Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".
In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.
They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors?
Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as successful as they wanted, so they're keeping them but massively scaling back on future investment. Which means they don't need those employees anymore.
Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive, and risk a competitor taking their place, and then go the way of Pandora? Do you think it's wrong to hire teams to build products when you hope the products will succeed but you can't know 100% for sure?
This is just how normal, healthy business goes. You make bets, sometimes they succeed wildly, and sometimes they don't. When they don't, it often results in layoffs because there's not enough profit to keep paying those employees with, and there isn't immediately any new product for them to work on.
Believe me, a company with profit margins as thin as Spotify's can't afford to "hire for the sake of hiring". That's just not how it works.
I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts, audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate apps.
I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into these new paths without any innovation in the music department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.
I think their expansion into other media was a signal to me to look for someone doing a better job at specializing.
> I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.
I left Spotify a while ago, but one thing I hate is that there's no way of differentiating when you add complete albums to your collection vs only one song.
This is precisely why I also switched to Apple Music, it was annoying to have Spotify constantly pushing podcast content to me as someone who had no interest in Podcasts and no way to enable a "music only" mode either.
I too recently left Spotify for Apple Music because it works better on my Home Pod and Apple TV. I don't know why Spotify doesn't fix this. I know they are in a feud with Apple and maybe they think this is a way to apply pressure to Apple, but the risk is they lose people like me.
There were other reasons for leaving. I don't like that I can't hide or disable audiobooks or podcasts. They take up a lot of important screen space and are useless to me. I also really dislike the notifications from Spotify. I have them all turned off, but ever once in a while they decide to show one anyway.
What I found thoroughly missing in all music streaming was emotional composition, aka the Algo being able to play music tailored to what situations I I'm experiencing and giving it an arc.
Example:im programming and the concentration music goes towards a victorious crescendo once it works.
Part of my dev process at work involves running a (rather) flaky test suite on my laptop. The test suite takes several minutes to run, and it doesn't fail fast. No good for my short attention span.
I wrote a script which runs the test suite in a loop. When the tests fail, it plays horns.aiff (from The Price is Right). When the tests pass it plays the epic Champions League theme music.
The best part is, I can do other stuff while waiting for the flaky tests to pass, without having to remember to check the terminal they're running in. Audio cues are really great.
That’s me too. I disliked having podcasts in otherwise perfectly OK music app, and also Spotify’s efforts to rebrand ‘podcasts’ as something else than “mp3s on RSS”. But I was a paying customer for 10+ years so they had a good run.
Counter-anecdote, I like that Spotify hasn't changed, and if it changed significantly tomorrow, it might prompt me to look at competitors and decide afresh which music service to use.
I left spotify after reading their privacy policy and some news stories about how they plan to use your listening data to infer things about you and sell the results
That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and something that had tempted me in the past. I have to relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to start).
There’s definitely some annoyances… the paramount one for me is actually the opposite of what you describe: I click on an item to simply play it and it makes me deal with a pop up asking me how it should interact with my queue, even when I have no queue at all! Just play the damned song, stop asking me questions.
Ugh… things like this make me wish we had just one FOSS music player with a paid backend. I’d comment out all the modals and get on with life.
That's a good attempt, but I'd rather not run a server - if I'm paying for the service I'd like to have an API I can run/write a frontend against. And ideally I'd have the ability to listen to lossless music, not whatever encoding Spotify thinks I deserve.
As I understand it that is for listening to a library of personally owned material remotely? That's not really what I'm looking for. I appreciate the MAAS model, it's just the UI's that suck.
Looking to do this - how did you migrate your playlists? Also my family was using my main Apple Music account - so I have to "clear out the new place" as I setup a family account for them.
The new cover videos bands can post on songs are ill. The changing of the like button to not be just for liked songs is great (usually, tho sometimes I wish it was two
separate buttons). There’s constantly a bunch of new tools to find new music, some hitting better than others. The “listen with friends,” while still buggy asf, is a great feature.
5 years ago, Spotify updates were more like “we changed the colors and layout of the UI and that’s about it.”
It’s true though. They haven’t reinvented music completely.
I'm not sure what you're referring to with the Like/Love button. It seems to be the same as it ever was for me, except the UI is different based on whether you're in CarPlay, mobile app, or desktop app, so sometimes it's a heart and sometimes it's a plus sign.
One of my biggest complaints for Spotify is the removal of star ratings, but that's been probably a decade ago at this point. Apple Music has it for the desktop app, but it's missing from mobile.
Buying music, downloading it and putting it into your music folder also works great! Then you can organize it, display it, order it and listen to it however you want by using a player that suits your preferences, decoupling the source of your music from the application you use to play it.
I think trying to normalize a ~20% workforce reduction as business as usual is a little bit much here.
Management made a lot of mistakes to get to this situation. It wasn't we tried a few things and it didn't work out, it was we burrowed too much money, spent too much money, and risked too much.
What other tech company has cut this deeply recently? You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it happening there? 20% is not 2-3%.
> You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it happening there?
