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Comment by Vegenoid | Hacker News Reader

Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.

I am very unsurprised by this outcome.

People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.

A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.

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>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.

Spotify or Shopify?

Probably both

Shopify has gotten quite a bit better tho.

Spotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify.

I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.

I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately

Can’t wait for Sphpoophteefy+ premium subscription to be released!

Shoplifty

You could start a consultancy called Optify to help them optimize their engineering.

Slopify

> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.

This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.

Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.

I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.

There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?

That and venture investment has become bane of good.

When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors

Things have become measurably worse as open standards have been dropped.

An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc.

In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as trillian or Adium was enough to communicate on all of them.

While today we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter, etc. earlier, the heavy use of RSS meant that a single RSS news client covered everything.

From a socio-political standpoint, “canceling” also wasn’t a thing, since you could trivially self host a blog and discovery would be no different.

Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.

> Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.

Yeah, that's one thing that is definitely noticeable. Online social services basically became data-driven psychology research companies, with the goal being to improve engagement. Every page refresh became an A/B test designed to keep you hooked.

15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ

Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.

I don't need an audit log for my audio. What I do need however is to remove something so it doesn't influence the algorithm. I may not remember every time I play music for a kid to turn on the right mode.

You're never going to win against a black box algorithm. Just let Spotify do it's thing or go back to hosting your own music if you don't like it.

That would also then require them to invalidate caches and rerun scripts to rebuild those lists and recommendations, which costs extra compute.

Invalidate the recommendation cache

You mean like, when a new song is added to the list???

I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.

When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.

I’d add on to that lifecycle demands: a development project with no users has a tight cheap feedback loop with high quality bug reports with relatively obvious bug sources, once issues start working through layers of QA and customers the per-issue costs raise by several factors (50x to 200x are numbers I’ve seen from research, YMMV).

I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.

The mythical man-month ;)

Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?

Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...

Such book could be distilled in simple essence:

- stay out of it for your sanity

- sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast

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