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Comment by LambdaComplex | Hacker News Reader

Spotify has about 10,000 employees. Their software engineers make 6 figures. Their only actual product is, as far as I know, a music player.

Despite all this, I had an issue for a while where some of the play buttons didn't work. I would click the play button and nothing would happen. Other users posted about the same issue in the "Spotify Support/Complaint Megathread" on Reddit's r/spotify.

I don't know how to adequately describe how ridiculous it is that they managed to break their music player's play button, of all things.

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How many of the 10,000 are developers though? For a company like Spotify, I'd assume they have a huge legal/business team just to deal with record label.

It’s just absolutely dreadful. Using it on desktop is a laggy mess. I mean this quite literally what do the 10,000 people do?

Jazz, apparently.

Come up with features no one asked for to justify their salaries. Seems to be rather common in product-driven tech businesses.

I can only imagine how many soul-searching meetings it took to decide to change the heart to the plus sign for liking songs.

It wasn't always like this. When Spotify was launched the desktop app was one of the best pieces of software I'd ever used. It launched quickly and songs played without buffering which was unheard of at the time. It was the work of largely one developer, Ludvig Strigeus who was also the author of the original uTorrent client (which was also used to be fantastic). As a software developer I'm biased but I think this ultra smooth experience was a large contributor to Spotify's initial growth.

It was also a native application on macOS (OS X at that time). But then it was replaced with this Electron abomination which would have a runaway process any other day and consume all battery and would require 2 years to implement sorting in playlists.

I truly ask myself what their development team is doing.

Spam me with pop ups tell me what I should be listening too.

> I don't know how to adequately describe how ridiculous it is that

This is nothing else than enshittification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277484

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