp, it is expected the corp pays for their insurance etc. If the member leaves the corp, they seamlessly continue to have healthcare etc.

I think the first step to making something like this happen is creating an extremely valuable piece of tech that society cannot do without. That acts as a beacon to attract workers and provides leverage. With the appropriate legal framework around that, it would cascade from there.

In the days-of-old to gain a skill you needed an apprenticeship. To gain an apprenticeship you can to become a guild member. This created a moat, where only guild members were highly skilled.

How do you purpose to market guild labor over non-guild labor, especially at a time when anyone can earn a CS degree, publish open source, and right to work laws pepper the country.

Guild-owned technology, created with human-aligned intentions (as opposed to greed-aligned). Human-centric tech is superior to capital-centric tech.

Open source is basically this in a naive and unorganized way, especially when MIT licensed (a giant con in my opinion). GNU does much better. But if there existed a guild license connected to tech and patents that are must haves, it would tip the balance.

The guild would offer objective security to a worker — health insurance, income insurance, and legal backing, with intentions aligned entirely with the worker. It provides a behemoth aligned with maximizing the rights and income of a worker. That would do a whole lot in attracting people to join.

What is this guild license, and how does it differ from the current system of having private companies own software licenses, tech patents, and trade secrets?

It sounds to me like you're just describing a tech company.

It is a tech company but it is owned by specialized, skilled workers. It is a guild because tech workers are professional artisans. Guilds are an organization of skilled professionals which have quality certification for work, often times integrated with legal frameworks in a government.

Software needs to be elevated, credentialed, regulated, and more respected. This is what a guild would enable. But I think merging benefits of unions with the prestige of a guild would provide some needed innovation in that space.

Providing skilled professionals with an army of lawyers, professional insurance, income guarantees, healthcare, lead management, all with cooperative ownership, profit sharing, etc is a drastically different incentive structure than existing organizations.

I'll agree with you that I like the GPL License (I think you meant that, when you mentioned GNU) more than the MIT. I think we, at least broadly, agree on the definitions of Guild, Union, and Company.

You haven't convinced me that this is a thing desirable or plausible. You keep mentioning benefits that I feel I already have. You haven't convinced me that the technical output would be better than the current system. You haven't convinced me that there is a place for this in our current world, or that their is a reasonable growth path for the idea. In fact, the discussion is largely abstract. I wish you all the best with your idea, maybe there is something here than just isn't getting through to me right now.

The issue isn’t for people who are already proven within the system. The system compensates competent, compliant actors very well (although not at the level they deserve, far in excess of the norm).

The issue I am thinking about and solving for is the fact that I believe there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of Einstein-level intellects who are completely unknown, under-utilized, and lost in the current system.

With the resources (including intellectual resources), we are far in excess of what is necessary to be a multiplanetary species. Yet here we all stand, upon our home planet, with minimal access to space except for a small exceptional few. It is a gross failing to be destroying this world with industrialization while there exists dead worlds with bountiful resources.

And that is the beginning of the problems. The current structure pays even top-level tech workers a pittance compared to the ruling class, and that ruling class has no vision for the future of humanity beyond their own wealth and prosperity. They are driving our kind and our world straight off a cliff to oblivion while utilizing the planetary resources for their own vapid pleasure and security.

Perhaps, if you cannot see why I say this, you may consider walking a mile in the shoes of common people. This planet is in need of a competent technical class with a collective mission of uplifting, enriching, and enlightening with technology. The technical class are the true leaders / managers of resources, and within it exist the means to maximize beneficial traits while minimizing destructive traits.

In any case, these are just words. I just hope that when paths open up, we all can recognize it and travel it.

Over the last decade I've had a similar thought and hope. Or at least the idea of working for an employee-owned and directed tech business (maybe on the model of REI?). Curious whether anyone knows of any successes in this area with respect to the tech industry?

> most employees are spineless and will fall in line.

I don't get this. It's a layoff - what do you think not spineless and not falling in line looks like?

“If you layoff Bob, I quit”

“If you do these layoffs, all of us will strike”

In other words, unified action among the workers that costs the business significantly more funds than the savings from laying people off.

That is one example of having a spine. There are countless others.

A union would force these layoffs to be justified well beyond what we see in these PR releases, however, the severance packages offered are very good for non-unionized labor. It makes me suspect that the loose association of programmers has latent power even if it’s not in a guild or union.

More like if you cheap out on severance.... no one will ever come work for you without a significant comp premium

Profit is what matters, not revenue. You can’t look at revenue numbers alone.

Regardless, you shouldn’t assume that any company’s first priority is to continue employing and paying everyone. A business is a business, and the employees are hired to do a job. The working world makes a lot more sense when you accept that jobs are jobs and not a benevolent source of guaranteed income.

Yes, that is a core truth, but doesn't excuse the current behavior. There's a lot of middle ground between "employment for life" and "you're a disposable object".

For sure you can treat employees as disposable objects, but this zero trust situation surely will backlash in one way or another.

The problem is, once you adopt this mentality, there's often pushback that you should also consider labor just like a business acting in self interest. Labor should focus on their profits (comp vs time vs benefits of concern) and optimize on those, just as businesses do in terms of employment.

Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.

Instead I often hear a mixture of inconsistent arguments where after all moral and ethical lip service is exhausted, we fall back to the "business is business and not charity argument." That's fine (and I agree with it) but if we're going to strip away morals and ethical obligations in society from business, we need to do the same for labor and not chastise labor with morals and ethics to prevent double standards.

If we do want labor to follow moral and ethical social obligations that aren't focused on pure self interest at all times, then we should also talk about how businesses should also have some sort of loyalty and societal obligations as well.

We sort of need to pick one option, not pick and choose a mixture that benefits business entities above all else. Not that this specific post makes any such claims.

