But why do they have so many in the first place?
9000 employees. My gods.
What are all these people doing?!
9000 employees. My gods.
What are all these people doing?!
On top of that, the company wants to innovate and probably has teams working on hardware and whatnot.
Whether it’s efficient is not clear, but most people there probably work hard on their particular daily grind.
It’s a LOT of humans for streaming music service.
This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?
Music licensing, streaming and revenue sharing is hardly a “go to the moon in the 60s” complexity problem. And having a lot of end users doesn’t mean you need massive employee head counts in digital service delivery, it just means you have a lot of customers and need to build your digital delivery systems to handle a larger scale which is generally expressed as a modest pressure on engineering groups to build most scalable systems and not a rocket science level problem.
The high head counts are always present at the end of boom cycles, but a LOT of what companies are doing at the end of these cycles is simply busywork.
The busywork problem exists because managers equate business with productivity, and their organizations reflect that.
The perception is not just that a busy worker is engaged and making an effort, but even that their industriousness gives them a higher value than their less busy colleagues. But really only a relatively small number of employees do the vast majority of the work (Pareto principle). The whole corporate management theory sets up a dynamic in which two office workers completing identical tasks can be judged on their busyness, rather than their results. Who appears to be more engaged: the busy worker who skips lunch to get things finished, or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses the time saved to buy groceries online?
This, when applied at scale, leads to highly staffed organizations with a LOT of busy people who don’t really do that much compared to their potential for output.
If you don’t see the metaphor between a large engineering project and an engineering organization that seems over staffed, that’s fine. But do try to have the social grace to not call people dumb. There is just no call for insults here.
Spotify's work might not be getting people alive to the Moon with 1960s tech, but there is A LOT of it since they need to cover so much more.
Rest of your post is pretty much bloviating with assumptions you have no grounds for - not to mention your almost insulting minimization of work that's not TrueEngineeringWorkForMoon(tm).
I've worked in streaming industry and I can tell you that there is a stupid amount of work getting all the licenses and content in order across all the nations that Spotify is present it. You can call it "busywork", but it's no more busywork than jockeying JavaScript to make your CI happy. It's critical for company operations - Spotify lives and dies on amount of content they have, the speed they get new content and the ability to payout artists across the world for their content. Not to mention take money from people across the world.
It's outright hillarious how everyone here underestimates a problem like "we need to legally pay out money in Germany to Rammstein for a song", it's like watching HBO's Sillicon Valley in real life.
Implying that “Jockeying JavaScript” isn’t real enough engineering work is also a look.
Arguing that engineering projects of scale can’t be compared because one can’t tell the difference between volume and complexity is rough conversation.
The idea that engineering on large technical projects can’t be compared across industries or eras isn’t true in an objective sense either.
Not super happy I took the time to reply to you and got told I was to get called blovating. That’s unkind.
That while stating that “everyone on HN underestimates things” and doesn’t understand how hard problems like paying someone for streaming actually is exactly the kind of nonsensical thinking that is building these large headcount companies.
Your argument is that “global payments are harder than people realize.” But it’s simply not true. They are profoundly easier than they have ever been in history and people on hacker news are many of the very people creating those payment rails.
So I think calling their opinions “hilarious” while insulting the entire community and the person you’re talking to… it’s not… great. Calling it a “real life” Silicon Valley kinda is though, because well, it kind of literally is. This is the website of the most successful Silicon Valley incubator.
I come on here to learn and have positive interactions with people, grow intellectually and this isn’t quite what I am looking for. Thanks for your interaction though. Have a great day.
A lot of the main tech achievements are great geek talking points but not where labor is really concentrated.
Humans are vain and shallow, that should probably one of the core things drilled into geek skulls.
They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 employees.
Yes, if they were at the cutting edge on every platform and constantly adding innovative new features, that could certainly explain 500 of the 9000 employees.
But that still leaves 8,500 employees unexplained.
Between that and the ability to just contract local lawyers, 45 to (realistically closer to) 90 employees per (relevant) country is still a lot.
Also, spotify outsourced 90% of their support to their community (designated "star" members). There's no hotline either, so no call centres to run, or anything else personnel intensive. (And you'd outsource that anyway, realistically.)