Their competitors are not direct comparisons, though, and percentages can be a little misleading. Spotify is ~7.5k employees, and does one thing. Amazon is ~1.5m employees, and does many, many things.
Around end of 2022 and start of 2023, Amazon laid off 18k people from their corporate workforce - about 1.2% of their global employee count[0]. That seemed to be the figure the % above was from, as the % from their corporate workforce was 6%.
But what I'd expect is for them to cut only a little (not 17%), because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive.
To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore doing so).
Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow, this looks like there isn't a big bet now.
> because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive.
Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change.
Revolving loans might cost more to service, which also impacts R&D and product expenditures. It's very dynamic.
> To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore doing so).
Exactly this. And that's just reality. No company has perfect information.
> Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow, this looks like there isn't a big bet now.
AI clearly is looking interesting and shaping up in a big way for music, but the iron probably isn't hot enough to strike yet.
These are hard problems that leadership constantly grapples with.
> Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change.
This is true, but I personally believe that the loss of knowledge and experience from within is a significant drag on momentum for when you do want to hire again... these people likely won't return even if the markets change, they've been burned, why would they return.
If it's possible to place the next bet, retain as much knowledge and experience as possible, and leverage that towards something new, then surely that is the best thing to do.
Could there have been other bets? Probably, if audio is the definition of the market and what you have at the moment is predominantly Western music, then stronger pushes into native apps for different markets? A classical specific app / flavour? A jazz specific app / flavour? Podcasts are good, but I think audiobooks are better... the audiobook market does not feel "done" at all, there's a lot more that could be done here too. Generational AI dynamic music could be a thing too, not streaming a file but streaming the basis of a constantly generated infinite thing, i.e. study aids, sleep aids, etc. Or how about audio app sync with video devices to enable the audio from your film to come out of your smart speakers or Hi-Fi even without a 5.1 amp?
A lot of these are smaller bets than "podcasts will be worth a gazillion dollars", but each is still significant, sticky, and leads to higher retention, and fights against the commoditization of music playback and the low margins there.
17% cuts does signal a lack of ambition despite "economic headwinds", it feels like a "we need to cut deep" rather than a "what are all the new bets we can make and then we are compelled to cut the difference".
This is literally how all commerce works, though. If someone opens a restaurant, for example, it's a bet that there's a market for the food they're preparing, and that their staff will be capable of being able to meet the demand. Sometimes you're right, and sometimes you're wrong.
and destroying their future plans they might have set in motion that will be derailed because of management's incompetance, they don't have money that much money to float on specially in this economy where everything is overpriced, almost like they are humans with their own histories and possibly other people depending on them, did you really try and consider their perspective or was dehumanizing them your first instinct?
but i doubt management will be fired will it? they'll end up with nice fat stacks of bonuses for making terrible business decisions
Believe me, I have very very close experience with what it’s like to go through layoffs, and I feel for those who have just now realized that nothing in this world is guaranteed.
But griping that management should have kept paying salaries when the money wasn’t there won’t get anyone anywhere. Take your severance, hone your skills, apply for jobs. If you can, maybe take some time to go on a trip. Life will go on.
Companies don't stay profitable by investing in unprofitable markets, though. If they don't think this approach is going to work out long-term, they should stop spending money on it, even if that means reducing headcount.
This is a really poor approach to discourse. I imagine you don't really think that every job must last forever. Jobs come and go, and working them means we can live and make choices. It's not fun being laid off (I have been), but it's just life.
People should know that know job is permanent and plan accordingly. Do you really expect to work at one company the rest of your career and get a gold watch and a pension ?
But why shouldn't we expect to be able to work for one company and earn a gold watch (at some anniversary date, I guess?) and a pension?
It used to work that way. Why not now? It worked that way for my grandpa. It looked like it was going to work that way for my dad, until the corporate world did its huge pension rug-pulls. But it could still work that way.
I have a pension now (Sweden). My wife has one (Germany). You could, too.
This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty. It's like counting cards with a freshly shuffled deck: nobody can tell what the state of the game is, so you place a minimum bet until you can get a feel for things again.
The movie is meh, but the boardroom scene in Margin Call has a great line:
"I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence."
Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.
> Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.
Sure, but you can leave a downturn four ways:
1. You went out of business
2. You experienced a decline and let a lot of people go
3. You managed to stay roughly where you were, no further forward, no further backwards (this is a small success but still a great achievement) and you may have let some people go — the expression "running to stand still" applies here
4. You find a way to come out better than you went in and maybe continued to hire
Spotify feel like they've gone from #3 to #2, but they had ambitions to be #4 of those scenarios, they will likely survive, but in what form and with what potential? And more to the point, if their competitors manage to achieve #3 or #4, at what long-term cost to Spotify?
5. Cut your losses and keep whatever cash stores you can for the storm to come.
We have zero insight into what the Spotify execs are seeing. Maybe ad revenue is already down. Maybe subscriptions aren’t renewing. Maybe costs are increasing.
Sometimes, the best thing to do is cut some employees now, so you don’t have to cut more later.
