Spotify CEO Daniel Ek blames his 1,500 job cuts on fake work and amateur execs | Hacker News Reader

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek blames his 1,500 job cuts on fake work and amateur execs

businessinsider.com

33 pointslopkeny12ko30 comments

We built Grooveshark with an extremely small team and grew it to a massive scale. We re built Grooveshark multiple times (moving from flash-based to HTML5, several major design overhauls, adding collaborative listening, etc). It absolutely boggles my mind how big Spotify is and how stagnant the product is.

Not just stagnant, but clearly getting worse.

- 95% of my auto-suggested/generated playlists I get for the last ~year are now the same ~200-400 or so tracks rearranged in different orders.

- Half of these tracks are not artists I ever intentionally picked myself, and in fact they are tracks and artists I don't like. So I have to essentially skip half the tracks which are suggested - Spotify doesn't seem to take into account that I keep skipping certain tracks/artists - it suggest and keeps recommending them over and over again. I've gotten to the point where I have to block entire artists in settings just to have reasonable playlist suggestions (which still suck).

- The mobile (android) and webos apps seem to be getting more and more buggy every update. From pause/play breaking and skipping to the next song, to the webos app bugging out when attempting to control using phone, to the apps randomly crashing like once a week, etc.

All of these problems didn't exist or were far less common just a few years ago.

That's an interesting point regarding suggestions. I wonder if they are having a massive drop in user engagement as the user base has matured.

As in, anecdotally, all my friends and I just talk about using the radio from a track or another playlist, as opposed to curating playlists ourselves.

The golden egg that Spotify was sitting on (user-driven curation and favourites across a huge userbase) may be slowly evaporating.

I don’t understand the appeal of Spotify. Back when it first came to the U.S. there were a few competing services and I thought Spotify was towards the bottom in terms of recommendations. Pandora was so much better, although all they had was a radio product. Even Rhapsody, from the detestable Real Networks, had a better product than Spotify in my opinion. These days, I would rather use Apple or YouTube.

It's not that stagnant, they have time to make the product worse imo. Their recent UX changes broke my weekly workflow, they buried the discover playlists behind three clicks and scroll, and they seem to have changed the algo so that it recycles the same songs over and over again (though my listening patterns have changed a bit since a recent addition to the family). Playlists are harder to create. And heaven forbid the thing you want to listen to is listed at the top of the iphone app when you open it, because they're going to refresh the list in 3... 2... 1... oh it's gone.

Sorry for the rant. I love Spotify. Nearly all of recorded music for one low low price. I wish they would realize that their apps are utilities, not social, and stop optimizing for engagement.

All I want to do is change the bluetooth settings back to my phone and all I see is "start a remote group session!" No thank you, get your sharing features out of my face.

Same as Twitter before Musk.

Basically the meme of Javascript / React devs making everything complicated is amplified at really large scale in a lot of these companies and there is a lot of truth to this. "Frontend engineering" is basically a bullshit jobs program masquerading as real engineering work and costing company billions in time and money.

Like Spotify had this whole team dedicated to just the back and forward buttons. Whole team for 2 buttons.

I wish more companies tried to be like Valve who are more efficient than FAANG or any other tech company.

Do you have the impression the Twitter web application has been improving since Musk took over?

Also, the Steam client has to be one of the most stagnant applications I ever had the pleasure of using, not sure that makes Valve super efficient.

> Also, the Steam client has to be one of the most stagnant applications I ever had the pleasure of using, not sure that makes Valve super efficient.

If said software is fit for purpose already, why the need to induce frivolous change for the sake of changes themselves? If permanent stagnancy is bad, perpetual change is equally bad IMHO.

In my experience Steam is slow and crashes often. I don’t generally care about UI updates (which Steam does actually have)

Every popular webapp can be easily made with PHP and hosted in a bedroom, prove me wrong. We don't even need backend solutions like containers or kubernetes, companies have definitely wasted time investigating these technologies and putting money into them.

We definitely don't need containers or kubernetes. Netflix wasted so much time and energy with the whole microservices nonsense while pornhub serves more video in more locations purely using PHP servers.

Kubernetes is supposed to make these things easier, and it very much can (and do for many). Containers are great, microservices on the other hand just seems like a way to decouple things so nothing can be verified AOT

Grooveshark was amazing

I used to use Grooveshark back in the days, while it had it's own warts it was amazing for its time. I was sad to see it go when it went. I'm mainly using SoundCloud for my techno needs these days as Spotify can't seem to recommend me new music.

It's insane to me how these CEOs shit on their own former employees (in front of their current ones) and don't see that as a negative thing, or a thing that could cause further detrimental effects in their company. What a horrific thing for what so many CEOs claim to care so much about - culture.

Look, if you want to cull people I think you have the right to do so. But maybe call it what it really is, you want a smaller team. You want to pay less in salary. That's fine, but don't blame multiple levels of managers for doing what you told them to do.

It’s easier to blame thousands of people you just let go than to take accountability for your own poor performance as a leader. You don’t wake up one morning with 1500 extra people at a company without bad leadership.

Exactly. Even if there were a bunch of crappy middle managers and lazy people, someone put them there and was responsible for them. The buck has to stop somewhere. This guy either doesn’t know what’s happening in his company or he’s as unqualified as the managers he’s blaming.

It must be very frustrating for Ek to have to clean up the mess that he - as co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Spotify - obviously had zero part in making.

Just once I'd like to watch a CEO lay themselves off.

This is a really poor article and business insider is almost blinding to try to read but anyhow.. for the last few years we've been too accustomed to throwing money at problems, as opposed to thinking about the deeper rooted systematic causes and fixing those. This is now rapidly changing, right across the board, and it's fantastic.

Spotify at this stage of growth has a complex problem, they can either raise prices to squeeze more juice (something they are doing), or they can figure out new ways to attract more paying people, continuously while also curbing churn.

I'm not surprised that they are downsizing, cutting operating costs to maintain a sustainable business under the pressures they are facing is the first place I'd start too. Perhaps I'd take on some more accountability than Ek, yes that's for certain.

The problem is music labels have Spotify by their balls. They don't give them good contracts and Spotify is stuck with the pricing because the other music streaming services are almost commodities at this point.

I know typical, “I could build that in a weekend”, but 9000 people at Spotify!

Is that 8000 lawyers to handle music IP rights and a thousand for all other departments?

well how much returns did they expect when handing out multimillionaire dollar deals to D-list celebs and royals to ramble on about nothing.

and adding videos to podcasts? that's a lot of work to build the framework for something 99% of people did not ask for.

people use to admire the spotify "algorithm" whereas now their song recommendation is as average as a FM radio channel.

Certainly couldn’t be the millions spent on exclusive podcast deals.

Shorter Ek: "Who do these people think they are, CEOs?"

YouTube Music is way better. Spotify is laggy like slack.

He pulled an Elon.

Except he presided over the bloat..

So like all the tech CEOs who bloated up their firms, he is not looking in the right place to understand why the company is filled with too many people working on the wrong things..

I would say 90% of my job is fake work

at least 33% of my time is spent engaging in empty Agile rituals

another 10% to 1:1s where we talk about the weather

another 10% engaging in pointless yacking in chat channels

etc etc...fill in the gaps with make-work until you get to 90%

no point telling me "you're doing it wrong!"...I'm well aware of that

I can't be alone in this...where my job is just rolling around in "process" all day...

Writing this at the end of a 1h standup, I work with infra with 2 other people (shouldn't require more than 1+1). We just had a sprint planning yesterday for 2h, great to do infra work in sprints.

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