In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping up with all that attendant complexity.
On top of that, the company wants to innovate and probably has teams working on hardware and whatnot.
Whether it’s efficient is not clear, but most people there probably work hard on their particular daily grind.
Maybe. But for perspective it’s approximately 1/40th of the number of people that were employed at the peak of the Apollo moon landing missions (400,000 people) and that required the support of over 20,000 firms and universities.
Last I checked Apollo didn't have to deal with worldwide music licensing or have an audience of 500 million people across the world it needs to serve.
This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?
Well the evidence sure seems strong they could have done the same job with at least 13% fewer people. I wonder how many of the remaining are also absolutely essential for the service to operate and grow?
Music licensing, streaming and revenue sharing is hardly a “go to the moon in the 60s” complexity problem. And having a lot of end users doesn’t mean you need massive employee head counts in digital service delivery, it just means you have a lot of customers and need to build your digital delivery systems to handle a larger scale which is generally expressed as a modest pressure on engineering groups to build most scalable systems and not a rocket science level problem.
The high head counts are always present at the end of boom cycles, but a LOT of what companies are doing at the end of these cycles is simply busywork.
The busywork problem exists because managers equate business with productivity, and their organizations reflect that.
The perception is not just that a busy worker is engaged and making an effort, but even that their industriousness gives them a higher value than their less busy colleagues. But really only a relatively small number of employees do the vast majority of the work (Pareto principle). The whole corporate management theory sets up a dynamic in which two office workers completing identical tasks can be judged on their busyness, rather than their results. Who appears to be more engaged: the busy worker who skips lunch to get things finished, or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses the time saved to buy groceries online?
This, when applied at scale, leads to highly staffed organizations with a LOT of busy people who don’t really do that much compared to their potential for output.
If you don’t see the metaphor between a large engineering project and an engineering organization that seems over staffed, that’s fine. But do try to have the social grace to not call people dumb. There is just no call for insults here.
Why are you mixing up complexity of work with volume of work (and comparing incomparable industries at that)?
Spotify's work might not be getting people alive to the Moon with 1960s tech, but there is A LOT of it since they need to cover so much more.
Rest of your post is pretty much bloviating with assumptions you have no grounds for - not to mention your almost insulting minimization of work that's not TrueEngineeringWorkForMoon(tm).
I've worked in streaming industry and I can tell you that there is a stupid amount of work getting all the licenses and content in order across all the nations that Spotify is present it. You can call it "busywork", but it's no more busywork than jockeying JavaScript to make your CI happy. It's critical for company operations - Spotify lives and dies on amount of content they have, the speed they get new content and the ability to payout artists across the world for their content. Not to mention take money from people across the world.
It's outright hillarious how everyone here underestimates a problem like "we need to legally pay out money in Germany to Rammstein for a song", it's like watching HBO's Sillicon Valley in real life.
There’s nothing incorrect about pointing out that the modern workplace reinforces busywork over meaningful engineering and managerial headcount justification. The data supports it.
Implying that “Jockeying JavaScript” isn’t real enough engineering work is also a look.
Arguing that engineering projects of scale can’t be compared because one can’t tell the difference between volume and complexity is rough conversation.
The idea that engineering on large technical projects can’t be compared across industries or eras isn’t true in an objective sense either.
Not super happy I took the time to reply to you and got told I was to get called blovating. That’s unkind.
That while stating that “everyone on HN underestimates things” and doesn’t understand how hard problems like paying someone for streaming actually is exactly the kind of nonsensical thinking that is building these large headcount companies.
Your argument is that “global payments are harder than people realize.”
But it’s simply not true. They are profoundly easier than they have ever been in history and people on hacker news are many of the very people creating those payment rails.
So I think calling their opinions “hilarious” while insulting the entire community and the person you’re talking to… it’s not… great. Calling it a “real life” Silicon Valley kinda is though, because well, it kind of literally is. This is the website of the most successful Silicon Valley incubator.
I come on here to learn and have positive interactions with people, grow intellectually and this isn’t quite what I am looking for. Thanks for your interaction though. Have a great day.
Apollo wasn't travelling all over 100+ countries scooping up podcasts and speaking to growing artists though. Your comparison is weird, the goals are quite different.
When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises
Because I have experience in the industry. Where is anyone getting any of this info? Don’t just believe these guys they are fake accounts repeating marketing info.
I also have some 2 decades of experience in the industry, so please, share me your reasoning, how did you arrive at these numbers? Just a ballpark, no appeal to authority as I believe we are both similarly seasoned...