That's peak capitalism right there - you've got people spending to buy products with money borrowed from credit card companies and banks, which they will have difficulty paying off and will pay a good amount of interest on.
If you can't make a company work in that environment, you might want to do a bit of a self examination and notice that your advertising is annoying and off-putting and your web-browser based client is utter shit.
It’s also healthy to get backlash from the public and investors for layoffs. Personally I don’t think it’s ever right to layoff employees for leaderships mistakes. It should be used as a last resort only when the entire company is at risk of going under. Based on their post it doesn’t sound like that’s the case, they even bragged about a “positive earnings report”.
So, can at least the execs that made the wrong bets be fired? Those are multi million dollar mistakes. But nope… they just take “complete responsibility” and fire the dev teams.
I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk.
Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's it. It's an at-will arrangement.
I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most companies acutally take too few risks. It's not hard to understand why when you start doing some the math: if you invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then your investment broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure rate and want to be more conservative with our investments. Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more conservative with our money, but because we didn't take enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even. This hypothetical thought experiment is why many companies should be over-hiring and taking risks.
If you make a mistake, so what? You lay off the workers and you immediately stop paying for that cost, and you might even have something to show for taking the risk.
Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few years is a completely valid strategy.
If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this but only for large employers making large cuts.
> If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods.
But then you push companies in the exact opposite direction than you say you want them to go. If it's harder to do layoffs, companies will take less risks that require hiring.
You're right, but remember that I was speaking from the corporations' perspective. They can make more money by taking more risks, but at some point larger society has to weigh corporate profitability against societal well-being.
For example, a factory could make more money if it dumped its pollutants into a river rather than paying extra to dispose them properly. That difference in incentives between greater society versus the individual business is why we have the EPA.
Basically, the intention of my last comment was to answer the common question that might be asked of: "Wow, this company laid off so many people, what were they thinking? Maybe they should plan ahead next time?" And the answer to that is usually "yes they planned for this scenario and they're perfectly okay with having a layoff."
I am honestly looking to move to a competitor because of their podcasting and audiobook efforts. Well, and I don't necessarily care about those things per se but Spotify used to be a focused music app, and they keep removing things from the app in favor of whatever new "growth thing" they want to do this year. I never know when I load up the app what is going to have changed and take me an extra 5 minutes to find what I want.
They have done so much damage to their app's usability by trying to "grow" that someone could probably sell me on some ultra-premium subscription that actually had a good music player that functioned more like the music players of 15 years ago.
There’s a lot about the Music app for Mac that makes me wonder how a trillion dollar company can produce such a crappy website (yes it’s a webview, not native), and the iOS app is jittery and buggy in its own way, but in the end I do agree it’s the best option around, and I’ve been a happy-ish paying customer for almost a decade now. (part of that time I had Spotify too)
You can avoid most of the annoyances by always using the Songs view and hitting Command-B to get the columns browser like iTunes. Then edit the columns to browse in the menu.
That's a neat trick! I just wish there was a Playlist option and Favorites. (The "Groupings" component is empty for me, not sure if that is supposed to have the playlists)
For playlists you can choose “view as songs” in one of the menus and then enable the column browser. I have a smart playlist for the classical genres that I do this for.
The groupings is a tag that’s free-form text: one nice thing about Apple Music is you can edit the tags, even if you don’t buy the music. I typically split “Classical” into “Baroque”/“Classical”/“Romantic” and then rewrite “composer” to be “last name, first name (years of life)”
There's always a business justification for hiring, simply because there has to be to get the headcount approved. That doesn't mean that it's the actual reason, as in the deciding factor that gets the decider to say "yes, we're going to hire more people". Principle agent problems are a thing. You can always come up with reasons that are true but wouldn't by themselves change your decision. And conversely, you can figure out what someone's actual reasons are by looking at counterfactuals where those conditions didn't occur and the person (or a peer) made a different decision.
Between 2020 and 2023, Google went from 118k employees to 190k. Meta went from 58,604 to 86,482. Stripe went from ~2000 to ~7000. Coinbase went from 1200 to 4500. These companies are not competing significantly in podcasting and audiobook efforts. But what they do have in common is that they are growth tech companies whose business models are pretty sensitive to interest rates and availabilty of capital. Who didn't hire in 2021-2022? Mostly industries like restaurants and hospitality that are not particularly interest rate sensitive, and were still recovering from COVID. They're catching up now that people are spending more.
That makes me strongly suspect that directors hire simply because there are funds available, and there are funds available because rates are low. Indeed, this is the Fed's lever on the unemployment rate. If they didn't, then changing the money supply wouldn't have any effect on unemployment or wage inflation, which would be purely determined by shifts in consumer demand.
> They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive
How many employees does it take to take an app that already works great on playing audio files and do a bit of UI redesign and change those audio files from music to podcasts and books? It's not like they're building this thing from the ground up.
The podcast app I use was built by one person, granted over a few years, and it works way better as a podcast app than spotify does. They are going to layoff 1,500 people. I assume those aren't all engineers but I think a team of 10, (including devops and QA) could build each of these features in the timeframe they did plus the additional business side of the ventures (negotiating contracts, acquiring rights, etc.).
