Why would it be a satire? I've worked on much harder problems than moving anywhere between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices, and we were 11 people, responsible for dozens of terabytes per workday.
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
Don't you think there is big difference between moving files to some users' devices vs moving files to literally half a billion users with almost 100% uptime? Not considering problems associated with the scale of Spotify and instantly dismissing the task of managing that as something trivial (or at least easier than your work) makes you sound arrogant.
Because it's like a cliché example of an engineer with the view that some relatively successful real-world product—that they have no real insight into—is far easier to implement than the people who _are_ familiar with it have. You see this literally all the time, to the extent that it's become a meme, and it's hard to believe anybody would make that argument seriously.
Spotify might have too many engineers on-staff; reducing the service to "moving between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices" is a flatly uncurious approach to understanding what engineering challenges they might face or if that's really the case. It's a service that _adds_ 100k songs a day, for goodness sake.
I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify moves a petabyte of images a day, I can't even guess the amount of data from their songs and videos. But obviously just moving data isn't what requires a lot of employees.
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
And apparently Spotify agrees.