Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations(fortune.com)
fortune.com
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/23/spotify-earnings-q1-ceo-daniel-eklaying-off-1500-spotify-employees-negatively-affected-streaming-giants-operations/
28 comments
How does a CEO not understand the employment needs of his company? Oh, right, he's playing stock price games with the investors and doesn't give a shit about his employees.
This is about as close as you'll ever get to a CEO actually admitting that doing layoffs for the sake of the short-term (lol as if that even needs to be stated) stock price actually had a negative business impact.
I once worked for a public company that panicked if it looked like the company wasn't going to meet its quarterly earnings projection. All the actions that the company took--layoffs, getting rid of contractors (also layofs), making employees take banked PTO--for this short-term benefit negatively affected the company's ability to meet its longer-term goals. It was infuriating.
I once worked for a public company that panicked if it looked like the company wasn't going to meet its quarterly earnings projection. All the actions that the company took--layoffs, getting rid of contractors (also layofs), making employees take banked PTO--for this short-term benefit negatively affected the company's ability to meet its longer-term goals. It was infuriating.
I was curious what jobs were impacted. Looks like plenty of SWE were fired:
From layoffs.fyi: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KPL87R3veJ6HaQeHdkG1...
From layoffs.fyi: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KPL87R3veJ6HaQeHdkG1...
"Although there’s no question that it was the right strategic decision, it did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated."
Absolute double-speak. Translation "Although it was clearly a dumb thing to do we are now fucked and full of bitter regret and embarrassment. Also, check out my shades."
Absolute double-speak. Translation "Although it was clearly a dumb thing to do we are now fucked and full of bitter regret and embarrassment. Also, check out my shades."
I'm blown away that company _needs_ more than 1,500 employees in the first place...
Supplier management sounds crazy. How many artists and labels exist in how many countries? How many contracts?
I'd expect that to be a non-trivial, not-automatable business critical task that requires lots of bodies.
I'd expect that to be a non-trivial, not-automatable business critical task that requires lots of bodies.
> I'd expect that to be a non-trivial, not-automatable business critical task that requires lots of bodies.
From my brief but traumatising stints working with companies dealing with music, yes, it is a clusterfuck of nonsense that requires industry knowledge, contacts, etc. and only parts of it are amenable to automation (not the important bits, either.)
From my brief but traumatising stints working with companies dealing with music, yes, it is a clusterfuck of nonsense that requires industry knowledge, contacts, etc. and only parts of it are amenable to automation (not the important bits, either.)
Spotify (surprisingly) doesn’t deal with many artists or labels directly, and music is delivered against an industry-code schema that contains all the metadata (ok, most of the metadata) needed to attribute usage and route payments.
That happens via a bunch of intermediary aggregators/distributors and a decent part of this automated/automatable.
As I understand it a lot of the staffing overhead at Spotify is in product and marketing - and R&D efforts for retention/acquisition. It also seems like these were a lot of the folk laid off which then impacts growth/retention.
That happens via a bunch of intermediary aggregators/distributors and a decent part of this automated/automatable.
As I understand it a lot of the staffing overhead at Spotify is in product and marketing - and R&D efforts for retention/acquisition. It also seems like these were a lot of the folk laid off which then impacts growth/retention.
Sales, marketing, customer service? Neckbeards apparently only think of themselves lol.
Exactly. Just look at Telegram. They have a team of ~30 engineers who are managing ~900 million monthly active users. That's wild
They don't have to deal with the legal aspects of licencing content, nor need to do marketing, nor sales, nor have specialised teams working for features in specific markets; They don't have to ingest content, match content with potential existing ones to pay royalties properly (if not you get legally fucked), they don't have to do any kind of recommendations, so on and so forth...
I think you have a very simplistic view of how businesses work since your comparison is not even wrong.
I think you have a very simplistic view of how businesses work since your comparison is not even wrong.
What exactly? They didn't lay off 1500 engineers, I would imagine the bulk of Spotify employees handle all sort of licensing deals, talent management, ad sales etc. Telegram is a chat application that does none of this.
So that's why telegram is swamp filled with hate and bullshit.
I‘m always blown away by HN commenters that think any sufficiently large company can be run by a few engineers.
Offices in many countries, licensing, marketing, sales, growth, data, design, engineering all adds up quickly.
Offices in many countries, licensing, marketing, sales, growth, data, design, engineering all adds up quickly.
Me too. I’m not aware of a single change they’ve made in ten years. Offline still doesn’t really work. I’m sure there’s been tons of scaling work, but why does that require thousands of employees?
User facing changes are usually the tip of the iceberg for most mature companies. Feels very naive to judge a large company that deals with complicated licensing, sales, marketing by some pet peeve feature you are missing in the app.
Not really. The engineering roadmap of large public companies optimize one thing: stock price. Gone are the days of working on features that benefit the user. That’s called enshittification
It feels like everyone learned the new word "enshittification" this year and is just using it in any context possible.
Ten years ago was 2014, there's been a lot of changes to Spotify in 10 years, not even just in types of content (podcasts, audiobooks, music videos) but the whole recommendation system, daily playlists, discovery playlists, lyrics, even banal things like playlists folders didn't exist 10 years ago.
There's also a lot of scaling into new markets they didn't have presence in 2014 (which requires scaling in billing, legal, accounting, etc.).
There's also a lot of scaling into new markets they didn't have presence in 2014 (which requires scaling in billing, legal, accounting, etc.).
I think when you hire them they make themselves useful which is the problem. If you stay small you solve problems using solutions in ways that small teams can manage.
I feel similarly about Reddit and pre-X Twitter.
Wait until you find out about Postman
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Summary:
* Spotify’s Layoff Impact: CEO Daniel Ek was surprised by the significant operational challenges following the layoff of 1,500 employees.
* Financial Performance: Despite achieving record profits of €168 million and revenue growth, Spotify missed its targets for profitability and user growth.
* Investor Reaction: Shares increased by over 8% after the earnings report, reflecting investor confidence.
* Long-Term Strategy: Despite short-term issues, Spotify believes the layoffs were necessary for long-term profitability.