SoundCloud announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff – 173 people – last week. We suggested on Friday that other streaming services and music companies would be keen to snap up some of those employees.
Now there’s a spreadsheet for that. Titled ‘Hire a SoundClouder’, the public Google Sheet offers a listing of staff looking for new jobs after being laid off, from engineers and data scientists to audience research managers and product designers.
It also has the side-effect of showing the scale of the layoffs, and some of the areas that were hit most by the decision.
The publication of the spreadsheet came as the details of why SoundCloud ended up in this situation continued to be picked over.
Much attention is being attracted to a long thread on Hacker News, which is a mixture of SoundCloud users complaining about how the service evolved, and former (and current) employees weighing in with their own thoughts on what went wrong.
There are some no-nonsense verdicts. “Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetisation plan,” says one poster claiming to be a former director of an engineering department.
“The entire payments and subscriptions infrastructure is now unmanned,” wrote another, claiming to have recently quit SoundCloud’s payments team.
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