3w ago

Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

arstechnica.com Sonos CEO behind disastrous app exits with $1.9 million severance

Frustrated users think Spence’s removal is “well deserved.”…

Spence will receive a cash severance of $1,875,000, per SEC filings. He will also get $7,500 per month and serve as a Sonos board advisor until June, and his unvested shares will vest.

If I was this bad at my job, I'd be shitcanned with no compensation. It's pretty cool how we reward failure at the highest levels.

71 comments

Golden parachute successfully deployed.
- $1.8M is pretty small as golden parachutes go. Was probably the smallest amount allowed under his employment contract which avoids a lawsuit.
  
  To paraphrase OP's body text, if I did a shitty job I wouldn't be receiving $1.9M checks in the mail.
  
  Absolutely this. I've never seen a CEO golden parachute anywhere near being under $2m before. To most large company CEOs $2m is pretty much nothing relative to their regular stock options.

i don’t know if any of you lot have experienced the sonos app firsthand, but let me tell you that it is worse than you could possibly imagine. it takes ages to open, has a million buttons, and pretty much all of them are useless. it has a play/pause bar on the bottom of the app that does not go away. if you want to change your speaker settings, that’s hidden away in a menu (within the app) called “system settings”. why would they call it that?
the app makes you type in the wifi password when pairing a new speaker, even if that speaker has the ethernet cable plugged in. the app also doesn’t support certain wifi passwords so i had to change my wifi password before connecting my speaker.
- 2015: There’s an app for that! 😮📱
  2025: There’s an app for that… 😞🔫
- The worst thing they've ever done is remove functionality from the desktop app and have it exclusively in their mobile app.
  I love the idea of Sonos. Being able to have whole house audio without having to run a shit load of cabling would be a dream come true, except they do it so badly it is often a nightmare.
- Holy shit, this is quite the list.
- Like I'm a programming dullard but they had to go out of their way to filter out allowable WiFi key characters? I don't see why they'd even bother...?
  
  maybe they were afraid of bobby tables
- As a Sonos user, yea - I hate the new app. The biggest annoyance is how long it takes to start up, because I don't have an IR TV remote I need to use the app to change the volume (or stand up and use the volume control on the side).
- I have an easier time using my Home Assistant dashboard to control my Sonos devices rather than the native app. Takes forever to load in Sonos but with HA, it’s near instant.
  
  same here. as soon as i got the speakers set up i closed the app, never to open it again. i would have done this anyway, since i like to have all my things in one place, but the app certainly didn’t do itself any favors here

Damn, I'm in the wrong business. Been making really bad decisions for free
- Obviously. You could be the next Phil Harrison. Failed with Atari, got picked up by MS to lead Xbox. Failed with Xbox One, got picked up by Google to lead Stadia. Failed with Stadia and is currently keeping a low profile because he probably understood that failing any higher than Google is going to be a long shot.
  
  He’ll probably show up at Ubisoft or EA, lol.
  Or maybe even back at Microsoft to lead their handheld launch.

The Peter Principle in practice. A Quibi exec is taking over for him, I shit you not.
- Quibi?! The streaming company whose business plan was so bad it lasted like 6 months. That sure inspires confidence.
  
  Said another way, the company that broke production just hired the guy who ran the backend of Pandora Radio for 10 years and not once did he make headlines for an outage.
- I feel like they couldn't make things much worse apart from just making the app say, "Lol, fuck you," every time you tried to do anything.
  It's so bad, I've mulled just trashing the one speaker I have that I didn't even pay for, just to move to something better.
  
  I just grabbed the old app from The Aurora store and told my speakers not to update their firmware.
- Quibi
  I'd forgot about that. Ha.

People like this clown really live in a reality of their own. Imagine being horrible at your job, just to be paid a fat lump of money
- If I got that payout, I'd be able to retire...
  
  Give that amount of money to anyone with the most basic of simple financial management and they wouldn’t have to work a day in their entire life while living a very decent life. Almost $2M at 5% growth, below the total historical performance of the stock market, is $100,000 per year for doing nothing except sitting on money. Any amount of that which is reinvested compounds exponentially.

I wish I could be such a PoS where I join a company, propose a massive investment into something, see it's failure and firing a bunch of staff, then bounce with a nice severance package to join a new company to repeat that over and over again.
- Honestly the biggest issue is the rinse repeat part. Anyone can fuck up. But they just get to do it all over again because they have no shame.
  Boards and executive suites are filled with people who repeatedly ruin companies and then just do it to the next one.
  
  people who repeatedly ruin companies
  You mean those bold leaders who have the rare ability to take risks* and make the tough decisions**?
  Risking their “number go up” fun money, not their actual lifestyle, or health, or home, or food supply, etc. Or just risking other people’s assets much of the time.
  ** The decisions that will hurt people they don’t care about and won’t have to deal with, in order to hopefully make their “number go up” score improve.

Just as a way to soothe the outrage about this POS of an app: A fair share of the problem can be minimised by using Home Assistant and Music Assistant to control the Sonos devices. This way you very rarely need to actually use the app anymore.
Which is good because it's indeed shit.
- Literally just started doing this last week. I did NOT expect it to work so much better than the name-brand app for such a "closed system" as Sonos.
  
  Sonos is the apple of speakers: great hardware, but overpriced and a walled garden.
- I haven't had any luck with Music Assistant and my Sonos speakers. :(
  I can add and select the speakers, select a track, everything seems to work right up to the point of actually playing music. It just stays paused and never switches to playing, no errors either.
  
