This comment should just be auto-posted every time there is any mention of employee count on HN. Will save all of us the trouble of beating this horse every time.
And every time someone does it, and it's a globe-spanning platform, someone should respond quickly by saying well at least some of these people have to deal with 75+ different languages and some of these people have to deal with relationships with 100+ different governments and taxing authorities.
And business relations in each of the markets. Marketing as well, editorial content, so on and so forth.
I feel sometimes that a lot of the HN folks work on small-scale companies, releasing MVPs and don't have much of an idea about the operations side of a larger operation. It's easy to think in MVP terms, it's really, really hard to understand the nuances (and costs) that scaling that to hundreds of millions of users across dozens to hundred+ countries entail.
Some of us work/worked for organizations doing hardware, marketing, sales to every corner of the planet and dealing with supply chain with 1/8 of that workforce though (more than 2 decades ago - productivity should be better now).
Spinning this as anything more than gross overhiring that is going to correct either in dribs and drabs or spectacularly sounds like complete bullshit to those that had been around a few bust cycles and worked in other industries.
Just thinking about dealing with payment processing, regulatory environment of music licensing, customer support, and record labels around all countries on which they operate makes my head hurt a little.
But then again, your bad take is the reason I keep coming back to HN. I always find it amusing how people here always seem to have all the answers for things they never worked with. Most of the times I think people being butthurt for whatever reason.
"Can't find the solution you're looking for? Here's how to get help from our experts. Note: We currently don't offer support by phone."
And half of what they do have is outsourced to "community members".
> regulatory environment of music licensing
This, this is what they do. So that's something. Is it 9600 people something? Apparently not since they already shaved off 6% of the work force earlier this year. It would seem their own CEO appears to agree with the take they are overweight.
Selling hardware around the world has tremendous regulatory burden as well. If you can't imagine the complexities of designing, sourcing and selling hardware products around the world maybe think harder?
Let the chips fall where they may. It isn't like it's the first or even biggest layoff for Spotify this year.
It all ends in speculation anyway, different industries have different sets of requirements, and regulatory frameworks. Different products at scale have different needs for maintenance and development. I know some people working with hardware with sales spanning most of the globe in a company with 300 employees, it doesn't mean you can have a phone manufacturer selling to most of the globe with just 300 employees.
Of course there's some level of overhiring but whatever comment here saying that 1/10, or 1/2, or whatever other percentage is what is needed is baseless speculation on some non-informed guess. Without knowing the insides it's just baseless speculation, and even in the inside you'd need to be in a higher level of management to have a decent overview of what's waste (and why it's waste) vs what's actually needed.
I think its the WhatsApp effect, they had all of 55 employees[0] and were bought for 19 Billion USD (cash & stock but still). Never mind that the product that is WhatsApp is fairly unique in how it can be engineered
Yeah and also the simple literal fact that WhatsApp in fact ended up with tens of thousands of employees.
Those who find the last sentence counterintuitive should stop to note that if you use WhatsApp today you're interacting with a company with tens of thousands of employees.
As a product or a company? Pretty sure the combined entity that now includes WhatsApp is drastically more successful from a financial standpoint that the predecessor standalone company that comprised WhatsApp and had 55 employees.
Spotify has an in-house design team in NYC of well over 25 highly paid art directors (think $150k and up), poached from the digital ad agency, who do absolutely nothing all day besides work on "campaign ideas" and make playlist covers and "design systems for RapCaviar" and generate portfolio-friendly PDFs of work that have absolutely zero connection to the core product or product experience. Meanwhile their actual branding and website (etc) are all designed by external highly paid agencies. The internal design team get to enjoy really exclusive private concerts in the NY HQ by music artists beholden to Spotify. It's all very cushy.
The company is absolutely heavy with highly paid department staff who are all working on fantasyware that does nothing to improve all of the things people complain about Spotify.
It's like the tyranny of the rocket equation, but for companies.
To do more (ex open in different markets) you need more people, but with more people you need more support people, which also need to be supported in turn ...
Next thing you know you have 5 engineers on Chaos Monkey so that your 20 SREs can more easily test their globally distributed low-latency CDN. You also have region lawyer manager VPs who manage lawyer teams per country, and are in turn managed by your glonal Head of Lawyering. Who also has an administrative assistant otherwise theyd lose head over the schedule and their tasks...
And we didn't even get to the programmers yet.
In rockets, to go a bit faster or haul a bit more mass, you need a lot more fuel.
Orgs are the same. Except they don't explode. Usually.
I don't have any hard info, but here's my speculation:
The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.
