Understand 2x, I was also looking across all the jobs at spotify. There are some that go as low as 70k salary, a majority seem to be 170k+. It was just for ease of calculation. even if we take 500k that's still 0.033% of revenue -_-

Again, revenue is not really all that relevant for this kind of business. They’re a low margin business because they must pay huge bills to record labels. R&D doesn’t cut record label costs.

I'm having trouble understanding why 'revenue is not really all that relevant.'

If you're burning $40M a year, and you press a button to save $90M a year, yes your label costs are the same but how are you not now at +$50M a year?

Payroll is a cost, so it’s more relevant to think about a layoff in terms of its impact to profit (your example) than revenue. Lots of companies sell at a tight margin, so tiny cost savings as a percent of revenue can be a big difference in profit.

You aren't using percentages correctly, I think you mean 3.3% (and 1% in your original comment). Also, as pointed elsewhere, revenue is not really relevant, majority of that cash flows directly to artists/labels.

2X is my understanding as well. Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer. Some other big employer costs related to employees you forgot include employment taxes, hardware/software expenses and licenses, and office space and related perks.

Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low. Spotify might be saving up to $500k all-in per employee let go.

> Also I suspect that $150k as the mean TC of those being let go is low.

Probably not low. It's an enormous salary for a developer outside of the Valley and Spotify has plenty of employees which are not in the USA.

TBH I think the average Sr. Developer is ~130k in the US. Of course this varies so much depending on the role and company.

Spotify pays significantly above the average, though. Not as high as the top-tier FANGs, but still high.

The average software developer (not sure that it's pertinent to constraint it to "senior" devs) is $120k in the US. In San Francisco, the median is $161k [1]

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/15-1252.00

Levels.fyi supports me at least: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spotify/salaries

I commented above, whether the salary is 150k, 250k, 500k... the impact doesn't change 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.33%. Not sure it really matters. Again I'm not defending lazy employees or saying employers are bad for doing this. I feel there is a hidden cost of layoffs from my own experience of being at a company doing round after round of layoffs.

Agreed it doesn't matter much in this case, but it is a common misconception that employees don't cost nearly as much to employers as they actually do, so I wanted to step in and correct that.

I applied for an "entry-level" EM role with Spotify in 2021 and the base was 260-275, plus a generous bonus target and stock. TC would have been pushing $400k, for a fully remote USCAN-based role. I say that strictly as a calibration point - it's unlikely engineers are pushing half a million (maybe at the Staff+ level) but there's also not likely any engineers before $150k TC. I'd expect even mid-levels to be in the $200-225 ballpark but could be wrong.

I think $150k median is probably on the lower side of correct, but not enough to meaningfully impact any of the numbers anyone is discussing here. It's close enough.

The stock is down by more than half since 2021, and based on their business model and history of profit, as an employee, I would not value the stock portion of compensation much.

As far as I can tell, Apple/Google/Amazon will always provide the ceiling price for how much Spotify can charge its customers, hence capping revenue, and the 3 record labels will always extract just enough to keep Spotify operating.

That’s what they attempted with podcasts.

> Whatever you think an employee costs based on TC, double it to get the rough cost to the employer.

Hardware/Software expenses, office spaces, health insurance are fixed cost.

$150k employee vs 200k employee will have the same amount of fixed cost (assuming both are in the same function).