> The problem is, once you adopt this mentality, there's often pushback that you should also consider labor just like a business acting in self interest. Labor should focus on their profits (comp vs time vs benefits of concern) and optimize on those, just as businesses do in terms of employment.

As someone who has managed a lot of tech teams over the years across multiple companies and including remote teams in different countries, I can confidently say that people already act exactly like this.

> Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.

This is how most people operate, especially in the tech world in recent years. Usually when people go above and beyond, it’s for promotion and advancement opportunities or to build their resume to move to another job.

The thing is, if either side takes these positions too far then the other side is going to want to cut ties. A company doing a 6% layoff into an obvious global downturn isn’t exactly unreasonable. An employee who actively tries to do as little as possible and requires more management oversight than their peers is being unreasonable, though, and will find themselves at the top of the list for layoffs (with good reason).

Neither companies nor employees should be adopting extreme positions. I don’t see Spotify doing anything unreasonable here.

I would say that both sides have social obligations to fulfill their part of a contract according to their best effort while the contract is active, but also both sides are free to change / terminate contract (with respect to contract terms and laws) - both employer doing layoffs, or employee asking for raise or leaving the job.

The equation isn't equal, though. A company losing an employee has a very different impact on that company than an employee losing their employment has on that employee.

All of these layoff announcements, regardless of high profits or otherwise, are quickly eroding any sense of loyalty I have toward my company - and it should do the same for all of the tech workers out there.

You have to do what's best for you and those that you support. Do not accept anything less; your company certainly will not.

Until it becomes apparent that the constant turnover of tech workers hits the bottom line, these companies will do less than nothing to make things better for their employees.

"We're loosing money on every sale, how will we ever survive?"

"Don't worry, we'll make up for it in volume"

The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry.

The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.

Outside the US, labour costs are already quite low though.

Although I agree, they're going to get even lower. To quote Neal Stephenson:

> the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity

Isn’t it possible that the high costs just aren’t sustainable for businesses that just don’t make any money?

Unions often have coasters and quiet quitters. As an experienced developer I would never work with people like that.

you'd rather work harder and for less money than work with people who phone it in?

I don't really buy the meritocracy argument that 'good devs get paid more'. It hasn't really panned out in my experience, except for less than 1%, probably closer to .1% of devs who are really, truly exceptional AND will fight aggressively for their keep.

I would rather, yes. Working with people who phone it in means my projects will unpredictably grind to a halt for weeks, and getting them to work at all requires an obnoxious and overbearing management style that I really don't enjoy being around. I don't think it's wrong to be a "phone it in" person, they're just trying to earn a living so they can focus on what they care about, but that doesn't mean I want to work with them.

I don’t want to work with people who consistently let me down nor would I want to work with jerks.

Well, that's rather obvious, isn't it? I prefer working in smaller organizations. Growth there is a factor of personal growth and the company succeeding strongly enough that you have something bigger to grow into. It's not enough for me to work for $x for 2 years, have the company go under, and then go work somewhere else for $x for another 2 years, rinse and repeat with some number of coasters killing off firms.

I want what I got: company goes through hyper-growth and my own personal growth has some meaty problems to latch onto so I can apply myself. You can put my Ducati on a frozen lake and it's not going anywhere. Powerful engine wasted on frictionless surface. What I got when I was young was that if I applied myself I got better. And the company got better around me. And that meant I got bigger responsibilities which I could actually do.

Plus the obvious factor that I want my peer group as bought in as I am. My morale is high. Every idea I bounce off gets improved. Mistakes I'd make are caught. I am improved tenfold.

Reminder that “quiet quitting” is a term for people who do what they have been asked to do by their position. It’s a smear-word for a good thing.

this misguided and only purpose it serve to make these company die sooner.

Main problem these company took benefit of cheap interest rates and overhired. hiring for promotion and ego. hiring not sake of true business growth.

Saw entire teams and orgs at two big tech companies sitting idle..senior and staff engineers have no commit in over a year. ok..maybe they doing design work or something else to drive efficiency or cross org optimization.

but no, even college level hires have no commit or other meaningful work. reasonable question: what they do? especially when team own no critical service and even have no support burden..why 7 engineers plus 3 managers?

meanwhile managers getting increasing hc and fighting territory battle.

this was massive grift. a union only make the grift last longer. real solution: remove dead weight.. massive bureaucracy..go back to entreprenurial root of company and what it vision.

I don't want to sound unsympathetic, but a lot of these companies massively over hired over the last couple of years. While others were losing their jobs during the pandemic tech employees were in higher demand than ever. In fact, I'd argue the demand for tech workers has been so high over the last couple of years that a lot of people who really shouldn't have got a job based on their experience were able to do so.

I'd also note that the severance packages most tech companies have been offering their employees have been very fair, and with tech skills being almost universally valuable across industries it's not hard for good tech workers to quickly find tech jobs if they're happy to work outside of the tech sector.

If people want to form a union then fine, but I'm not sure what you expect. Spotify isn't profitable. With the cost of capital rising and a potential recession looming they obviously need to be financially cautious otherwise everyone at the company will eventually lose their job.

It's a meme at this point that Google is probably developing 5 new chat apps to replace the 10 they recently killed. But then everyone gets up in arms when Google trims it's workforce by 6%, one which as grown by 100+% since 2016. If everyone wasn't looking for anything to signal 'recession!', no one would bat an eye at these big tech companies doing small staffing course corrections.

There's another way to look at it, though.

Without unions, employees are disposable. Companies hire them when money is plentiful and throw them away when it's convenient. It clearly benefits the employers and investors to operate that way.

With a union, employees aren't so dispensable, and companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim. Despite being more stable for everybody, it's extra difficulty for the company and it balances out their power over employees.

