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Spotify said Monday that it will cut 6% of its workforce to reduce costs – CEO Daniel Ek took full responsibility for the job cuts, which he called “difficult but necessary”
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- Title
- Spotify to cut 6% of its workforce | CNN Business
- Authors
- Hanna Ziady
- Published
- Jan 23 2023
- Word count
- 326 words
Funny. This is the exact percentage that Google cut its workforce by. My impression from the inside is that Google had a quota. Low performers were cut - but there weren’t enough low performers to hit 6% and so they just started firing randomly. Lots of good people were laid off as a blood sacrifice to the stock holders.
Spotify has certainly been planning this for a while but they probably saw Google’s layoff on Friday and adjusted their own quota to match.
What I've heard on few youtube stories and anecdotes is that most of the sacked positions are non-technical in nature, and that developers and "tech folks" are mostly retained. Is that true?
That lines up with what I've heard. PMs, Google's entire fleet of massage therapists, etc.
I know of two "tech" people, both of them there for many years, who got laid off. From the outside, I couldn't really say what the criteria was.
One difference between now and the 2008 recession (the last time Google cut back) is that there were a lot of contractors back then, so it didn't affect employees as much. However, Google has closed offices and required people to move somewhere with an office if they wanted to keep working for Google.
I know a lot of people at Google so I was shared a spreadsheet set up by Xooglers laid off recording their level and perf status. There was about a 50% support check in rate, and a good amount of people with perf in good standing.
Interestingly, unlike some of the other tech layoffs, this one really reaped the newgrad/L3-L4s. Or maybe that was selection bias.
The distribution of levels was pretty close to the population distribution.
What I've heard is that 10% of the company was recently put on the Google equivalent of a performance improvement plan. But if you're on a PIP in AI/Ads as a programmer they really want to make things work. In the self-reported data I've seen about half of those laid off weren't on a PIP. The one person I know personally that was laid off was high performing in a PM role.
I don't really know what's going on but it's clear from talking with my coworkers that a lot of decisions were arbitrary. The people making the calls on who to lay off were 3+ levels removed from ICs. There's no way they could have known enough to make the best decisions.
In these cases I don't think anyone expects the decision on who to the let go to be "the best decision" (whatever that might mean). I believe the aim is instead to filter out the worst decisions, i.e. the ones that will cripple the business.
Only 750 senior leaders were involved in the process out of 30,000 managers and 200,000 employees.
As a manager who has been through a few rounds of layoffs, you are lucky if you get asked to stack rank folks "for pay raises/ bonuses."
The mistake is to put the guy who just got promoted and a pay raise at the bottom. Because usually it's about pay raises and bonuses, but every now and then it's not.
That would be an especially easy mistake to make at Google.