Hacker News Reader

Comment by dominus103 | Hacker News Reader

People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard.

PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.

View on HN

I am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better.

I wonder what gripes people have.

The website, desktop app, and mobile apps all have different feature sets, for one. There are things that you can only do in one of them, but it is a different one of them for each thing. There is no one feature set. It feels so cobbled together, with each platform doing their own thing.

Also, the website is slow and buggy, and the Electron “desktop” app is even worse. Both gobble up way too many resources and soft-crash constantly. The app does not lock up, but simply stops working. Often it even shows an error like “Spotify cannot play this song right now.”.

Also, probably due to some DRM bullshit, resuming a song from the middle doesn't work most of the time. I have to seek to the beginning for it to start playing.

Like that's literally the only thing it should be able to do 100%..

Spotify works mostly fine for me but there's weird rough edges that I don't always see in "simpler" apps.

Stuff like transitioning between desktop and mobile - it tries to work and most of the time it does, but sometimes I need to manually make my desktop play on my desktop. Not a big deal but sometimes I'd be happier if this feature didn't exist at all.

On my desktop, Spotify can be finicky when I connect/disconnect my bluetooth headphones. Sometimes it refuses to play after I connect my headphones, and I need to restart the app. I think it's trying to do something magically for me after it detects the headphones and gets into a wedged state, but a simpler "play to active speaker, whatever it is" audio app wouldn't have this problem.

It's cool to hate on Spotify now I guess. But I agree with you, Spotify works really well for me.

The article is about Shopify, not Spotify.

I wonder how many of the 100k+ enginners at Google work on that "simple" text box that shows you relevant websites to the input text.

I'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher

It’s not that much about scalling software, as scalling software on highly concentered nodes. Distribution downstream can be its own hell, admittedly, but otherwise having fully independent copy of software copies that run in local terminal is a no-brainer if all that matter is running software at scale.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com