>They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors?
If this were true then wouldn't the cuts be limited to the podcasting and audiobook arms of the company i.e. the source of the overstaffing? The announcement however states the cuts are across the entire company - "To align Spotify with our future goals and ensure we are right-sized for the challenges ahead, I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company."
I'm not saying businesses shouldn't make bets or innovate, but in my experience hiring more people to do those things has a point of diminishing returns, and that point is much lower than most people think. From what I've experienced, more people tend to slow innovation, not accelerate it.
And while Spotify may not have hired for the sake of hiring, my comment was more targeted to the general behavior of tech startups during the ZIRP years, where I've personally experienced companies just hiring to show they they're growing, even when they have very little work for those extra personnel to do. It's not often intentional, but is rather the result of poor discipline or lack of forethought.
Maybe it’s just me, but as a CEO if you misjudge enough to have to fire a double-digit percentage of your staff shouldn’t you face some consequences, like demotion or losing your job yourself? Daniel only owns 7.5% so it’s not like he’s a majority that can push anything through.
If Spotify had a brain in their head they would’ve known that Amazon’s offering was desperation against losing so badly to the main big baddie, not a genuinely good product. The Amazon music player is a joke and the service sucks at integrating with other services and products.
>Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive
That's a reductionist way of looking at it, but an alternative way would have been what Daniel said on that letter; They were "more productive and less efficient and they needed to be both".
From my ivory tower I do see some things that could have been done differently, such as adding only one new offering (maybe just podcasting), or rely more in contractors than employees and set the temporary expectation of the roles up front.
Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
How does innovation help them make more money? In the case of higher quality, they can charge more. There are premium services such as TIDAL doing that.
And if they charge more for the relative few people who want it, the record label still gets 70% of the revenue. They have to do something that is not dependent on music licensing.
My point still stands. They chose the path of trying to get market share from incumbents in the podcast and audiobook market rather than trying to innovate in their core music business and that has cost them in multiple ways.
I don't even know what the incumbents are. I had never listened to a podcast before they came to Spotify. So I can easily imagine there was a big untapped market of getting people to spend more time with podcasts, which I assume is much cheaper for Spotify than music licensing. So more customers and less royalties -- I can see a potential in that.
Audible for audiobooks is the most obvious there. That's an interesting point about podcasts, I naively assumed most people were familiar with them long before Spotify offered them. I have been using PocketCasts for many years but iTunes has also carried podcasts for a long time.
I agree in theory but practically this is a non-starter as the big 3 record companies are also investors in the company. Even if they weren't however the downside risks of the big 3 not agreeing to renegotiate licensing in the future would be catastrophic to Spotify. This is where I think Tidal got it right both in terms of a business model and something that was good for artists. It's a shame what became of Tidal.
Even if they did have a non negligible interest in Spotify, that is not the reason it is a non starter. It is a nonstarter because everyone wants to listen to music owned by the big 3 record companies.
Insufficient people are going to be interested in paying for a music streaming service without Michael Jackson, Sinatra, and a whole bunch of other big names and old songs that span decades. And people want to listen to music on demand, and repetitively. People are not going to be signing up for 1 month at a time like video streaming businesses, because people do not consume music the same way as video.
>"The big 3 record companies have negligible investments in Spotify":
This was not always the case however. The big 3 historically had interest at over 6% and they took money off the table only recently. [1]
>"Even if they did have a non negligible interest in Spotify, that is not the reason it is a non starter. It is a nonstarter because everyone wants to listen to music owned by the big 3 record companies."
Yes we are saying the exact same. I clearly stated that losing that licensing would be catastrophic.
The people who made the decision could bear the brunt of the failed "bet". But I'm willing to wager that the CEO's year-end bonus isn't going to change radically in light of this.
What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice? Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should.
For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers and the cost cutting via offshoring/remote employee replacement / no backfill is probably just getting started.
> I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers...
Basically, the article was talking about how being a doctor or pharmacist used to be a very respected profession, and most doctors/pharmacists didn't previously see the need to unionize. With all the consolidation that's gone on in medicine over the past couple decades, though (the article talks about how many of them used to be partners in small doctor groups, that is increasingly rare these days), they now realize they're wage slaves just like the rest of us, and their management has been treating them like interchangeable widgets to squeeze the most productivity out of.
If doctors are unionizing, maybe software developers should rethink their historical aversion to the idea.
Quite a stretch from "This company hired too many people and ended up having to lay off some" and "Hmm, maybe we're not as irreplaceable as we like to think" to "Let's all make ourselves less attractive to our employers by threatening to gang up on them."
But I guess unionization is the universal solvent for every HR problem around here.
If Human Resources are just replaceable resources, you don't care about them outside of what they can do for you. If a company is consistently failing to recognize their employees as people who deserve dignity, maybe a collective group is necessary to ensure they start to. This can be government based or be a private union, but companies don't usually make changes beneficial to employees without some kind of outside pressure.
