CEO Alarmed to Discover That Laying Off 1,500 Workers Had Consequences
CEO Alarmed to Discover That Laying Off 1,500 Workers Had Consequences
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek recently discovered that firing 17 percent of a company's workforce might have a big impact on said company.
I like how the verb in the headline evolves every time I see this story. First he was surprised. Then he was shocked. Now he's alarmed. Maybe I'll check back tomorrow and learn he's horrified!
Especially when these whole articles revolve around couple sentences in an earnings call which were basically "it had a bigger effect than we expected, but we're doing okay now." I'm sure as an excuse for lower than expected profits in that period.
This guy needs to slam somebody.
Fuck I hate that word now
It's just another example of news orgs running interference for a twenty-something dbag "entrepreneur"who has no idea how his business works.
one can only dream!
Layoffs are a leadership failure so should always be accompanied by firing them too
Not to his paycheck, it didn't.
They only do this for end of year bonuses for shareholders and the C level folks. They don't give a single shit about who it affects. People's lives were ruined over this.
It's just insane to me that it even takes 1500 people to run Spotify to begin with
Techwise it probably doesn't, but then there's marketeers, sales, accountants, legal, etc...
It's the music industry. Probably 50% lawyers.
People think that because you can build a Spotify clone with two sticks and a heroku subscription it must not need a lot of people to work on. It's what Elon said about Twitter prior to buying it and gutting all the features.
These apps are first and foremost businesses with legal, HR, and all sorts of other roles before you get to product. And the products are so mature, so complex, that you need dozens of teams to cover the entire thing
Why not? Some companies do have a fraction of Spotify users and have around 100 software engineers. Things do not run by themselves. Also they are in many countries so you need to keep up with legal changes...
I can see the need for those engineers but more importantly, Spotify needs sales people.
Spotify is also a record label now. They probably need an entire division devoted just to the marketing and strategy needed to make that successful
i tought this was the onion for a second
Firing him would have a negligible effect. Bet.
He and the shareholders still made a ton of money. They will do it again so they can make a ton more money.
He doesn't care and never will.
God damn, capitalists can be so fucking stupid.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In December, music streaming giant Spotify fired 1,500 workers, a cohort amounting to a staggering 17 percent of its total workforce at the time.
On an investor call this week following Spotify's Q1 report, the streaming CEO admitted that while the layoffs were the "right strategic decision," firing 1,500 employees "did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated."
"It took us some time to find our footing," Ek continued, according to Fortune, "but more than four months into this transition, think we're back on track."
And sometimes, it's true that companies do over-hire — a reality exemplified by the tech industry, which saw record layoffs last year after a decade of fairly steady workforce increases furthered by the industry's pandemic hiring boom.
Because copyright exists, access to an endless music library isn't cheap.
"On the surface," Spotify's business model "looks great," Simon Dyson, senior principal analyst at the consultancy firm Omdia, told Wired last year following Ek's layoff announcement.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Only 1499 next time please!
xmanager