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...
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
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.
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!
This just means "to insult". Not exactly interchangeable with "overcome with a negative emotion".
But yes, I fucking hate this kind of hyperbole in news headlines. The other one I see is blasts like somebody legit fired a Kamehameha wave at somebody else.
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.
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!
