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Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#131

Post by jjoonathan »

Hamcha wrote: post #93
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, bu…

Yes, but Dropbox Photos still:

    Lacks an exclusion mechanism, so icons leak in
    Includes STL files as photos and fails to display them
    Sometimes misses photos for no obvious reason
It's difficult for auto-tagging to add value in the presence of unrelated dealbreakers. Laying off people working on unsexy features does not inspire confidence that they have these priorities in order.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#132

Post by mieubrisse »

soared wrote: post #90
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.

There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'"

In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox:

- Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?"

- Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured meeting notes: "How much revenue did we make, from last quarter's notes?"

- Automatically fine-tune a model using your own writing so that ChatGPT talks more like you

- Apply an AI to recognize security threats in your files("Hey you might have stored a secret in plaintext in file Y. Do you want to encrypt it?")

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#133

Post by quijoteuniv »

soared wrote: post #18

> In an ideal world, we’d simply shift people from one team to another. And we’ve done that wherever possible. However, our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development. We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more. Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatg…

Everyone is cutting off these days, however i have not seen any saying, we are cutting directord bones and cutting theier salaries. Any trie leader will do that

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#134

Post by tinyhouse »

seanalltogether wrote: post #111
cushychicken wrote: post #36

500/0.16 = 3125 That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.

And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.

Dropbox's revenue is about $2.5B/year. They want to grow too. You need a lot of people to support that. Sales, marketing, customer success, etc. It's not just the engineers who build and maintain the product. You cannot ignore revenue and growth potential when comparing head counts between companies.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#135

Post by scrollaway »

seanalltogether wrote: post #111
cushychicken wrote: post #36

500/0.16 = 3125 That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.

And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.

The HN rule of headcount: if you have to ask, it’s because it’s Sales.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#136

Post by soneca »

rybosworld wrote: post #110
Hamcha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, bu…

> we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT I really don't think there are many existing companies that "pivoted" to blockchain and NFT. Certainly not a majority.

In case of NFT, I would round the number of companies that tried to pivot to it to zero.

Blockchain there were a lot of hiring and experiments for sure. Actually to try to pivot a company to it after these experiments, very little.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#137

Post by gavinhoward »

citruscomputing wrote: post #117
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off to lobste.rs then? I do agree with this observation of yours, fwiw.

Have tried a few times, it's not my kind of place. Would appreciate other suggestions, though.

I'm trying to spin up the lobsters software on a forum. It's meant to be a pseudo comment section for my blog, as well as a place to discuss anything that is intellectually stimulating.

If I succeed, do you want an invite?

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#138

Post by afavour »

xwdv wrote: post #129
afavour wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It’s a testament to the Unix philosophy that after all these years, Dropbox has grown and morphed into something that people no longer enjoy, and yet if you simply followed that advice years ago, you would still have a system today that works exactly as you intended, and in 50 years when Dropbox is long gone as a company, that system will still be working as built, and even after you die, that system can be inherited…

I wish I shared your optimism that any kind of server I set up in 2007 would still be fully functional today without any kind of maintenance, let alone that it will still be around to serve my grandchildren.

An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.

Re: Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff

#140

Post by hbn »

Hamcha wrote: post #93
rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

I can understand some of the skepticism, we JUST finished having every company try to pivot to blockchain and NFT and now it seems history is repeating with AI. However, I also totally see the point, as an example: the biggest reason I like Google Photos is the automagic tagging on the pictures, I can just write any random description and it usually finds them across 10+ years of photos I have stored (not perfect, bu…

Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it.

LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing.

I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some information that was on page 9 of a document from 2017, you just ask the model and it pulls the info and links you to the source doc.

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