> companies have to take a longer term view when hiring because they can't get rid of employees on a whim

that would make it harder to find a new job, right? tradeoffs to consider

Yup. Hard to fire = hard to hire. Why should an employer take a chance on hiring you, if in case it doesn't work out, they need to spend considerable time and money to fire you?

You don’t need a union. It’s enough to have a long notice period required by law.

I'm not sure that collective bargaining would be helpful for most tech workers -- there's such a large diversity in individual skills and productivity that negotiating for yourself seems to make more sense.

Moreso than professional sports or actors?

unionization is one thing, but i think i'd prefer to just do away with the conflict of interest (between owner/manager/employee) from the get-go and push for more employee-owned businesses instead

The core question is how many employees do you need run a stable internet business?

Stable means no massive new product lines, growth, etc.

Spotify is what it is. An app across a handful platforms, streaming infrastructure, and a legal/purchasing dept for music rights.

Does this need 7000 people? Zero chance. Is it 1000? 700? 250? No ones knows yet, but everyone remembers WhatsApp at acquisition and watches Twitter to kind of continue without 80% of its former employee base.

If your goal is maintenance mode for the company, milk profits for 10 years, and to be eventually replaced by competitors then I think you can run a company very slim. The other question would be, if you have captured a large market share (100s of M/yr to Billions in revenue), how many employees do you need to prevent an upstart from overtaking you through improved tech, product, or strategy?

For example, if FB never invested in ML they would have had even larger margins (fewer GPUs and ML engineers), but now that investment may pay off by fending off tiktok through copycat products and also rebuilding ad attribution after ATT. To complicate matters, before it happens, you don't know in what area your competitor will arise (ML? Product? Paradigm shift?). Similar examples with Google vs. OpenAI, ~2010s Kubernetes wars between cloud providers, Snap vs. FB/Twitter, etc.

If you compete with startups with tens of employees - shouldn't you use tens of employees to counter their strategies too?

Do you need endless hanger ons in HR, PR, all kinds of non-producing departments?

Crappy CEOs, which is not the same as a crappy founder, have grown companies without any sense and purpose. Daniel is a great founder and rode great luck. But, he should have been replaced with a Eric Schmidt operator figure a while ago.

I think the founder clings to company forever is coming to an end, in most cases going public should mean a new CEO.

>legal/purchasing dept for music rights

I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or not), all because of some cryptic licensing shift from the record label. There is no easy way to automate this; a human interaction must occur between the label and streaming service every time a weird licensing shift causes a particular song/album/artist to be removed. Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, there are probably thousands of such licensing changes each day.

Pretty sure the DRM process in YouTube is heavily automated - why wouldn't Spotify do the same? Give the labels an API, then they can dynamically maintain all that crap themselves.

I would be surprised if there tech team was larger than 2000 people. Majority of those people will be marketing, sales, legal, talent/content, etc.

The majority of saas business is like this: Numerous engineers trying to invent new unnecessary features or sitting idle through irrelevant projects and meetings or doing continuous refactoring and ‘let’s use the new x tool/process/language/whatever’ every x months, numerous managers ‘managing’ them and managing these managers and fighting about headcount and other irrelevant metrics and so on, numerous product managers having no clue and just copy-pasting features from different saas, ux designers iterating on the designs every year and so on, founders keep founding the same saas with another tens of competitors building the same thing snd so on.

We are really privileged to be in such an industry, gaining so much money (depending on location) compared to other professions and doing so meaningless job. IMO the majority of saas business would operate decently with at least half of their staff or they shouldn’t exist at all. Most of them just facilitate invented features for other saas anyway.

Might I suggest "Spotify" be retrospectively added to the title ?

The present generic "An update on January 2023 Organisational Changes" is very unhelpful. And indeed has already lead to at least one duplicate post ...

I changed it to the most relevant/interesting snippet from the post and added "Spotify: " before it. Maybe too much editorialising for HN? But it feels more informative to me.

I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99.

I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.

> Video > audio

I get what you mean, but I wouldn't accept that as a universal truth. I spend considerably more time listening to music on Spotify than I do watching video on Netflix. The content I consume on Netflix may have cost more to produce, but the content I consume on Spotify gives me subjectively more value.

I agree with you - music keeps me entertained all day, it has far more value to me. But isn't there an argument to be made that the infrastructure requirements for video is huge compared to music? The requirements to store and stream enough 4k video all day every day to satisfy millions of users is monstrous and that has to factor into the cost. I wouldn't expect streaming audio to be nearly that costly.

The only reason music streaming is so cheap is because it's a commodity. There's several multi-billion dollar corporations all competing with largely identical products. There's not much else than price to compete on.

Video services compete on exclusive content, so they can make subjective value considerations around how valuable certain content is to certain groups.

And, related is that there's a royalty/copyright structure in music that means those multi-billion dollar companies can stream almost anything they want for a known low dollar amount.

There's also an almost infinite supply of good music--past and present--out there. There just isn't a lot of incentive for most audio streaming services to invest in exclusive content--the odd podcast notwithstanding.

If streaming got too expensive, I'd just buy more music now and then. I managed fine before streaming and I'd manage without it. But then I have a big library.

Spotify is dumping tons of resources into live streaming video podcasts, I guess they heard "people pay for videos" and didn't realize the video had to be good

Netflix has been doing the same thing by cracking down on sharing of accounts between family members not living in the same house, etc. I'd probably sooner cancel Netflix or Amazon Prime than Spotify. I've actually been thinking about that lately because they seem to be putting out less nice content lately.

I might just start subscription hopping for a while. Binge on a bunch of HBO things. Cancel that, move on to Prime, pay for a few months of Netflix, Apple TV, and so on. The issue is that none of them have enough quality content to keep me there permanently and they all have some content that is at least tempting. There are a couple of shows per year on each that I really enjoy and then just a lot of filler content that I don't really care as much about. I actually watch more free content on Youtube at this point then Netflix.