> They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform
Yes, if they were at the cutting edge on every platform and constantly adding innovative new features, that could certainly explain 500 of the 9000 employees.
But that still leaves 8,500 employees unexplained.
Developing the software is easy part. Handling and negotiating contracts and licensing agreements for all their music and podcasts (and advertisers) all across the globe is probably the hard part. Plus of course all the marketing, support and related tasks.
Still. There's only ~200 countries, and a good chunk of them either isn't worth having any presence in (no need to negotiate licenses for Somalia), or is so small and has similar laws to surrounding countries that they'll be treated as one bloc by the publishers you negotiate with anyway (all the Pacific statelets e.g.).
Between that and the ability to just contract local lawyers, 45 to (realistically closer to) 90 employees per (relevant) country is still a lot.
Also, spotify outsourced 90% of their support to their community (designated "star" members). There's no hotline either, so no call centres to run, or anything else personnel intensive. (And you'd outsource that anyway, realistically.)
This is the only valid question here. Bloated workforce is somehow a must-have byproduct of growing cash flow, someone could surely say why. Is it prestige? Is it managers gaining more power by commanding more teams and this workforce then remains? Is it to please shareholders with feature bloat? Is it an actual (one-time?) need to scale up globally?
I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
> I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
Xitter is massively tanking as a company with massive revenue losses since that brilliant idea. Its example proves literally the opposite of what you're claiming - after firings the company is in tailspin of financial losses.
How is the revenue loss a cause for downsizing? I mean bigger revenue loss since Twitter always made losses. If you say lack of moderation (workforce) and thus leaving advertisers, I think that's a minority, and moderators were just a fraction of the people let go.
These are probably not all devs/engineers. Usually, selling services/products in multiple countries mean, dedicated legal, HR, accounting replicated in nearly every location where no common treaty exists, and management in large tech tends to have too many levels and adds up quickly as well.
“probably”? I mean, yes it’s a tech company, but it’s a bit surprising anyone would expect it to be much more than 50% engineering. Marketing and customer support alone would have a huge headcount - and given the impact AI tech is having on those areas, I wouldn’t be surprised if they represented a disproportionate fraction of the layoffs.
exactly 0 engineers working on the stupid "enhanced shuffle" or whatever its called that I am forced to toggle through in order to switch between shuffle and non-shuffle, and makes me wait 5 seconds while adding random songs to my liked songs that I dont want and did not ask for. The amount of computing resources wasted on this trash is just insane, both on the backend for the song recommendations and on the frontend where my phone is frozen for 5 seconds. It escapes me how such a big company is fine with having that this abomination of a feature in their app. rant over
I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20?
I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total.
And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,...
Don't know. I'd struggle to fill a roster of 200 people for Spotify.
> Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
Sadly, yes. That they become so tone-deaf is something I'll never condone though I do understand why it's happening (or so I think: is it the gobs of money that make people comfortable and disconnected from the bread and butter of the company?)
Internal tools for licensing, library ingestion, tools to support data science, customer payments in however many countries they're in, artist payout, search, recommendations, encoding/playback (probably even multiple teams for multiple platforms), whatever their ad sales platform looks like, ad selection, concert listings, merch sales, wrapped (which is probably their most loved feature)
Some of these are a team per region, some are a team per platform, some are entire divisions
>I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20?
So Spotify should bring you in as the CTO, right? How can you make such a confident claim that you know better how to run the company that has beat the daylights out of every other music streaming platforms (including Google, Amazon, and Apple)?
Whelp, even for tech-core products, number of engineers are often very insignificant compared to other stuff(legal, license, buying, acquisition, hr, advertising, marketing, sales, security, management, decision board, product management, product owners, agile team, release team, test/QA, support etc.).
I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans the globe(or even multiple countries or continents), you really need a huge team to keep troubles out and the wheels going.
According to LinkedIn, Spotify currently has 13,900 full-time employees, with 3620 in Engineering (26%), 1850 in Arts & Design (13%), 1000 in Media & Communications (7%), and roughly 800 each in Marketing, Business Development, and Sales (5-6% each).
Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.
If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.
I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.
Lmao, I love this comment so much because of how incredibly uninformed it is. 5-6 backend engineers to run Spotify in 185 countries... I've seen a lot of ridiculous comments when it comes to company sizes, but yours is probably the best one I've seen in my life, thanks for the laugh.
Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/useful and you can't even imagine it?
I'd love to hear how you split the workload between these 5 backenders.
