this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?
Probably devs, updates, the verification and review process for music, reports. Apparently they also create playlists by hand.
The annoying ads also won't create themselves. There's a lot of effort being put into making them as annoying as possible actually.
Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley's VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
Trying to come up with rough IT numbers and I don't think I could break 500 (depends on how much they self-host and not considering contractors). Even if I bump it up to 4500 it seems insane for a large "digital distribution" company to have 50% of its workforce to be non-IT.
My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.
You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it's all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.
If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.
That is what I was thinking, too. Maybe it's really just marketing, hand curated content like someone commented or something else non technical.
I saw banks being maintained by 10-20 people.
Yeah that is a huge number
to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
Seems to be a lot of competition there.
It doesn't surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.
A small number of that will be IC's and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they'll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you've likely got a few thousand.
The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you'd be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you'll have people in dozens of countries.
Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve "growth" you need all the supporting stuff.