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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

#151

Post by Spivak »

spamizbad wrote: post #141
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…

Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep…

I think Dropbox is, like a lot of companies right now, is struggling to find new revenue with new features added to their existing product lines and is divesting themselves of new work on mature products to focus on new markets. AI just being something exciting in general that has everyone hyped.

I would have thought HN would celebrate a company that's publicly decided to stop fucking with the Wi-Fi.

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

#153

Post by dmix »

jjoonathan wrote: post #131
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…

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.

> Laying off people working on unsexy features

You guys are reading way, way too much into this press release.

People here are acting they've abandoned their existing product and is betting the company on AI, when it could just as easily just be what every single major company has said recently ("we're exploring AI").

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

#154

Post by jjoonathan »

grepfru_it wrote: post #149
jjoonathan wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What generates 80% of the revenue usually comes from 20% of the customers. What I’m trying to say is that those 20% DGAF about Dropbox photos.

This isn't about photos, it's about walking before you run and Dropbox failing to walk, firing their physical therapist, and talking up their big plans to hire a running coach.

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

#155

Post by palata »

hbn wrote: post #140
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…

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 inf…

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

Well Blockchain promised a lot. I remember that in the beginning, I found it interesting and thought it would be the next big thing. Now we have had more than a decade to realize that Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies (and it's not clear if we want cryptocurrencies).

So yeah, I could totally imagine that many promises of LLMs today are similar to those of Blockchain back then. Let's see how it evolves in the next few years, I guess.

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

#156

Post by Spivak »

palata wrote: post #150
rybosworld wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"tried to pivot", that's very different. Maybe it should read "announcing that they would try to pivot", but you get the idea. I have seen many companies announce that they would look into blockchain and NFT. Which is exactly what Dropbox is saying now for AI.

Which shouldn't surprise anyone in an economic environment where the money fountain dried up. Every company is desperately chasing new revenue sources over growing their existing ones right now.

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

#157

Post by bayindirh »

mieubrisse wrote: post #132
soared wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

Even being able to train a personal model on the user’s handwriting to digitize the notes will be a big hit. I would love to have that. I’m this close to train my own Tessaract instance to do it.

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

#159

Post by notatoad »

xwdv wrote: post #113
meling wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree… I wish I could buy Dropbox’s minimal feature set: syncing files. And that they’d improve that feature rather than adding features I don’t use or want.

What if I told you you could replicate all of that with proven battle tested technology… for free.

what if i told you i know that, but i don't want to do the work or ongoing management of that myself. i just want somebody else to do it for me. for money that i pay them, and not for money that some VC or data broker pays them

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

#160

Post by mortenjorck »

JediWing wrote: post #59

Condolences to the affected Dropboxers. I think the silver lining for all of you is that amidst this turmoil, you're well positioned just by having Dropbox on your resume. As someone laid off 2 weeks ago from a company with much less notoriety, I cringe at the idea of having to now compete with 500 of you. Good luck out there.

Same here. I hate that my thinking has become so zero-sum, but after four months of this, the first thing I think now when I see another high-profile layoff is “great, more name-recognition resumes to consign mine to the trash.”
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