I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.
Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.
Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.
EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:
Well you are right - Spotify operates in 184 markets, so even if you only had a small 10 person team for each country handling sales/marketing/support/localisation, that's already c2000 employees before you start on anything else.
Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.
Monaco, Syria, North Korea, Lithuania don't need 10 person teams. It's this napkin math that causes tech companies to inflate. I'm sure Spotify execs did the same math and told HR "Hire 10 people per country, thx".
In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.
The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.
80 people to manage African countries from a finance, sales, marketing, support, legal, localisation and licensing perspective for a company the scale of Spotify is way too light.
Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.
Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.
Spotify makes money from record labels who pay good sums for a placement on various ”hot new metal”-lists. Managing those deals takes lots of personnel
Include in that list: ingesting content (audio and video), maintaining clients for <N> platforms, strategic partners support. Algorithmical personalisation is also quite important for Spotify's offering, etc.
Prediction: this will become a thread where lots of people will confidently handwave about how Spotify does "so much stuff" that "obviously" they need 8000 people, please jump on this bandwagon, but not provide any actual rigor that would justify why 8k is reasonable, 16k is too much, and 4k too little (nor realize that they should be sanity checking the argument that way).
With 1-2k people you can probably barely keep the current business from falling apart. Like crewing an ship and constantly bailing out water, but never plugging leaks.
With a few k more you might plug leaks, and do actual maintenance of the ship. While you’re not always firefighting, you're also mostly just doing basic maintenance to ensure people don’t always work at 3am bailing out the ship to barely keep it afloat. No actual new fancy features being added to your ship.
If you want to actually build NEW features on your speedboat, you need even more people. And if you care about features, and not burning out employees, that’s how you get to 8k.
- N people to just juggle live incidents/emergencies. Actually triage, live, why the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter isn't working. Give the server more RAM, spin up more instances, pray it works.
- M+N people to do the work to prevent the incidents/emergencies (maintenance). Actually ensure the next big giant event on the streaming service doesn't cause failures. Create automatic scaling up of new capacity as needed. But avoid overprovisioning and costing the company a bazillion $$. Get to the bottom of what triggered the incident. Build practices, runbooks, etc the next time this happens.
- M+N+L people to actually create new stuff. Create a new feature on the live streaming service to comment or somesuch. (and all the work M+N people do to handle incidents with this new feature)
So X * (M+N+L) people if every product area is trying to create new stuff.
But the reality is most teams have T people where M < T < (M+N+L). Which is very company dependent.
Spotify has dozens of consumer facing product areas. Probably many more for creators, record labels, admins, etc etc
The same as in any big company: going through hordes of small/medium/large initiatives being pushed around by multiple orgs inside the larger org to achieve a goal set by the C-level.
Seriously, what do you expect the answer to be? Have you worked in any large org with thousands of employees? They are all pretty similar, there's tech debt, there's new initiatives, there is maintenance to be done. You need to work in one to understand how the whole machine works, there's no simple answer to be given on HN about what they are all up to, it's a mix of all of the above as it'd be in any large org...
I mean, it's a music streaming platform with global presence (and to my experience, with no downtime), dealing with the regulatory environment, record labels, payment processing, and taxation across all different jurisdictions. Also needs to have customer service support in all languages it operates.
If you ask me, 8k doesn't sound absurd at all. Maybe a bit on the high end of what I would have guessed, but I'm possibly not accounting for new things they might be developing as well.
I've had the theory that Spotify is a legal department that happens to own a tech company. That would explain why its app is so terrible. And from what I've seen, music licensing is very very hard to do correctly, especially internationally and with so many different labels.
Can you explain what makes it terrible? I only use Vanilla Music (open-source) for my mp3 collection, and Spotify for streaming. I don't think I've ever tried any other commercial apps. The Spotify app seems fine to me. My only issue is that the volume in ads is higher than the volume of the music. I wish Google would forbid this in their appstore terms.
There are thousands of small UI problems and bugs. To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song. Then you're imprisoned rapidly by your own choices. The autoplay decision-making is atrocious. You are guaranteed to hear a song you just played manually within 10 songs. It's so painfully dumb. You could write a better system using a random number generator.
To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song
This is literally by design. Amazon doesn't want you to search, they want you to buy what they suggest on the homepage. Spotify doesn't want you listening to what you want, they want to shove profitable songs down your throat. you know how radio in america is controlled by the labels? Same with spotify.
Remove and/or break existing features, mostly. To their credit, they do occasionally introduce highly annoying anti-features with no way to work around them.
What do they all do?