  When they removed the ability to listen to my local music library from the app I started looking for alternatives. Seemingly perfectly timed for the app to shit itself.
  I found BubbleUPnP. It can cast to all of my Sonos and my Google assistant speaker with zero issues and can play from Plex, my phone's local library, and my NAS. Highly recommend. Three free version is usable but paid is only $7 and I no longer need the Sonos app.
  
  That very much sounds like a network problem.
  Are both hosts in the same subnet?
- I’ve had my Sonos sound bar controlled by HomeKit since the day I bought it and have never needed to fuck with their app.
  I guess I got lucky?
  
  Sadly you still need that POS to intially configure it and the occasional update.
- Are the speakers themselves good though?
  
  They sound decent. A bit overpriced honestly by the time you add in the sub and enough speakers to setup a nice 7.1 you can buy something less fidgety and save a lot of money.
  Their security is bad. They're vulnerable to people screwing with them. If you're on the network, you can ask their webservers to do whatever you want, there's no auth. Their networking protocol is kind of bad. They need a LOT of ports open to communicate with each other. Their discovery is iffy. If you put one of the speakers on ethernet, they'll mesh the rest of the speakers and use that one speaker to lower latency. but if that speaker reboots or updates, the rest of the speakers go nuts and dissapear for a while.
  They don't allow bluetooth playback. They don't always show up for casting from Plex. They keep forgetting my wife's apple ID. They don't allow you to use a custom name for the alexa integration. The mic on the beam is so hot, that other alexas on the same floor will always defer to it, it's very bad at hearing you over it's own sound.
- I’ll have to try Music Assistant - I use HA and the Spotify app

I had 7 Sonos speakers. 2 months after they updated their app I sold them all and replaced them with the Denon 150s. I was such a Sonos booster and loved their products. Now they are a dead company to me.
- Sonos basically failed their way out of me ever buying their shit. I bought a Wiim pro and am still using my Samsung soundbar from a decade ago. No complaints.

I am glad most of my devices couldn’t be upgraded to S2 anyway with the size of clusterfuck that turned out to be.
They freaking removed SMB/NFS playback. That’s like 90% of what I listen to.
- Haha, I'm also "lucky" to be stuck to S1.

I'm so confused by some of the stuff in this thread. I still use my sonos stuff and never even noticed the update beyond seeing that the UI changed a little at some point. I know people had some issues but I never stopped being able to do what I wanted with my beam, sub and a couple of satellite speakers in other rooms.
I use streaming services for music when i'm not using it for the TV too. I usually use the streaming apps themselves rather than the sonos app to do anything. I have set some custom EQ stuff with their app, but that's understandable.
I don't think they are anything special and they are very expensive things for what they do, but my problems are very few and far between. Every now and then my beam doesn't get commands from HDMI via my TV... and the TV is always the issue (it's old.) That's really it. I'm not in love with the stuff and when it's time to replace it i'll look at what else is out there, but I don't hate it either.
- I believe many folks were using the other features that go beyond streaming... E g. Setting up alarms, streaming music from their locally hosted servers, etc. I believe all that went away with the new app. I never noticed any issues personally, since I just steam/cast.
  
  Even then - my alarms never stopped working, even while I had no way to change them
- Right when S2 came out, If you needed to go in and screw with anything they would force you off of S1 into S2.
  Right when the app released it was pretty bad. They broke the integrations. Speakers were having a lot of trouble being added. My SL ones were just appear and disappear randomly for a bit. It took them like a month to sort it out.
  But 99% of my use cases are audio over ARC, and playing music in one kid's room every night. The arc never stopped working for me on my beam 2.
  When the sl-one dropped off I just used an echo for about a week. Plex was broken for two separate 1 weeks bands during which I also just used the echo.
  I think it didn't bother me all that much because I'm already presenting to home automation, and any of my cloud immigrations just explode every time a company farts.
  I'd love some speakers that allow streaming without having to be cloud-controlled. I'm afraid I'd have to make them myself.
- Same
  The main thing I noticed that the “advanced” stuff disappeared, I can’t debug what signal my Arc is receiving any more.
  On the other hand I’m not going to buy any more Sonos stuff either and if I find a valid replacement (Atmos, wireless, minimal app involvement) I’ll switch.
- Same, I've been happy with my two play 1s for over a decade. But my secret is not updating, and not using the app (neither phone nor windows), I use Home Assistant (Python) and Noson. My other secret is not adding more Sonos speakers, because I believe you need to use the official phone app for grouping or updates.

Failing upward ¯(ツ)_/¯

Sonos ought to be licensing their protocol as a standard for multiroom audio to compete with airplay. Seems obvious to license it to Denon, Yamaha, etc. I’m using Yamaha MusicCast but if I were buying today I’d standardize on either Airplay 2 or Spotify Connect instead. IMO Sonos is a dead man walking.
- Sonos actually uses AirPlay as well. Frankly, they lose when it comes to multiroom audio vs that interface, and they need to make their money off of selling speakers (compatible with AirPlay and other services). Their problem is they wanted to be a clearing house of users listening habits, where you’d need to use the app for them to track that (where you sign up / in with your services); that’s asinine, and they just need to be a speaker company.
  
  That’s so corporate. Everyone’s big idea boils down to being a service instead of a seller (because that’s theoretically more profitable), but it sucks.

Y'all have the business comprehension of a 6th grader. Lemmy thinks the CEO is the manager at their fast food job.
The CEO is hired, and fired, by the board of directors. Sometimes they're hired to do unpopular shit, and take the blame. Sometimes the board insists they do stupid shit, and take the blame if it doesn't work.
If you want to jump off that plane without negotiating a parachute? Go for it.
- I don't think anyone is blaming him for making the deal, they're just mad that the deal exists.

71 comments