121–130 of 1001 posts
I’m 22 and work on a 3-person team so it’s hard for me to imagine why a company would more than 4 or 5 total employees.
You're not wrong.
I've seen companies with less than 10 employees make around $9M ARR within the first 3 years, and some with around 50-100 employees that can't even reach 100K ARR.
The smaller your startup the more faster you can go, Dropbox's main issue is that they haven't implemented Founder Mode yet. I am willing to bet that that there are jobs in Dropbox that doesn't need to exist.
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Genuine question: what do people want from a CEO in this situation? What consequences do you want the CEO to face? A token reduction in pay? Being fired?
I ask this myself. What is the point of both doing layoffs, and then also firing the CEO? That next person will probably be worse, won't have the learnings of the layoffs, and would probably increase chances of layoffs happening again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpopular opinion, but I don't understand this type of comment. It sounds like people want executives to get some kind of punishment or pain as a consequence of laying people off. But what would that even look like? A fine? That would probably make no practical difference, and would discourage them from making changes that need to be made. Fire them? Then you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver se…
100% agree, but the opposite is what happens. Mass layoffs -- unless the company is actually tanking and on its last leg, which isn't the case with any of the tech companies who have been doing this recently -- cause the share price to rise. CEO pay, or at least bonuses, are often tied to the share price. So a CEO is rewarded instead.
So all this crap is just cargo-culting our current management paradigm, and/or execs cooperating to suppress wages and weaken labor, which had gotten a bit too uppity after Covid (that's one thing waves of layoffs like this do accomplish).
TIL that nobody knows what they're doing. Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need? What is management exactly doing during the time they went from 1 excess person to 500? Did they just hope the "macroeconomic headwinds" would become tailwinds? Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work, and maybe we should deal with that problem instead of…
It's also less labor intensive to focus on a few core areas, making smaller incremental improvements than doing that PLUS launching big ambitious greenfield projects.
Also, remember how people used to say "Startup X is a bad idea because could just clone you in 6 months"? Well, those ideas are now back on the menu for entrepreneurs because bigger tech firms are now running too lean for quixotic defensive plays like that.
If you look at its earnings they have appeared to plateau and there isn’t a major offering planned that will change this. I am reminded of Slack which has a similar history of rapid growth followed by a very competitive market and then significant slowing. Maybe Salesforce could acquire Dropbox and bundle it into their offerings or some other similar company?
Slack shot their own selves in the foot iirc. They were miles ahead of any competitor, employees loved it, and then they just started gouging all their whale customers in contract negotiations, to the point that they started looking elsewhere... If this isn't the full picture, let me know. I was at multiple companies trying to move away from Slack as the cost was not justifiable
In the end, Microsoft is IMHO once again abusing its stronghold on the market. Just the enterprise-compliance-integration stuff is more than enough to cause any medium or large company to move off of Slack or its competitors (e.g. Mattermost).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What consequences would you like CEOs to take on when they have to do layoffs?
Resignation. If they made a big enough blunder to need to lay off 20% of their staff, they're not capable of leading the company. Why do we think they'd do any better next time if there are no consequences to their poor leadership?
If you look at its earnings they have appeared to plateau and there isn’t a major offering planned that will change this. I am reminded of Slack which has a similar history of rapid growth followed by a very competitive market and then significant slowing. Maybe Salesforce could acquire Dropbox and bundle it into their offerings or some other similar company?
Slack shot their own selves in the foot iirc. They were miles ahead of any competitor, employees loved it, and then they just started gouging all their whale customers in contract negotiations, to the point that they started looking elsewhere... If this isn't the full picture, let me know. I was at multiple companies trying to move away from Slack as the cost was not justifiable
The severance package is great! I don’t think I would be upset (unless I was extremely passionate about a project I was working on)
Really? 16 weeks of salary, or 4 months of pay. In my country, you get 3 months of pay as standard when you're fired from your job. Doesn't seem that great to me to be honest.
TIL that nobody knows what they're doing. Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need? What is management exactly doing during the time they went from 1 excess person to 500? Did they just hope the "macroeconomic headwinds" would become tailwinds? Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work, and maybe we should deal with that problem instead of…
It's actually a pretty simple risk/reward equation.
The risk of understaffing a company is greater than the risk of overstaffing a company.
If you overstaff a company, the solution is quick and easy. If you understaff a company, the solution is extremely painful and takes a very long time to fix.
E.g. it takes 1 day to fire someone, but 9 months to hire/onboard someone. So to ensure the staffing isn't a bottleneck for growth, the obvious answer is to err on the side of overstaffing.
TLDR: You need to hire and onboard people before you actually need them. If hiring and onboarding someone takes 9 months, you need to guess how many resources you'll need a year from now, and hope that your estimation is accurate. (And obviously a lot of companies over-estimated how many people they would need, hence lay offs)