I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
Xitter is massively tanking as a company with massive revenue losses since that brilliant idea. Its example proves literally the opposite of what you're claiming - after firings the company is in tailspin of financial losses.
These are probably not all devs/engineers. Usually, selling services/products in multiple countries mean, dedicated legal, HR, accounting replicated in nearly every location where no common treaty exists, and management in large tech tends to have too many levels and adds up quickly as well.
This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total.
And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,...
Don't know. I'd struggle to fill a roster of 200 people for Spotify.
> Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
Sadly, yes. That they become so tone-deaf is something I'll never condone though I do understand why it's happening (or so I think: is it the gobs of money that make people comfortable and disconnected from the bread and butter of the company?)
Some of these are a team per region, some are a team per platform, some are entire divisions
Mobile (iOS, Android), web, vehicle native integrations (Tesla, Volvo, VW, BMW, Audi, Ford), gaming (Xbox, Switch, PS4, PS5), desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook) and voice assistants (Alexa, Google).
Maintaining that variety of front ends must be very labour intensive.
TVs, Wifi connected speakers, home theater systems, Chromecast etc.
A lot of the external frontends are also not made by spotify themselves, but implemented by the manufacturer through Spotify's SDK.
You still want a bunch of dedicated staff to support all that, but it's not as dramatic as it could be.
At least 10x that, easily. In a very optimistic scenario.
The back-office part is much bigger than people think (bands management, content management, rights management, recommendations, etc).
Then you have the services like Auth, streaming, encoding, managing CDNs, caching, etc.
So Spotify should bring you in as the CTO, right? How can you make such a confident claim that you know better how to run the company that has beat the daylights out of every other music streaming platforms (including Google, Amazon, and Apple)?
I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans the globe(or even multiple countries or continents), you really need a huge team to keep troubles out and the wheels going.
Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.
If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.
I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.
Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/useful and you can't even imagine it?
I'd love to hear how you split the workload between these 5 backenders.
Though I have only once worked in a huge corporation (and I couldn't understand what did they need all the people for either).
I was almost always working in smaller tight-knit teams that got a LOT of stuff done (too much contracting for my now 40+ y/o self).
So I err on the side of "be efficient" and that's not even for the purposes of cost efficiency. It's more about being able to iterate with a reasonable speed. My observations from my career support what Bill Gates and others said i.e. that the productivity of a tech team starts to decline when it goes beyond 7 people. Generalization, sure, but it's very often true.
As for the 5 backenders thing, OK, my perspective might have been too narrow i.e. "writing code to move bytes from our servers to CDNs to user's devices can't be that hard" and I mostly stand behind it. Sure you might need much more devs to author complex login systems, SSO and such (if you even need it) but again, after the product somewhat stabilizes, how much backenders do you really need?
I am also interested in your opinion. My entire career has been a proof that small and tight-knit teams get sh1t done and everyone else drowns in bureaucracy.
I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.
Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.
But as another commenter pointed out -- it's actually 13900 people.
Again, everything you say it's true but I am finding it hard to imagine the scale and the degree of the problems that mandate ~14k people. Sure, 1000. Maybe 2500.
But 13900?
How WhatsApp served 1 billion users with only 50 engineers. https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
And apparently Spotify agrees.
Because it's like a cliché example of an engineer with the view that some relatively successful real-world product—that they have no real insight into—is far easier to implement than the people who _are_ familiar with it have. You see this literally all the time, to the extent that it's become a meme, and it's hard to believe anybody would make that argument seriously.
Spotify might have too many engineers on-staff; reducing the service to "moving between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices" is a flatly uncurious approach to understanding what engineering challenges they might face or if that's really the case. It's a service that _adds_ 100k songs a day, for goodness sake.
Ensuring Spotify can smoothly operate globally
You are assuming that Spotify is just the consumer facing app, but it's not. It's far more.
You've got all the bits of Spotify you don't see. Like:
* Apps and interfaces for labels to ingest their music
* Reporting and billing so all those labels get paid
* An ad platform to service free-tier users
* Embedded systems. Did you know Spotify has a commercial hardware division to integrate Spotify onto smart speakers and devices?
The surface is huge.
I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.