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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

#281

Post by echelon »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #275
birdyrooster wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously it’s embarrassing how leadership in many companies has ZERO vision for AI right now. Too focused on buying houses, drinking wine and riding horses. I think these people need to retire already.

Snark aside, this is something that's always kind of baffled me. If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach. Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without…

Because no matter how many experiences you accrue or how much leisure you have, you're already dead on the geologic time scale.

With that perspective, the best thing to do is keep on pushing. Despite whatever pain and headache that might bring, it's one act our short lives can use to push against entropy and the dying universe.

If I ever come into such wealth, I'll spend it all solving as much as I can through my direct involvement.

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

#283

Post by gizmo »

tapoxi wrote: post #118
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.

I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/ , it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).

Syncthing is not end-to-end encrypted. It's peer to peer TLS encrypted.

With end-to-end encryption you can transfer data with an untrusted server as intermediary, which syncthing doesn't support.

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

#284

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

qsort wrote: post #204
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about. In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in par…

> There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.

The AI doesn't need to be the end-all-be-all of defining permissions. But it's not hard to imagine a couple of areas where AI could help:

1. Letting users enter desired permissions setting in a natural language, and then the AI recommending checkbox settings, and, importantly, explaining these settings.

2. Useful as a monitoring/alerting system for DLP. Most DLP systems already use some sort of machine learning for identifying sensitive docs.

3. Easily running "test scenarios" to show to admins who can and can't get access to particular docs.

There is a huge chasm between "AI owns all my permission settings" to "AI can make it easier and more robust for me to understand what my permission settings should be."

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

#285

Post by RoyGBivCap »

rco8786 wrote: post #54
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…

> 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…

>It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.

They were also non-E2E encrypted for like most or all of those years. It was the main reason I didn't use it for personal backups. I use SpiderOakONE (paid) instead, which is.

So yeah, they have a fuckton of other people's documents. 100% chance. Even I admittedly use one of their free documents as a simple todo list at work. That's probably really nice data for them too.

If they aren't doing some ML based on that data, somebody at the company is not doing their job.

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

#286

Post by cubancigar11 »

tapoxi wrote: post #118
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.

I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/ , it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).

I prefer seafile because it actually scans immediately and has a functioning android client.

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

#287

Post by JustSomeNobody »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #133
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

They're too busy downvoting your comment to discuss ways to cut back themselves.

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

#288

Post by silksowed »

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…

add in an equivalent to https://www.glean.com/ to enterprise dropbox and you have a new AI product that actually solves large org problems

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

#289

Post by varenc »

AJRF wrote: post #41

"These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our…

I believe nowadays most of Dropbox's revenue comes from their Dropbox Business customers. Or at the very least they see growth in business customer revenue as much more promising. (from my glancing over their SEC filings)

So while as a personal user you might not see much potential for AI (though I do), I'm sure there's huge opportunities for their business customers to use AI tooling on the many corporate documents and files they already stored on Dropbox. Also if you look at DBX's current offerings you can see they've branched out from just storing files. Signatures (HelloSend), "DocSend", password vaults, etc. Focusing on the potential for AI to solve problems for their business customers makes sense to me.

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

#290

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

avnfish wrote: post #25

I recently migrated from Dropbox to Google One. I find Dropbox's personal pricing really baffling: you get 2 GB for free or have to move all the way up to 2 TB and pay £100 a year. 100GB for £16 via Google is a much more sensible offer.

This is exactly why I switched to Google One.

I needed about 20 GB of storage. Why the hell should I have to pay for 100 times that?

Since I switched, I've slowly grown to 30 GB, but I still have plenty of room before I need to go to the next tier and pay another $1/month.

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