> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.
I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?
Probably just a fraction of employees are doing software, the bulk of the work is managing contracts, labels, legal compliance in 250 countries, marketing, administration, etc.
Reminds of the quote attributed to Naval Ravikant (paraphrased):
You have one person running the website. They leave and, of course, you need two people to replace that one person. Then, eventually, one of them leaves, you need two people to replace them etc. This brings you to a scenario where you have 5,000 people maintaining the website and changes take years.
AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).