Obviously I can't be well informed since I don't work in there, I am saying that the core functionality of moving bytes around the globe is not something you need hundreds of people for -- because I worked on similar teams. In fact the DevOps team was times bigger than the programmers which might be one clue in Spotify's case.
Have you ever worked at a company with more than say 1k employees that's active in more than one region? I'm honestly intrigued in your opinion, it sounds similar to what I thought back in uni before I had any work experience, but from your profile you don't look like a complete junior, so I'd really like to better understand how you can think Spotify could possibly operate with 5 backenders.
I am 43. :D And with 22 years of experience, 95% of which in backend and some sysadmin-ing.
Though I have only once worked in a huge corporation (and I couldn't understand what did they need all the people for either).
I was almost always working in smaller tight-knit teams that got a LOT of stuff done (too much contracting for my now 40+ y/o self).
So I err on the side of "be efficient" and that's not even for the purposes of cost efficiency. It's more about being able to iterate with a reasonable speed. My observations from my career support what Bill Gates and others said i.e. that the productivity of a tech team starts to decline when it goes beyond 7 people. Generalization, sure, but it's very often true.
As for the 5 backenders thing, OK, my perspective might have been too narrow i.e. "writing code to move bytes from our servers to CDNs to user's devices can't be that hard" and I mostly stand behind it. Sure you might need much more devs to author complex login systems, SSO and such (if you even need it) but again, after the product somewhat stabilizes, how much backenders do you really need?
I am also interested in your opinion. My entire career has been a proof that small and tight-knit teams get sh1t done and everyone else drowns in bureaucracy.
For larger companies, there's a lot of "hidden" functions that you're probably not aware of as a customer. Just payment integrations in 100+ countries, with all the local regulations and reporting requirements is probably going to be rough to handle with a single team of 5 backenders. Then we have functions like marketing content management (every country has different copy and will probably want to be able to surface things slightly differently to maximize conversion), artist/podcast/audiobook tooling, the ad platform, hardware integration (for Spotify in your car/speaker etc), legal stuff (including GDPR and its equivalents), metrics & data analysis tools. And much more, and those are just some of the things you don't really see as an end-user.
I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.
Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.
But as another commenter pointed out -- it's actually 13900 people.
Again, everything you say it's true but I am finding it hard to imagine the scale and the degree of the problems that mandate ~14k people. Sure, 1000. Maybe 2500.
At the time WhatsApp was only forwarding messages from user to user. They didn't deal with different contracts and license deals in 180 countries. Nowadays they have a lot more country specific regulations to deal with, and also a much higher headcount.
I remember when rolling out Yandex.Music (a similar streaming service) in 2010 we had maybe a dozen developers rounding way up, a half dozen strong BizRel team, perhaps three DevOps and a few managers. Totalling around 30 people, though dozens more would do some things by the virtue of being integrated in much larger Yandex team.
Obviously we had way fewer regions/catalogue/listeners/platforms, especially back then.
Why would it be a satire? I've worked on much harder problems than moving anywhere between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices, and we were 11 people, responsible for dozens of terabytes per workday.
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
Don't you think there is big difference between moving files to some users' devices vs moving files to literally half a billion users with almost 100% uptime? Not considering problems associated with the scale of Spotify and instantly dismissing the task of managing that as something trivial (or at least easier than your work) makes you sound arrogant.
Because it's like a cliché example of an engineer with the view that some relatively successful real-world product—that they have no real insight into—is far easier to implement than the people who _are_ familiar with it have. You see this literally all the time, to the extent that it's become a meme, and it's hard to believe anybody would make that argument seriously.
Spotify might have too many engineers on-staff; reducing the service to "moving between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices" is a flatly uncurious approach to understanding what engineering challenges they might face or if that's really the case. It's a service that _adds_ 100k songs a day, for goodness sake.
I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify moves a petabyte of images a day, I can't even guess the amount of data from their songs and videos. But obviously just moving data isn't what requires a lot of employees.
Am I understanding correctly that you're looking for a HN poster to explain to you the complexities involved in maintaining compliance, legal and licensing for a globally distributed service, just so you can decide whether or not to be outraged by the size of Spotify's staff count?
Here’s just one example of where Spotify didn’t actually have enough staff to understand the legal requirements of one single product decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
Obviously you don't need all those people. Almost no company apart from like one-man companies or dying companies employ only the people they need. You employ as many people as possible that generate additional profit, short or long-term. Do you need to hire a conversion specialist? Of course not, though if she costs $400k a year while improving conversion by 10% the payoff is absolutely massive, and you'd have to be an idiot not to hire her.
I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.
9000 employees. My gods.
What are all these people doing?!