How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.
If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage
Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1 billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900 million goes into core business interests. You form a union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own.
What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year? Replacing you is a core business interest now, and so is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R&D budget will be adjusted accordingly.
If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.
> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.
This is really irrespective of union membership. Sometimes people have this odd view of unions as "Now you're basically consigning yourself to 'lowest common denominator' employee", but that need not be the case. There are many unions that have vastly different pay scales and include "stars" (think actors' unions, sports players' unions, etc.) Even Tom Cruise joined the negotiations as a SAG member, and my guess is he's got plenty of leverage all by himself: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/tom-cruise-repo...
One thing the Hollywood people have in common with each other, but not with us, is that they move from one employer to the next frequently as a matter of course. Those employers explicitly do NOT want to carry them on their books when they don't have specific jobs for them to perform.
Unionization makes a lot more sense in those cases. If I need a ship unloaded, I call up some dockworkers. If I need some heavy boxes moved, I call up some Teamsters. If I need someone to look good on a screen, I call up Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence. If I need someone to feed the actors, I call the craft union. Etc. Like the old joke about hookers, I don't pay these people to come to work, I pay them to go away.
None of that is comparable to what I do, or (probably) to what you do. Your employer can only become less competitive if you join a separate outside organization that acts as a middleman for your labor. That's not the case in other industries.
That's certainly not the case with all unions like that, e.g. sport players' unions, where a player works for a team for a couple of years, then may go to another team, or (an area where I'm familiar) AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, where many union members are employed by the same dance or opera company for years, sometimes their entire career.
> demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own
The union oughtn't seek "ridiculous" accommodations then. It should seek at least reasonable ones, and possible aspirational ones, and negotiate it out from there. The problem we're seeing now is that even demands that most would find reasonable are cast as ridiculous by management. And if a union has trouble getting employers to listen, there's no hope that someone on their own can.
I've personally lost faith that a typical employer is capable of recognizing the value of an individual employee. So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business (Twitter's being a good example). So my own value isn't as strong of a bargaining chip.
It doesn't matter, if my employer would treat me as interchangeable anyway.
And even interchangeable employees deserve reasonable accommodations. I do think a union can highlight those needs more effectively than individuals (especially for interchangeable ones, to your point).
Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.
Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.
> it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.
That's a bad take. I can understand reasons for not wanting to join a union, but that's a pretty ridiculous assessment of what goes on.
The thing is, all of us like to believe we're special snowflakes and uniquely valuable. What many are realizing is that some of the only real power most of have is if we act collectively. It's not just "a middle man doing the negotiation for you", it's union members acting together, and organizing that way, that gives unions any power at all.
Just look at the recent Hollywood strikes - the only reason they got anywhere is the strong power of their unions (e.g. union members aren't allowed to work for any struck employer, worldwide, while a strike is ongoing). And actors and writers really do have special snowflakes, the big stars that make millions per film, and they're all union members, too.
Don’t forget all the “oh yeah I’m not allowed to fix that, that’s a CSS bug and I’m a JS Developer. You’ll need to bring in a CSS development team to look at that one”.
You understand that that only happens in unions when the union assents to those divisions, right? You understand that you get to vote about whether your union operates that way?
You understand you’ve removed all personal agency from the worker? They must now do what the thousands of others have decided is best for their job security, not what that individual actually wants to do. My gf used to be a split artist/technical person at her job, she loved it. It got unionized, and now: “Sorry bub, union says you aren’t allowed to make art any more. Keep your head down and script your scripts, we’re getting a real artist for the other parts. Oh yeah and it will be way more work to integrate with them than if you were doing the full stack, but we still want it done in the same amount of time so work late or whatever. Thanks!”
If that's an accurate representation of what happened, that sounds like a shitty union that's insufficiently understanding of the reality that efficiencies improve the bottom line in ways that workers can benefit from, too. Maybe, then, one should engage in that dreaded politics and make it better--because on the flip side, "personal agency" for a worker is just as likely to be "RTO and work late and no raises this year".
Only outliers ever win by atomization--and as somebody with a track record of being an outlier and operating successfully in atomized environments, I'd certainly rather not have my entire technical career be a high-wire act because companies can get away with it!
I do not know what RTO is, but her union is certainly shitty - and still doesn't give raises. And your advice of "in addition to taking on the job of training these artists, and doing extra work to integrate with their sub-par assets, you should take on the job of a politician too, then you'd see how great unions are!" doesn't really gel. Some people want to just have a conversation with their boss about what work they want, not take up three new jobs they don't want because "The Guild" gave them a shitty contract.
I'm just trying to understand why on earth you wrote "gang up" here.
The corporation has an HR department. Usually, this consists of more than one person.
The corporation has a hell of a lot more money, legal resources, (money is speech, my friend) and so on than you do.
Why isn't it obvious... the most natural thing in the world... That you would also want more than just you on your side?
This is like saying "why did you join an army instead of just fighting the bad guys single-handed?"