There are a few alternatives to Spotify. I'd say Prime Music is probably the least polished of them. AWS for all their success as a retailer just never figured out how to do decent UX. Prime video is pretty bad for example.

I've heard good things about Tidal and I kind of like their focus on artist revenue. But for now, I'm pretty happy with Spotify and the switching is not really worth the trouble to me. In terms of cost most of these things are pretty close together.

> I might just start subscription hopping for a while.

Aren't you worried about how this will look on your resume?

> I might just start subscription hopping for a while.

>> Aren't you worried about how this will look on your resume? @halgir

You jest, but this type of censorship is coming to a business near you in the very-near future.

When Spotify threatened to cancel my account for sharing with my sister, I cancelled Spotify instead.

Spotify removed password sharing first.

> I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription

Don't worry, I am sure Netflix will put up their prices again.

Netflix doesn't have all films and shows whereas Spotify has pretty much every song. For video I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney plus and Hulu but for music I only have Spotify.

That's fair. Still not sure Spotify's worth £20/month though but I wouldn't describe myself as someone massively into music.

> Video > audio

This is why they're now offering video and podcasts. They want to be valued the same way Netflix and YouTube are, and they can't do it with an audio-only offering.

SiriusXM costs from $18-$23/month for ad free streaming. That’s channels instead of on demand playback. The prices that are being asked for make me wish we just had a better successor to FM radio.

> I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio.

Hard disagree, video streaming platforms are a gigantic hot mess where movies and shows constantly appear and expire, you never know where to look, if something is available or not anymore or for how long.

Spotify and friends are constantly growing libraries, where everything is available, at all time, always (modulo the expected lawyer temper tantrums here and there). It boggles my mind how people can feel so entitled that they wouldn't accept paying a bit more for sixty million tracks available everywhere every time all the time.

Spotify is a shit company, with garbage mobile and desktop clients, but the service is absolutely insanely cheap for what it is, I personally would gladly pay double and still be happy about it.

They are worth way more than a stupid Netflix subscription in my book. Vastly.

I get what you're saying but I also want to clarify that an equivalent analogy would be if Netflix had nearly EVERY film/TV show that was ever released.

Apple One which includes Apple Music, family app sharing, family storage, and family privacy (essentially TOR for everyday browsing, except through a privacy preserving tango between Apple and CloudFlare) is a surprisingly good value relative to the standalone music offerings.

https://www.apple.com/apple-one/

Family is $22.95 a month, with 5 other people:

- Apple Music

- Apple TV+

- Apple Arcade

- iCloud+ (with photos and video sharing, email/cal hosting with family domain name, hide my email, private browsing)

Apple Music is very clunky, much worse experience than spotify. I tried twice to switch. I would recommend paying a dollar for icloud+ and ignoring the rest.

One is for people who like collecting music and discovering things you wouldn't have discovered. The other is for people who like radio, and hearing more things like the things they already like.

They're only superficially the same, in fact they're wildly different. Each will be a "worse experience" if your preferred experience is the other.

> video > audio

Agreed, but keep in mind this is “access to virtually all available audio” vs “access to one particular channel/library of video”

I switched to Tidal and have been pleased so far. It's not perfect, but it is focused on music, has a pretty good interface, and pays artists better than Spotify does.

Reasons I was unhappy with Spotify:

- They went all in on podcasts at the expense of the music interface. Too many little design choices trying to steer me into podcasts when I'm there for music.

- Their podcast strategy relies on leveraging their market position instead of adding value to the market.

  - Trying to replicate Patreon

  - Buying up a catalog of exclusive podcasts

- Not going to respond to any comments about this point, but the Joe Rogan thing left a sour taste in my mouth as well. In addition to other aspects of that debacle, it was not a sound business strategy.

The podcast app I use (PocketCasts) is generally pretty good, but it has enough annoyances that I thought I might as well try to switch and get all of my podcasts on Spotify. I couldn't get special Patreon feeds because Spotify doesn't support them. The reason is they want to roll out their own Patreon-like podcast payments mechanism. But as of when I left, they had not rolled it out across the board, and the podcasts I listen to were not supported.

I'm not sure what their value proposition to podcast producers is that would get them to switch from Patreon to Spotify, but I imagine that has something to do with the trouble rolling that out.

I don't recall the details, but I wasn't all that impressed with the Spotify podcast functionality as a user either.

If they spent money on paying musicians more instead of podcasters, made a podcast app worth using, and played nicely with the podcasting sphere, I probably would've stayed with them.

They got big because they solved problems. Then they shifted their strategy to leveraging their market position instead of solving problems. A sure sign a company has lost its way.

Gotta love these euphemisms, “reducing our employee base”.

I can see it being used to imply that these are full time Spotify employees, since they hire some contractors.

Right? Surprised they didn't use "adjusting" instead of "reducing" to make it even more opaque.

Another one I love is "right sizing". A phrase I have only ever heard when companies lay off.

This announcement is really beating around the bush and burying the lede. The sentence "And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company." comes after about 10 paragraphs, and is 70% down the length of the text.

The vague, ephemistic title "An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes" doesn't help either. If I saw this article on its own, I would probably miss its main point. But because I saw this from HN, the title from HN - "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%" - told me what I needed to know.

It feels like a pure bandwagon action, and not one that was well thought out and came from the organization’s needs.

To give one data point, I have a friend who just joined Spotify and had his first working day last week.

More doom and gloom. Last few years have been terrible.

