Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
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?)
How WhatsApp served 1 billion users with only 50 engineers. https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
Some of these are a team per region, some are a team per platform, some are entire divisions
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)?
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.