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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#151

Post by uhtred »

recroad wrote: post #44

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…

The problem is we live in a society now where everyone has a public platform to promote themselves (linkedin etc) and there are a lot of ruthlessly ambitious narcisists who put self promotion and resume building ahead of everything else.

So they muscle into a team lead or manager position and grow the team, because it looks good to post on linked in "hey I'm growing my team" and it doesn't matter if the team needs another person.

And who cares if the company is then stuck with surplus employees, not the person who hired them because they have moved on and up at another company.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#152

Post by nemo44x »

This is a stack ranking layoff. They will fill the roles with new roles to teams they believe are more vital to achieving company goals. Pretty much every tech company has operated this way the last couple years. They’ve fired 10-20% and have replaced all those heads pretty much across the board.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#153

Post by shitlord »

malfist wrote: post #63
mattmaroon wrote: post #34

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?

By that logic, Mark Zuckerberg is a poor leader and should resign. I think most investors would disagree with that assessment.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#154

Post by surajrmal »

paulcole wrote: post #5

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.

Software is complicated. If you keep writing new functionality, maintaining it slows down your ability to write more new functionality. Eventually if you want to ship more new features and not wait an extraordinary amount of time to do so you need more people. This doesn't scale super well so your headcount grows non linearly.

Companies develop a lot of bespoke features used by a handful of their customers. It might not be obvious to the average person what all of those features are. Additionally just scaling software to continue running with more customers using the product is not a trivial task as well. Adding more servers or making servers beefier only works until it doesn't.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#157

Post by tyingq »

throwaway313373 wrote: post #109
recroad wrote: post #44

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…

I mean, imagine that you are leading a team of 4 people. Are you sure that you will always be able to accurately tell if you need a fifth person or not? Or you have a team of 5 people. Can you tell if you have a one too many?

Maybe not. But typically natural attrition rates would let a hiring freeze take care of most of this. Layoffs are kind of normal current day, but a 20% layoff is not.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#158

Post by coldpie »

recroad wrote: post #44

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…

> Actually, I know why. It's because they have too much money

Money was almost literally free for like a decade. I'm so glad that era is over, and I hope it never returns, but the period of adjustment as businesses discover that they have to actually have a business model again does suck a bit.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#159

Post by jamil7 »

elric wrote: post #90

I'm always a bit confused by profitable companies with (presumably) large reserves laying off lots of people. I get that they want to remain profitable. But sure 500ish people could be put to some use? A new product, a new market, a spinoff. Whatever? Are you telling me that no one in such a big, wealthy company of clever engineers has any use for a bunch of talented people?

It might be 500 middle managers which you can't do much with.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#160

Post by mrthrowaway999 »

recroad wrote: post #44

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…

> Actually, I know why. It's because they have too much money and when you have too much cash, you start splurging without thinking and then one day the chickens come home to roost.

This is an incredibly uncharitable and shallow take, on the level of that comment many years ago that said something along the lines of "what's so interesting about Dropbox? It's just rsync, I could build it in a weekend".

We don't operate in a perfectly legible world, especially more so when it comes to people. It's all bets and risks and whatnot.

If you or anyone has the power to create perfectly aligned and efficient organization, I'm waiting here to see you build large multi-trillion dollar companies. Let me know how it goes.

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