Yeah we seem to have had hit our industry peak in November 2021.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Palo Alto. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle twenties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Watched the Gimme Shelter documentary last night and it made me wonder if, when Thompson wrote that piece, he wasn't merely being allegorical. Perhaps he was also referencing the Altamonte Speedway which is North West of Vegas as the crow flies and where in a sense the 'sixties' came to a very definite end.

There's still a ton of jobs out there, depending on where in the world you're able to work. They might not be as exciting, the companies aren't as well known, but they still pay fairly well and it's stable.

I do feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, it's not their fault. Many of the companies currently firing people simply had too many employees to begin with. Daniel Elk even admits it: "I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth".

It really depends where, outside the US pay is pretty terrible usually.

In Europe for example, as a senior developer you get maybe $70-90k in FAANG and big companies, and $50-70k in smaller companies.

It's a little hard to compare across countries in Europe, even within a small country. I'm in Denmark, but outside Copenhagen. $90.000 isn't a terrible salary and $100.000 is pretty doable for a senior developer, dev-ops or operation person. You can go a bit higher in Copenhagen. That's not for the FAANGs, that's for the companies that a desperately looking for employees.

Other countries have much lower cost of living, so I don't see the issue with saleries being lower in those countries.

Again very much depending on which country you're in, I'd say that $50.000 is a starting salary, perhaps on the low-end, for a developer fresh out of school.

What's weird is that all of these CEOs are saying the same thing: "I hired too many folks a couple years ago, welp, guess I was wrong".

You would think some companies hired too many, some hired too few, others more or less just stayed the same. Instead we're seeing this groupthink of these so-called geniuses of the industry moving this way and that like a flock of sheep.

It is almost as if the low interest rate stimulated frivolous spending by investors..

Those CEOs knew what they were doing and what they're doing isn't wrong.

Our entire economy is built on short term gain and rewards that. CEOs are worried about their quarterly numbers and are doing layoffs to lessen the blow.

Sure, but then one questions the need of these extremely-well renumerated CEOs. If they are guided purely by quarterly numbers, stock market trends and industry groupthink, then why not save a fortune and replace them wholesale with an AI.

Never said purely. In any case, it's a proxy. When they're presented an easy win, they're going to take it. Most of these cuts are happening in unprofitable business areas. Before with cheap cash and a strong economy, it made sense to keep these people on. The market valued investment. Now it no longer does - now profit matters, and that means cutting costs.

There's not a single person on here who wouldn't be making these decisions right now. You don't call a person who decides to cut their grocery bill dumb and influenced by group think. It's time to save money, and the overall economy recognizes this.

> There's not a single person on here who wouldn't be making these decisions right now.

What about Tim Cook?

Spotify lays off 6% of the workforce.

Spotify fucked up and makes good by firing 6% of their people.

I've seen some good analyses lately showing spotify's business model just can't survive in the long run with the way things are going in the economy and the record companies are squeezing them while simultaneously maneuvering to own them/buy them over time. Apple/Amazon/Google are diversified giants that can seemingly get away with running things without a need to make as much money as Spotify/Tidal/Whatever which just do music/podcast streaming.

In the long run these services are all unsustainable and bad for music.. I sometimes wonder if the young people going back to vinyl is somewhat of a pushback on how lame the entire experience of using these streaming services can be.

Podcasts can do well and have done well for a very long time in a small business model with sponsors & product promotion.. throwing massive money at them has always seemed an odd choice.

Thing is though, I have probably thrown 3K into Spotify, If I cant get a "Flat rate subscription for All / Most of the music out there" - > I will 100% just go back to downloading discographies of the artists I like.

People saying "Support the artists" - I don't care about the artists, I just want to listen to whatever takes my fancy, and if they can't do that at my price point, they will end up getting nothing from me..

What is your price point?

Why would artists give anything to you?

Well, I am currently on like £15 a month for 2x users on Spotify.

>Why would artists give anything to you?

Literally not my concern.

Spotify isn't profitable. Tidal isn't profitable. Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple probably earn a profit on their bundles, but if artists and labels aren't making money on streaming, how long until they start pulling their catalogs?

Will you stop listening to music if/when the unprofitable music streaming services shut down? What happens if/when Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple are barred from tying and bundling their services?

It seems like artists and labels will simply revert to pay per song/album and legal battles instead of wasting resources on listeners who aren't willing to pay a meaningful amount for music. At your price point, you'll probably be able go back to buying a few hundred songs / dozen or so albums a year.

It seems like most casual listeners just don't understand this no matter how many articles there are about the current model not being sustainable or how many time their favorite artists complain about it.

There is not enough money in music for both the record companies and spotify, et. al. to simultaneously rob the artists. These streaming companies being the new middle man are going to be the first to lose out. Especially if the record companies wake up and start making their own stores/services.

>> It seems like most casual listeners just don't understand this

I very much understand it. I just don't care.

There will always be some form of music. I pay my money for it. If they can't get by on some agreement from the record industries, I really don't care.

how long until they start pulling their catalogs?

> Not my concern, I will just rollback to having an offline downloaded library if Spotify / All you can eat music stops being "Easy"

>Will you stop listening to music if/when the unprofitable music streaming services shut down?

No, I will just stop paying for it.

>What happens if/when Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple are barred from tying and bundling their services?

Yarrrrrr

>will simply revert to pay per song/album and legal battles instead of wasting resources on listeners who aren't willing to pay a meaningful amount for music.

Then they get nothing from me..

I think it all rolls back to - > Would they rather have 1 million listens at 0.5P or 1 million listens at 0p.

$3k is a lot of money to rent music. It's kind of odd to realize people have spent that kind of money to rent music and have nothing to show for it without continuing to spend money.

$3k would still buy a very large physical collection. Most people didn't have that kind of money into a physical collection back in the day.

