Spotify CEO is shocked by negative impact of recent layoffs

4 months to get back on track organizationally after laying off 17% of the work force? That seems pretty realistic actually.

Was he shocked? Was he totally astonished? Was he completely flabbergasted?

Oh this is about the impact on the company. For some reason I clicked on this thinking it would be about the impact on the people layed off and was looking for another story where The Onion writes itself.

The results were lower than expected. So he needs to blame something. Taking a recent thing that is transient and could plausibly be related is a great choice - in terms of the narrative to investors. Not sure there is particularly informative here as to the actual impacts on the organization...

Discussion two day ago [0] (35 points, 25 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133235

At this point there’s a ton of research on how large and long-lasting the negative impacts of layoffs are on company effectiveness (especially in the area of innovation). Eg: https://hbr.org/podcast/2023/12/the-hidden-costs-of-layoffs

It’s not surprising that CEOs are the last to learn of these impacts because they tend amongst the people at any big company who least understands how it works in my experience. And, like you can see here, once your CEO becomes just an agent of the short-term stock price you are doomed at doing anything other than enshittifying your product until the company eventually dies.

And yet he is still the CEO. Funny how that goes.