I must be missing something here, because you said this and everybody just went along with it like "oh yeah why would we do that? when this seems like asking "Why did you start a company with your friend to gang up on that new project you guys were talking about instead of just doing it yourself?"
Totally, completely confused.
As usual, the anti-union argument on HN is "The rest of you shouldn't put up lion defenses to protect you because I'm strong enough to fight off a lion and the fences would just get in my way".
Hopefully for you, your luck holds, and you never get ill/weak/sick/unable to fight lions. Like everyone else does eventually.
(Shrug) The site is run by a VC fund, and is intentionally (but increasingly ineffectively) geared towards an audience of people interested in, or actively working on, startup companies. Is this really the best place to sell the whole "dark Satanic mills" schtick?
> I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources
I think that's just a normal process of growing older. Also: yes, of course you are a resource to your employer. An annoying one (stell or laptops don't usually talk back and has demands). I also don't think there's anything wrong with companies behaving this way. By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals, nothing more. Of course, ideally your interests and the companies' align beyond that narrow scope; e.g. you're both interested in you becoming an expert in X, or in solving problems in area Y. But it really comes down to you being a resource for the company to produce stuff. Thinking back I realized that my elders and mentors and everyone worth listening to always tries to tell me that (e.g. by telling me "you're not your job", "look out for your WLB, noone else will", "a job is just a means to an end", "HR protects the company, not you", "always keep in mind that you're disposable"...). And yet it seems to be a lesion that everyone needs to rediscover for themselves eventually.
> By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals, nothing more
That's exactly the opposite of what 99% of the companies sell to candidates. You must have seen stuff like this is a great place work, join the family, etc. So maybe you mean the hidden intent was that but that's not the message being broadcasted.
Of course it is. That's why I'm pointing out that everyone learns the lesson eventually. If it were obvious from the outset it wouldn't require learning. If it was easy to discover, it would be learned immediately. But as it stands, it's a difficult thing to learn because it's not in the employer's interest: they definitely do want people who are are better aligned with the goals of the company outside of "work for payment". They want people that are passionate about the job and the company, because ceteris paribus those people will do a better job. And a way of getting there is trying to be a company worth working for. To have a good culture, great goals, or great colleagues. But taking a more cynical view, that's just a different form of payment, in the sense that 60k/year at a great place to work is probably worth more to you than 70k/year at a not-so-great job. But as soon as a company enters some hardship and needs to cut cost, it needs to take a sober and realistic look at its expenses. And personal costs tend to be a huge expense.
In fact they will try to terminate hires or reject candidates who express primary interest in work being "for payment". Every business looks for an edge, including exploitability checks (and checks against disrupting that line of thought for their other hires)
Well this is same for 99% products advertised on media. No one really take it at their face value. So why is employment advertising/selling is expected to be factual.
>Well this is same for 99% products advertised on media. No one really take it at their face value. So why is employment advertising/selling is expected to be factual.
Advertisers have somehow gotten away with lying to you for your whole life, so obviously it's your fault your employer did too!
People want to be seduced, it's why you said 99%, some percent of advertising works on all of us, and a major decision like "this is my job and how I spend most of my waking hours on this earth" is ripe for the employee to accept the seduction.
The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all.
As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see which people worked out, I don't have a problem.
I think that's the OP's point. They were not hired in good faith and I agree. This mass hiring/firing cycle is playing games with people's lives and, as always, the people at the top are unaffected by it, and in fact maybe rewarded for it. This isn't a game, this is people's lives. It's a little less horrible if it's a remote position but people upend their lives and move for jobs all the time.
I don't think there's any particular malice to the ups and downs - it's just the nature of work these days. Employers and employees have pretty much laid bare their view that the other is simply a cog in their machine. That being true, folks need to understand, plan for, and not be particularly surprised when these ups and downs happen. That means having a runway for lean times, and knowing your worth, how to communicate it, and being flexible when things go pear-shaped. People do move for jobs all the time, yes, but I hope that part of the planning for that involves asking the question - "what happens if this job evaporates?"
I agree. The employees got a lot out of the trade. Money, experience, connections. In addition, anyone participating in the tech economy should be aware of the boom/bust cycles that have plagued its history. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that a tech company had a large round of layoffs. The employees should have been aware of the risks when they signed on.
It's not just that, most of us are knowledge workers, think about how many hours off the clock you spent trying to solve some business problem. Why aren't you enjoying your kid's soccer game and instead thinking about that problem at work? To make your upcoming work day easier, or is it because you're spending many many more hours on the clock actually, working for your employer?
When employers wanted your body, it was a lot easier to have separation between work and home life, but now that employers want your mind, that separation is incredibly illdefined for most of us I think. I used to give that time freely but now I wonder what's the point.
This is very true. I spend a lot of time thinking about work problems. On the one hand it does help me in some ways because those problems are there whether I like it or not and I don't seem to have the control to stop thinking about them. So it does help that sometimes I'll settle on a vague solution in my head before I fall asleep at night, but of course it would be better not to have to do this at all.
