They are "thriving" because of layoffs, there is no more direct path to increase profits than to stop paying employees
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Yeah the headline doesn't make sense. They pay less salaries, how is that a bad thing for profits... :)
They hired too many people when money was cheap. Now they get rid of some of them. It's still just like a few percent of the total work force.
I'd say that they're "cooking the books" as in: making it look like they're in better shape than they are by cutting costs, but causing irreparable damage to themselves that will manifest in the long run.
I've survived 3 layoffs at Spotify last year alone. Once I started working there It didn't take long to be proud and feel happy about it. Now, although people still find it cool when I tell them and I still do the same job (no workload increase), I know it is just like any other greedy corpo and I feel compelled to care less and less.
I just survived layoffs this week and I now give zero fucks about the company. People are scared and angry now.. It's really not a good way to get the most out of your employees
I have done it both ways. Stuck in out thru layoffs and jumped ship when they happened. Generally, if you can, I think jumping ship is better.
I thought I was working at a great company, now I wonder if I'll be employed at the end of the year.
It sucks I know. Happened to me twice. If it helps any it probably wasn't the people you worked with, it was a financial "engineer" who did this.
Yeah, apparently 3 trillion dollars isn't enough to get by for the company
Can I ask you why Spotify has this braindead handling of downloaded songs where it still tries to fucking stream them? This goes on my nerves so incredibly much that I'm thinking about quitting my subscription because it's so fucking stupid.
I've downloaded it, Spotify. No you don't have to fucking stream it when I have a bad network connection so the fucking downloaded song constantly cuts off or doesn't even load!!!
On handling downloaded songs and offline playback, my personal (but informed) opinion is that there is:
- some licensing reasons for it to be more complicated than strictly necessary
- lack of interest of supporting an app feature that doesn't drive numbers immediately up (sure, I agree that a better offline experience would improve the product and help user retention, but it isn't easy/quick to measure its impact), and
- lack of ownership with many teams having to support a functionality (keep the app working offline) within all the various app features they own.
So, just as a dog with multiple owners, it goes neglected and starves.
Ah, yeah, same stuff as always. Management.
The licensing part I did think about, but the songs are in a proprietary format anyway (I think?) and any keys or whatever can be refreshed without streaming the entire song over a slow connection.
Thank you for your detailed answer!
Garbage app
It's also hard to care when you know you could be next.
Yep. Recently saw it at my employer. It happened fast too. One day there was a lot of chatter on Slack channels and the day after the general noise was almost nothing that was not required.
this is exactly what is happening in the industry lol
For now. We are looking at the short term short sighted part of this right now and they will seem like they are thriving for a bit but, they were massive burnout factories to begin with. But increasing everyone's workload Im sure will have absolutely no effect on that right...
Yeah. Spend a decade or more building resilient architecture, sure, you can now fire people. Good luck building on it though.
Chesterton's fence is pretty important in tech, and the community sucks at documentation while working.
Also: I work in tech, holy fuck the burnout I've experienced these last two years is being anything I've experienced before.
Good luck building on it though.
This happened to my employer's competition. They couldn't deal with the clusterfuck that was the last few years. Meanwhile my employer has a big engineering staff and got more market share.
Both of us man. And those resilient architectures are not as resilient as some bosses seem to think. Which we saw with twitter will end in hilarity if the people that they need to try and get it running again are as petty as they should be.
It’s a combination of higher interest rates, short term thinking, and a follow the crowd mentality when CEO’s see everyone else cutting back.