https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/4/23987335/spotify-layoffs-17-percent-profitability-cost-cutting
Ouch
Work hard, make investor’s history.
This is week for layoffs in order meet the yearly targets or cover up for earnings misses by doing a layoff. Why this week? Because it right when most people are back from thanksgiving break and any later in Dec and people will note they did layoff before Christmas.
To follow trends: have diversity and inclusion, etc. Now it becomes expensive when economy is so-so…
They hired ~2000 people since the height of the ZIRP era so this is just a reversion to the mean unfortunately
This is after 6% layoff and then 2% earlier this year.
The gift that keeps on giving
Spotify is just Twitter 2.0. Highly vocal and political workforce doing very little work. The platform has scaled massively and wasted billions on podcasts nobody cares about. It's sad but what are 7500 people still doing there? It does not take that many people even to scale an app this size. Seems like they have investors now that are putting an end to the party in a bid to show consistent profit.
Why does Netflix have 12000 employees? The Spotify app and business are way more complex than Netflix. So many different parts of the app and functionalities, so many different devices, not to mention tens of millions of tracks and billions of playlists compared to only 5000 movies and shows on Netflix. Just think about the type of ML structure and cloud solutions needed for this scale compared to 5000 movies. The problem is not the number of employees but it is the business model. In this music streaming model, the only side that wins is the listener: paying 10 bucks to get access to an unlimited amount of audio is ridiculous. A Chipotle costs more than 10 bucks these days. Not to mention paying 70% of the revenue to record labels. Apple and Amazon may afford to keep the rate this low but it does not make any sense.
One can’t also discount the fact with subscription price hikes. If you are in iOS eco system Apple Music that comes with Apple one is much better value proposition. Not to mention Amazon and Google have their own streaming services as well.
Good Riddance
Why?
We need to cut fat. The party can't go on forever
This is really rough. Anyone impacted can DM me for a TikTok / Bytedance referral
A garbage company does garbage things. It’s sad that Spotify would fall to this type of behavior, and it’s even worse that people in this thread are justifying it due to a perceived number of employees, without failing to realize that an attack on tech workers anywhere is an attack on tech workers everywhere—many positions that don’t seem important, actually are, and forcing people to consolidate to take on more work than what they’re paid for is the hallmark of toxic management. Considering all the hard work that goes into Wrapped, the execs at Spotify should be ashamed of themselves for this decision. I hope everyone affected finds a better company that doesn’t treat them like garbage.
Exactly my sentiments.
I’m an ML expert with deep knowledge of the music domain, and Spotify has always been on my list of dream companies, but now they’re on my blacklist. Lay off so many people due to your incompetence in over-hiring, and you not only reduce morale but also make it hard to hire in the future. Maybe instead of mass layoffs the board(s) should kick out the CEO(s) of all these companies who hired too fast in the 0 interest rate environment, with no intention of keeping staff when rates went back to normal levels.
Right when holidays come. 😬