It’s not unwarranted IMHO: you’re paying a premium for what is assumed to be top-tier talent and engineering rigor. It is reasonable to expect a higher return for that investment.
Spotify has always included ads on podcasts because podcasts had already normalized that before Spotify took interest in them. As a result, they pivoted the value prop of Premium from “no ads” to “no ads on your _music_”.
Perhaps a better way to word that is “30-40% of page loads in last {n} {unitOfTime}”. This also jumped out at me as wildly inaccurate to the point where I felt compelled to be this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/ rather than enjoying the rest of the article ;)
This was before we grew to 200+, but the best snapshot was:
- <80 person team (total); ~60% engineers
- 0 product managers: design and engineering are equally empowered to make the site nice within general business/product definitions defined by GM who would constantly get excited about the work you showed her, making you feel good about yourself and your work
- 0 project managers: business understands that there is no magic formula for delivering products that haven't been built yet and so long as we try our best to hit dates and cut scope as needed, it's on us to track our progress and determine priorities
- gm, cto, and head of hr all supportive of growing team and individual members in a non-political way
- politically-driven employees (typically a head of sales or marketing) shut down and churn out quickly
- engineers talk directly with customer service
- engineers perform rounds helping out in support forums
- domain specialists, but no fences. i might be a web engineer, but if there's a sql query i feel compelled to optimize, nobody is going to stop me.
- company regularly interacts with, and hosts local events for, an engaged user base. engineers actually end up having in person conversations with our users, gathering honest feedback for improvements while simultaneously being told how great the product they contribute to is overall
- relaxed hours ("you're an adult; we trust you to get your work done")
- when dining out or getting drinks, even paying by cash a large group is able to come up with the right amount of money, with no one person needing to chip in more than necessary
- anyone in the company can deploy the site with a single chat room command
Yes. I seldom used it and in the wake of the CA scandal, deleted all my posts, photos, and then finally the account itself.
I don’t miss it and am quite happy that I got around to it and that a one-time cost of 45 minutes of my time has likely paid itself back twice over by now.