Comment by Vegenoid
8 hours ago
Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
I am very unsurprised by this outcome.
People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.
>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
Spotify or Shopify?
Spotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify.
I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.
You could start a consultancy called Optify to help them optimize their engineering.
Shoplifty
I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately
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Probably both
> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.
I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.
I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.
There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?
That and venture investment has become bane of good.
When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors
15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ
Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.
When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.
The mythical man-month ;)
Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?
Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...
Such book could be distilled in simple essence:
- stay out of it for your sanity
- sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast
[flagged]
The first comment in this thread drew a comparison between Spotify and Shopify. Perhaps you were skimming and missed it.
I don’t think that AI would have made this confusion (it’s much less likely to overlook things like these), and I’m also not of the opinion that these comments confuse the two companies, it’s rather than Spotify is used by the grandparent as another example like Shopify.
Actually, the first occurrence might have just been a typo (auto-correct?), but the second occurrence looks like slop directed at the previous comment.
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>> This is unfortunately not an isolated issue, Spotify for one has the same issue.
I just brought up Spotify since I have more experience using their app and they have also gone fully into “agents have made us 100X more productive”
AI can do captchas better than humans can
They don’t confuse them, he says both have the same issue.
Perhaps you are the AI slop?
Seriously, it’s funny how confident people can be about something despite their awful reading comprehension.
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