I'd say that they're "cooking the books" as in: making it look like they're in better shape than they are by cutting costs, but causing irreparable damage to themselves that will manifest in the long run.
I've survived 3 layoffs at Spotify last year alone. Once I started working there It didn't take long to be proud and feel happy about it. Now, although people still find it cool when I tell them and I still do the same job (no workload increase), I know it is just like any other greedy corpo and I feel compelled to care less and less.
I just survived layoffs this week and I now give zero fucks about the company. People are scared and angry now.. It's really not a good way to get the most out of your employees
Can I ask you why Spotify has this braindead handling of downloaded songs where it still tries to fucking stream them? This goes on my nerves so incredibly much that I'm thinking about quitting my subscription because it's so fucking stupid.
I've downloaded it, Spotify. No you don't have to fucking stream it when I have a bad network connection so the fucking downloaded song constantly cuts off or doesn't even load!!!
On handling downloaded songs and offline playback, my personal (but informed) opinion is that there is:
some licensing reasons for it to be more complicated than strictly necessary
lack of interest of supporting an app feature that doesn't drive numbers immediately up (sure, I agree that a better offline experience would improve the product and help user retention, but it isn't easy/quick to measure its impact), and
lack of ownership with many teams having to support a functionality (keep the app working offline) within all the various app features they own.
So, just as a dog with multiple owners, it goes neglected and starves.
The licensing part I did think about, but the songs are in a proprietary format anyway (I think?) and any keys or whatever can be refreshed without streaming the entire song over a slow connection.
Yep. Recently saw it at my employer. It happened fast too. One day there was a lot of chatter on Slack channels and the day after the general noise was almost nothing that was not required.