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Spotify doesn't use the Spotify model (2020) (jeremiahlee.com)
86 points by ggeorgovassilis on July 10, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



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.


> 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”.

Reminds me of a story about some person using LISP for a ecommerce website and being quite about it because lisp allowed them to develop much faster than their competitors. Lemme try to track it down.

Edit: beating the average http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html


I do think that article sparked the joke, and it might have been a HN only joke.


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!


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


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).


Spotify was amazing back in the day. I could start to listen to my music faster by using Spotify than by using Winamp (which used local files, albeit using an old hdd). Also at that time Spotify was using p2p which made it even more impressive. Those where the days.


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.


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.




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