I have at times had idle daydreams about doing a job that ends at the end of the work-day and you literally do not have to think about it again. I'd say those sort of jobs are not well paid these days.
One of the big things I saw when a company I worked at did layoffs was that more people left voluntarily than were fired, especially a lot of the people I saw as the best and brightest. Heck, it's why I left. To me, that's the biggest side affect of the layoffs. There's going to be a brain drain, not because you fired people, but because the morale and mental of the company has shifted.
Even if you THINK you are indispensable, even if you are 100% CORRECT that you ARE indispensable, plenty of gamblers exist in management, and will happily try and route around you. Maybe it doesn't work out every time, but it works out often enough to encourage companies to keep doing it.
It's so much easier to fire one person than the entire department. It's really hard for your manager to replace you when your coworkers say "naw we aren't doing their work without being paid their salary". And guess what? If you're a cunt, unions can, you know, not strike! They can 100% stand by as someone gets fucked over. Ask any member of a teachers union.
Companies don't jettison entire profitable divisions of the company to kill Unions in the crib (walmart) because they DON'T get the workers a larger slice of the pie lol. Companies don't play you anti-union propaganda on your training day because unions mean they pay less for talented workers lol. If unions truly reduced the price of real talent, companies would start unions themselves!
Be careful though, my father in law has told stories about people who made themselves irreplaceable by being the only person who can fix a machine because they allegedly fixed it in a way that breaks often enough that they can be the hero. A stain like that on your resume means your burned trust for potentially short term gains and may find trust is not given as easily as a result.
Actually doesn't matter if you do or if you don't, since it can't be proven. What matters is whether or not somebody accuses you of "fixing it in a way that it breaks".
In this case it was apparently proven enough that the place wanted to fire the person, the union said "you can't fire him but you can escort him out and tell him never to come back" so being accused is just the tripwire that brings the rocks down. Don't pile rocks up there in the first place and there aren't rocks to fall!
Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.
Did they retrench the people who made that decision?
Did they retrench the management who approved that contract?
Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching, but they still gave Joe the bag.
They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June. I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver financially. See:
A "fraction" of 20 million is still a lot of salary runway though. They were paid out on 2.5 years worth of that 20 million dollar deal. Even if their deal's earn out was only million dollars a year for 20 years it would be 2.5 million. Of course no earn out period is that long so it's likely they were paid out much more than that.
Under What metric do you apply that? What goals did they have for his program?
My understanding was the purpose of buying Joe Rogan was 2 fold, one of course is to bring in new users, but that was not the only goal (maybe not even the primary goal) the other goal was to get more of their current users to have more listen time on podcasts and less on Music, they pay far far far far less for podcasts (in many cases nothing) than they do for Music.
If they were able to shift the total listen time it could have more than paid for Rogan even with out new subscribers
The contract is up for renewal very soon so if they drop him we know he did not meet their objectives. Somehow I bet they renew
> Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.
The fact that they signed Joe for that amount, and continued to air everything throughout all the controversies, throughout all the COVID years, and through some artist departures over him, signals that he has more than recouped that investment for them.
Unless you are pretty high up at Spotify, you have literally no idea how much Joe Rogan has brought in for them. His podcast has been number one on the platform since it launched.
OTOH, the only reason I ever downloaded the Spotify app was because there was an episode of that show that I wanted to listen to, and it wasn't available anywhere else.
I suspect you didn't cancel your subscription because of Joe Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.
I think you cancelled your subscription so you could TELL people you cancelled your subscription as a result of Joe Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.
The second option is mildly insufferable, and a very transparent way to grift upvotes from other like minded contrarians addicted to trendy knee-jerk alarmism.
Me, pointing this out, might also be a bit insufferable, but I guess I just enjoy pointing these things out, because everyone who uses this site is so intelligent (on average).
It sucks seeing such intelligent people get caught up in these pits of cognitive dissonance.
No the second is the person was going to cancel anyway and Joe provides a rather weak and pathetic way to virtue signal to a very minor political in group they are "with them" while doing something they were going to do anyway
I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."
That is how it should be read, because this is how these companies operate. My company's CFO was talking about this as we pushed for profitability (since the market expectations changed) and rationale for investment was exactly like you said.
"It's our job to grow, profitably, so if we think we can generate more than what we spend, we can invest. But if its not working, we will cut it."
Unless you have a specific reason to believe it to be otherwise.
Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.
I agree it's not a fun situation, but I'm curious what you expect to have happened instead. What would the "competent management" version of the situation look like?
In a competent management culture plans of impending downsizing would have been communicated to hiring managers and they would have adjusted their open reqs. It is not uncommon to be told during the interview process that a role has been frozen. It's personally happened to me on 3 occasions.
I don’t know how much Spotify pays or if it pays above market. But I much rather have a high paying job - especially if it doesn’t require relocation and then get laid off than not have a high paying role at all.
A job is not a marriage, it’s more like a a semi serious dating relationship. I’ve had 9 jobs in 27 years and 7 since 2008.
A job is merely a method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
Once either me or the company decide it isn’t on our best interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break up and I change my relationship status to “open for work” and put myself back out there.
Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon.
Nine serious relationships in 27 years, but no marriage? I bet you live in one of those heathen countries where sex before marriage is legal, don't you? If you weren't allowed to have sex before marriage, would you still be unmarried after 27 years of relationships? Sweden, where Spotify is headquartered, is 8,600 kilometers from the San Francisco VC-backed tech scene, and is just as culturally removed from it as well.
>Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".... In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.
I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of continued employment.
Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are 8% we can only afford Y"
I get annoyed with comments like yours that reach for absolutisms to try and make a point. No, we wouldn't be stuck in the past "forever". We may just move more slowly into the future than you would prefer.
Given our historic inability to predict the long-term externalities of present-day technologies, I'd say a more cautious approach is warranted compared to the current YOLO strategy.
The only way the human race becomes stuck in the past forever is if it goes extinct.
Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work?
Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check.
The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground.
Any significant layoff that doesn't have a disproportionate number of people from those two groups thrown overboard is ass-covering. They are the ones who screwed up.
In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy. Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill management's agenda.
>
In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does.
They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of what actually happens in their firm.
Middle management controls that - by deciding on what kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person director (who should at least vaguely know what each of their reports is doing this year) is.
You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some people."
> Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.
Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees from the team (and keep others on their toes).
Until there are real consequences these companies will not change.
> All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'
In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly. They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a job that somehow helps making the company money.
As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the market and product (which as far as I can tell is not the case here), firing employees should result in lower revenues. After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees.
This leaves me with a bunch of questions when I read things like this:
1) If the company can get by without these people, what were they doing in the first place?
2) If these people did not contribute to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) what was the point in hiring them?
3) If they did contribute, why let them go?
I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every single update has made the windows version worse at least. They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose benefit I don't know.
Obviously that is just the app side part of the whole org.
firing employees should result in lower revenues
Why? They built the product and live off the subscription fees. The service is running, people are paying. They don't need to build anything new to keep getting paid. Does a landlord need to keep paying for the construction crew after his building is finished?
There is still no crystal ball. You take the opportunities as they are presented, especially given that your competitors are doing the same. Where exactly was your commentary on Spotify's business when times were better, urging them to leave more people without jobs?
You can't have your cake and eat it too. There are plenty of other lower risk companies that have way lower chances of layoffs, but they don't pay as well. Working at a company that tasks risks and has a high rate of return also has a higher chance of making the wrong bet and needing to cut you. If you want a perfectly stable job go work in the government: you'll be practically unfirable.
- someone who was layed off from a FAANG corp. I was not done a disservice, I knew what I was getting into.
If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap.
I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future.
I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.
A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot be replaced without the business collapsing.
No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.
It’s hard to know what’s “responsible” when you’re operating a business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years without making money.
Hot take: it's a life skill to look at a company beyond the salary they offer you and get at least a basic sense of whether they are over staffed, well managed, offering a valuable service, and not in a dying industry - or at least be sure your role there is doing something high value to the critical service provided. Too many employees IME are just too comfortable with ignorance about their employer outside of their team and the other teams they work with directly.
? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing, its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a architectural mess).
Once more from the the top - to be let go in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.
> "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'...
But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-awareness of the world.
They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in people is some service to employees.
Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and many tech companies are really in the drift racing business, not in "commute rationally" business.
The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.
> In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place.
These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have a well known company on their resume, and are being let go during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit. What’s not to like?
If they knew that was what they were getting into, great.
On the other hand, if I hire a guy, he quits a secure job, he moves his family all the way across the country, and then 3 months later I fire him because I changed my mind about what I need? That guy is absolutely not going to thank me.
Yes, it depends on those factors. One other factor is what would have happened at his old job. I have a friend who went from one big tech company to another was then laid off recently. There's a good chance the result would have been the same either way, since the first company cut a lot as well.
One factor that keeps people at a company is the knowledge that, all things equal, last hired is first fired. It's not hard and fast, but you tend to have fewer allies at a company you just joined, making you more susceptible. When someone decides to leave one company and join a new one, they know that they're giving up this advantage.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.
Sure. There are all kinds of things that could be done to increase their consideration of moves like this and simultaneously benefit the people affected.
E.g., rather than considering only percentages of unemployed/employed to set rates for Unemployment Insurance, they could also add a "capriciousness" factor for events like this. Or, they could also require funds be provided for continuing education for those laid off. Heck, they could also just make a basic adjustment for the inherent bias in the Unemployment Insurance rates against small biz, where a single layoff/firing has a huge negative effect on your rates, more than firing 100 people for a medium-sized company.
But of course, for the "libertarians", this is evil regulation.
Your comment was pretty good, but didn't need the weird potshot at libertarians at the end.
What your comment touched on though is how the companies already are "punished" in a way for it because it affects their unemployment insurance rates. That was established as a way to balance the needs of the company (unintended bad consequences happen to unemployment rates when you tie the hands of firing) with the needs of the people who are affected. Arguing that the balance is off seems like a much different argument than GP though.
In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.