Vinyl prices are a joke, but CDs are often cheaper than a digital download if bought new and they are easy to find for $1-2 used.

It's kind of amazing you're OK having spent $3k renting music but think the only option would be to go back to piracy if streaming rental isn't available.

"Nothing to show for it" is strange way to requiring getting value from something.

2 hours after I eat lunch, what do I have to "show for it"?

I'm perfectly fine with all the hours of music and the accompanying enjoyment I've received from paying Spotify, and that doesn't start to take in to consideration the amount of new music I have easily discovered.

Honestly, I paid for the convenience.

I paid to bark orders at my Amazon Echo's / Google in the car, and vend literally any song I wanted.

You could look back and be like >> Its amazing your ok with spending 100k on food over your lifetime, you could have eaten grass from the side of the road for free.

Piracy is easy, Spotify was easier.

Buying and ripping CD's is Effort

> $3k would still buy a very large physical collection

It's only a couple of hundred CDs. If you buy a lot of low-priced ones, perhaps a few hundred.

The large collection is an asset to you, but to many of us, it's a liability.

Almost everything I own I do because it is not cost-efficient to rent (which is what I would prefer to do). i.e. if cost-efficiency were even, I would rent things like books, movies, or music.

how have you spent $3k on Spotify? the company is 17 years old and if you were subscribing from day 1 for $10/month that would only be 2k.

OP probably just ballpark estimated… but you can certainly have spent $3k on Spotify since they now allow you to buy audiobooks.

Been using it since I was back at Uni, 2012, and have paid for both myself and another account recently.

you do realize that young people overwhelmingly stream, and do not generally purchase vinyl, right?

I've heard this idea of streaming being bad for music bandied about, but I don't believe it. streaming solved by piracy problem by getting people to actually pay for music. People in the industry like to complain about streaming, but I'm not actually sure that 'the good ole days' are actually better, or if people just have rose-coloured glasses about what the actual state of things were.

You are right that streaming-only companies cannot afford to take the same loss on streaming as Apple/Amazon/Google. And IMO that's probably a good thing: we need to find the balance between producers and consumers, not subsidize it with phone sales.

Artist revenues on streaming have been dropping substantially over the years, not increasing as the companies get larger. There is no shortage of artists talking about what a joke the payments have become.

If Spotify can't make money after cutting royalties 50% over the last 3-4 years how can that possibly work?

Realistically Spotify is a whole bunch of people making a lot of money as middlemen, but they can't seem to figure out how to actually make money.

The music industry really doesn't have a choice in this though. If Spotify and Apple music die out, then it's back to sailing the high seas again, and they get nothing. A Plex-like music streaming app will be born, with an idiot-proof way of downloading music from torrents, and they're fucked.

As a long time user of Spotify (almost two decades in a couple of years...), this is my biggest gripe with Spotify:

https://i.imgur.com/wfSka2H.png

More and more playlists are starting to look like this, which is starting to piss me off. I don't really care if it's the record companies fault or whoever, and I blame 100% myself for getting into this situation in the first place.

Started to use Bandcamp more and more lately, and feel a lot safer because of it. I'm hopeful Bandcamp won't ever need to do layoffs either, as they are not trying to take over the world with their SaaS or pivot to focusing on Podcasts, or stuff like that.

But Spotify was really useful for a long time and still discovery is second to none.

> I don't really care if it's the record companies fault or whoever, and I blame 100% myself for getting into this situation in the first place.

Interestingly that in a situation where it's 100% copyright holders who are at fault, you say that you 100% blame yourself, but in reality you blame Spotify be cause that's your biggest gripe with it.

Somehow no one ever blames the three-four companies (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation) that hold 90% of the world's recorded music hostage.

Well they’re owned by Epic now, so that may not be up to them anymore.

That did suck big time, makes them less independent. But at least stuff I already bought and downloaded can't disappear overnight, as I have the files on disk and backup already. I learned something from Spotify after all :)

Yeah this is what we get for relying on streaming. After 10 months of YouTube Music, I just noticed my first disappeared track. Funny thing is, the track is found in the service, just disappeared from my playlist and the album art seems a bit different. Time to create a job that saves at least the tracklists.

Another "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today." message from the CEO. What does this accountability mean? Shouldn't he be fired and stripped of all benefits, just as he did for those employees that got axed?

> What does this accountability mean?

It means to own up to one’s mistake and fixing it. It isn’t that mysterious.

Side note but every year Spotify's app gets worse and worse as they remove features and try to 'simplify' the UI. Has anyone been able to use the home screen where recommendations are offered successfully? They want people to listen to podcasts but can't even build a useable interface for browsing podcasts. All the Spotify playlists have the same songs over and over. Their proprietary shuffle algorithim is stupid because it doesn't actually shuffle. Why can't they offer a true random and also their shuffle algorithim? Music discovery is falling off as they are forced to promote record labels point of view.

I am a Spotify user for a long time. I don't understand this layoff. They spend millions on podcasts deals ... I just want a music app with good discovery option and offline listening mode. Am I asking too much?

sounds like you'd like Pandora

Worth noting that Spotify has less than 7000 employees so that 6% will be ~400 employees. Terrible news for those affected, but it would take many more to affect the industry the way FAANG layoffs do.

This is an unpopular opinion, but history from the DotCom crash tells us that the layoffs are just getting started. Turns out you can’t run at a loss forever, and when the going gets rough the fastest way to increase profitability is to cut costs.

Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company. That is probably true at _all_ of the large tech companies.

If you work at a tech company make sure you have at least 6 months of liquid savings set aside for a rainy day.

What did he prove? First, the effect is going to be visible long-term. Second, they're hiring as hell. For example, they have reached out to me, and I spoke with recruiters just to understand what's going on a little bit better. So yes, they're hiring people now. What he proved is that when you fire, you hire immediately (but secretly).

