<story><title>Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%</title><url>https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-12-04/an-update-on-december-2023-organizational-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>Reminds me of: &amp;quot;Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s not our core competence, it would require more people&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I get it, it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;sexy at all&lt;/i&gt; to deal in infrastructure, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen their cloud bill and it&amp;#x27;s significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got through committed use and even when considering the actual costs for infrastructure they need.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure there are inefficiencies everywhere, but this was the one that I talked about before and was talked down in a rather condescending tone. &amp;quot;Nobody got fired for buying cloud&amp;quot; is evidently a misnomer, because if you spend a lot of money and you don&amp;#x27;t have a lot of income: something has to give. And cloud has a lot more lock-in than most employees.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>marcinzm</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center department that actually supports other departments properly. The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align. Cloud&amp;#x27;s selling point is that you won&amp;#x27;t have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).</text></comment>
<story><title>Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%</title><url>https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-12-04/an-update-on-december-2023-organizational-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dijit</author><text>Reminds me of: &amp;quot;Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s not our core competence, it would require more people&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I get it, it&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;sexy at all&lt;/i&gt; to deal in infrastructure, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen their cloud bill and it&amp;#x27;s significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got through committed use and even when considering the actual costs for infrastructure they need.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure there are inefficiencies everywhere, but this was the one that I talked about before and was talked down in a rather condescending tone. &amp;quot;Nobody got fired for buying cloud&amp;quot; is evidently a misnomer, because if you spend a lot of money and you don&amp;#x27;t have a lot of income: something has to give. And cloud has a lot more lock-in than most employees.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blcknight</author><text>Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design).&lt;p&gt;They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.</text></comment>