[HN Gopher] Spotify doesn't use the Spotify model (2020)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Spotify doesn't use the Spotify model (2020)
        
       Author : ggeorgovassilis
       Score  : 70 points
       Date   : 2022-07-10 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jeremiahlee.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeremiahlee.com)
        
       | 2sk21 wrote:
       | This is funny - back in 2015, the Spotify model became the
       | organizational model for our product team at IBM Watson. It did
       | not work for much the same reasons described by the author. All
       | that it resulted in was an inscrutable organizational matrix
       | which rapidly became ossified - the very opposite of nimbleness!
        
         | raverbashing wrote:
         | I'd blame this on consultants and other bureaucrats adding a
         | heavy goop of SAFe/RUP etc on top and then calling the process
         | failed
        
       | ggeorgovassilis wrote:
       | Jeremiah Lee points out that the focus on squad autonomy causes
       | squads to sever ties with all dependencies in order to maximise
       | autonomy, so squads grow and become unmanageable.
        
       | wodenokoto wrote:
       | The Spotify model was huge in Sweden. Everybody talked about it
       | it seemed.
       | 
       | I remember a joke about companies in the early 2000's would say
       | they used Java to encourage competitors to have development
       | problems because "Java sucks, haha".
       | 
       | I wouldn't be surprised if the "Spotify model" has had adverse
       | effects on the Swedish IT sector at large.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | winternett wrote:
       | In my 20+ years of working within and managing development teams,
       | no one ever follows the book, and most project teams are flush
       | with people that know the language, but nothing about the actual
       | execution.
       | 
       | Companies gush volumes about their rigid adherence to excellence
       | and perfection, because proposal and marketing teams are distant
       | from development teams that often scramble incessantly, not to
       | innovate, but more-so to just use duct tape to keep things
       | running without showing errors on the front end.
       | 
       | Human psychology experts and product owners now also join into
       | the mix for these large platforms too, which greatly contaminates
       | development goals and ruins enthusiasm by overcomplicating and
       | superseding the sense of accomplishment that development work is
       | meant to create. It's a vicarious cycle of abuse to be an entry
       | level dev on a mega corp product now... May God have mercy on
       | anyone interested in working for those brutal companies... heh.
       | 
       | As a musician that's been on Spotify for years, it really does
       | not need to be exalted that much... It's music streaming that
       | doesn't pay a sht on a stale bean cracker to musicans...
       | 
       | Spotify's UI has been terrible in my opinion since it started,
       | with it's full screen madness and prohibition on copying and
       | pasting song titles. The song sharing features prevent much from
       | being productive, and everything is designed to drive you away
       | from the one artist you came to the site to hear. It's
       | bewildering to me how artists are expected to pay a minimum of
       | $250 US on marketing to promote themselves on the platform just
       | so they can show the public they're worth being listened to based
       | on the value stats that spotify prominently displays to extort
       | musicians on their profiles.... They're still going to give one
       | single talk show host the majority of the money you pay to them.
       | 
       | Music streaming has literally been around since the age of
       | Mp3.com, the only real advancement that's been added by Spotify
       | since then is nonsensically still calling radio shows "podcasts"
       | (even though iPods are retired), embedding ads into streams, and
       | maybe making people spend a lot of time creating and promoting
       | already popular music and playlists for money. Spotify is a
       | wildly overvalued and wildly under-delivering service... At least
       | YouTube has music videos to hear and view the content that it's
       | very underpaid musicians create. (Just a personal blunt opinion
       | though).
        
       | tootie wrote:
       | I spent a long time working in consulting where matrix management
       | is a requirement since product teams spin and down every 6-12
       | months. It's a pretty solvable problem to have a tech lead per
       | project and separate tech manager per person. Sometimes it's the
       | same person, usually it isn't. You actually get a different
       | perspective as a manager hearing about the drama of projects you
       | aren't working on and you have a lot more discretion to seek
       | project team transfers for reports that are struggling with their
       | teams. Typically (but not always) the career managers were also
       | tech leads on their own projects.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-07-10 23:02 UTC)