Outside looking in - it appeared that large tech companies were hiring a billion engineers just so they had them. Like safety in redundancy, and if you were employing the best and the brightest, they couldn't make a product that undercut you.

I guess now's the time to start undercutting?

The companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. also having major layoffs are not and have not been running at a loss for a long time.

Most of these layoffs are driven by shareholder demand. I suspect this will be a bit like 2008 where tech companies pulled back and then realized it was a huge mistake and went on hiring sprees again after a year.

Twitter just posted a 40% or so reduction in income this quarter. It seems way too early to say they didn't need all the people they laid off. From everything I see their ad revenue is cratering from poor targeting, reliability, etc.

I don't think "the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company" is a fair statement: one because it's not clear that it was the majority, two because it wasn't necessarily "no value" as much as "not as much value as other product areas", and three because it wasn't just engineering, it's product managers, sales, marketing, community managers, everyone.

That being said I do think Elon's bold moves at Twitter sent a shock through the industry. It made executives reevaluate their company's business strategies and if the non-core-business functions actually even made sense. Why is Google making a cloud gaming service, much less funding a video game studio? Why is Twitter employing people to debunk climate change? Why is Amazon employing a team of people to write jokes for their unprofitable smart home device?

Corporate bloat has been common forever, but it's been especially common over the past decade with zero interest rates. There's been basically zero focus on expenses and 100% focus on growth at all costs.

Scary part is we might just be getting started. Maybe we will see 50% cuts at Google/Meta/Amazon by the end of the year.

I think Elon was stupid in cutting the account managers and salespeople, but clearly there has been no noticeable difference in the service now that all those engineers are gone. Hence the comment about not adding value.

And if you read the whistleblower report you might seriously question what they were doing before Elon reset everything.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 2023 marks the start of another tech recession. The era of outrageous tech salaries is over.

> Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company.

Unless you care about revenue, which has been crushed due to Elon's actions. The company is less healthy than a year ago and still coasting on reserves of previous work and network effects. Musk is spending billions, and refusing to pay valid debts, just to keep the lights on. He admits that the company might end up bankrupt.

It blows my mind that anyone could be touting this as a well run business that others should emulate.

I never said it was a well run business. You’re also going to have to untangle Elons antics, laying off the account managers and laying off the engineers from the downturn in revenue.

It's pretty funny though, that people so recently talked of labour shortages, but are now, saying, not with their mouths, but with money, the opposite-- across both Google, Spotify and some others, that there are a whole 6% too many.

It's even funnier in Swedish, because the word for redundancies, is arbetsbrist, 'shortage of work'.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the dotcom bubble. You can't seriously look at the balance sheets and revenue flows of tech corporations now and still think there is any comparison to be made with what happened 20 years ago.

Big tech generates insane amounts of money, which is why they have been pretty resilient to the massive fall in stock prices in early 2022 while still ending the year with a net increase in headcount.

Allusions to a pending "dotcom bubble burst 2.0" have also been common in every "downturn" since then and have never really materialized.

Lot of talk about productivity. But I really wonder with companies like Spotify. Shouldn't they be at this point pretty mature? And is there really value looking for the next moonshot or big win? Did they actually even need the pool of engineers they had? There is always maintenance and keeping things running, making them better, but how much greenfield work would there be in short term?

At one point I tried to switch to Spotify for my podcast consumption and quickly found it to be unusable as soon as I had to travel.

They simply are not interested in the podcast consumption features, like downloading the latest X episodes and having them easily available offline. I hope they can figure out that podcast episodes are not spoken word songs that go into playlists.

Another company turning off the peacocking and turning on the dominant business practices culture that makes them great to begin with.

Unrelated but, does anyone have a good universal solution of what music you "like" or "own"? I want to move off of Spotify but I want to make sure all my music is playable from some platform or locally.

A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.

Scrobbles through Last.fm? But I don't think you can export directly from Spotify (maybe through playlist and one of the music transfer tools? I mostly use Spotify to listen through a recommended album. And ads bother me, so I switched to premium (It's 2.99 for me).

I have a local library of ALAC albums that I like. I used Syncthing to sync it to my home server, where there is a Plex installation (When I want to play via the ATV). And I convert to AAC 256kbps to my iPhone (Bluetooth is lossy anyway). More hassle than playing via Spotify, but the latter's UX is so bad that it's worth it. Also I have some excellent headphones (Hifiman Sundara and Sennheiser 6XX).

While Plex has some shortfalls with handling music (mostly that most tags are applied at the album level, not the track level), it's still the best option I've tried for handling your own streaming setup. The PlexAmp[0] app they developed sands off many of the rougher UX elements from the web app, but it requires a paid version of the Plex server.

[0] https://plexamp.com

When you say "own" what do you mean? CD's? Or some digital purchase?

I believe modern iTunes is DRM free so you can keep all your purchases safe that way. Alternatively Youtube Music allows you to upload all your local music so you can their service to stream it. I've bought things on iTunes and then uploaded them to Youtube Music.

Sorry I should have been more specific. I care less about the actual song content itself than having a synchronized list of the names (i.e. metadata) of all the songs I like/save/listen to.

TIDALs sister company TBD touches on that here https://developer.tbd.website/blog/what-is-web5/

If you have iOS, there's an app called SongShift. I think some features are paid, but I used it once a few years ago to transfer my Spotify library into Apple Music to try it out. It looks like it can also export to JSON too (that might be a paid feature?).

> A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.

Relying on anything that is closed source, or worse, an online service, brings with it the eventual inevitability of losing everything. No product or company lasts forever.

For things that are ephemeral in interest (e.g. movies you only care to watch once), that's fine.

For things that you really like and want to have a strong guarantee you can enjoy them later, the only solution is open formats and have the data in your control.

For all the music (and a few handful movies) that I want to be able to enjoy forever, I keep them locally in a redundant backed up ZFS server. No corporate change of heart can ever take those away from me.

I run a homemade script to scrape my profiles on Mixcloud and YouTube for my activity. Hardly a good universal solution I'm afraid.

Spotify is overrated. Apple Music is the same, in the aggregate, and Apple's family plan allows you to share it with everyone.

Spotify also sells all your previously 'private' public playlists to other platforms and advertisers.

We just sort of came off a pandemic into what seems like another pandemic.

When I read the title "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%", I thought Spotify was reducing the base compensation of all employees instead of laying people off. How wrong I was.

I got fed up with the poor UX and Scandinavian songs shoved in to my Discover Weekly, so I cancelled a month ago. I haven’t missed it at all. I just use YouTube occasionally to listen to music.

Can a mod rename this: sounds like base salary is being reduced by 6%

Don't tell mods to change something if you're not sure what you're talking about. Base here refers to people, 600 to be exact, so it sounds like you're wrong.

I think you've misunderstood the parent comment. They were saying the current title could be misinterpreted to mean "base salary is being reduced by 6%". I didn't think that, but I can see where they are coming from.

That was my first skim on it as well. Which to me sounded horrible considering inflation rates.

Ah, you're probably right and my comment is stupid in that context. I apologize.

I hope we can keep companies like original Spotify around, where I can find almost all the music I want to listen to. I wish companies could keep a limited scope for their offerings and just be really good at just that.

Spotify's focus on pod cast is kind of crap. It's like TV eras cheap production value reality shows from late 1990ths all over.

I guess the capitalist mantra of perpetual growth is leading them down another path.

Netflix used to be my go to site for film, now there are so many to streaming services choose from I don't know where to start. And they mainly focus on making series, which I'm not a big fan of.

Looks like Spotify will follow the money and hollow out their original service to be another junk site for vapid entertainment and easy money.

I would happily see Spotify die, they have exploited the artists more effectively than any other organization since the advent of streaming.

Both Spotify and Netflix depend on content that they don't, and can't, own.

Netflix became a desert after WB, Disney and others decided they wanted their own streaming services and took their content with them. And since Disney basically owns everything, Netflix now has nothing (except their own content).

Spotify is fully at the mercy of the three-four big companies that own nearly all the music in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation

And don't forget, you also need to complete with companies with near-unlimited money and quick access to users like Apple, Google, Amazon

I canceled recently. they suck. they keep making the platform worse and worse and it's following the trend of every single paltform

was good...got shitty....I unsubscribe...my life improves...I find alternatives and rediscover the way things were before streaming ruined it....forget about the stream until a new article mentions they are laying off staff... remember I was using them until recently....stop thinking and move on..put on an album and relax.

The thing that annoys me about spotify is the order does not seem to work. I was listening to some beach boys songs, then went to play an album by marvin gaye. It played the first song in the album, then went and started playing beach boys songs again. This just started happening this week, never had the problem before. Another problem was podcasts were either missing episodes or playing out of order.

I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)

I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux

Yea it’s the kind of thing you deliberately don’t want to see changed. Never had an issue. Now, if my DW would stop playing songs I’ve heard hundreds of times, that would be appreciated!

The app is terrible. No consistent route for the "back" button - constantly doesn't do what I expect. No clear way to find a history of songs you'd played before. App notifications for new podcast episodes never take you to that episode. In patchy wifi/4g it takes forever to start or search, rather than finding local results first.

Just a couple that hit me all the time:

- Click the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page. Hit the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page a second time. Hit the play button. With some delay, it finally starts to play.

- My own playlists are buried underneath their insane recommendations. Want to know which songs I'm most likely to want to listen to? A good place to start would be the ones I put on my playlist. I think their recommendation system was designed by an intern that trained a deep learning model on 6 observations. Then the intern left, and nobody knew how to fix it.

Have you ever tried to deal with playlists and queues? It's a nightmare. Way too easy to accidentally play a song rather than queue it up, and simple requests like "I'd like to queue up this song in the middle of this album/playlist" are too confusing. Run into issues constantly on road trips or at parties.

I have a few problems. Spotify for me is about music and that’s it. Why can’t I remove podcasts or audiobooks? They are using too much of my screen to promote stuff they care about and I don’t.

Also, they really, really don’t want you to turn off in-app notifications. I’ve gone through the settings and turned off every single switch I can find and now instead of getting a notification for “band $x is playing in your city” I’m getting a notification that I have notifications disabled and so I’m missing out on all the stuff they want to promote. Occasionally they decide to turn notifications back on and I have to go through them again to find which ones they flipped.

We pay for the family plan and as soon as my kids are off of it, I’ll probably switch to something else.

more discussion (80 comments as of this posting) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488121

Reminder. You’re disposable. I matter how secure you think you may be.

50 million charge for 600 jobs, average of 83k for severance....

So saving less than booting Joe Rohan ?

So based on the rate of feature releases and bugfixes, this will take the active development team down from 2 guys and a dog to 1 guy and a dog.

Why does it take 12k people to stream a song on my phone? I'm being kind of sarcastic but kind of not.

Weird wording for layoffs.

Can they compete with Deezer for audio quality or will they also be reducing that by 6%?

Jesus fucking christ

Just learned that Spotify made all the private playlist (along the playlist' label) public.

Someone posted about it the other thread for the same news.

I am shocked.

I don't see them visible on my profile, as of now, but my profile also doesn't seem to be loading reliably.

I can confirm that private playlists are accessible by their link even in an incognito window. That is surprising to me. Has that always been the case?

edit: a quick google suggests that sharing by link is known to allow access to anyone with the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com