Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by ilyt » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

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…

If it somehow be able to answer prompts like "show me the picture of Jeff from that trip we took 4 or 5 years ago" it might've been mildly useful. No idea whether worth the price of research tho

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

#162

Post by bayindirh » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

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 can’t recommend it enough. Install your own directory servers, and you’ll have true invisible infrastructure.

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

#163

Post by time_to_smile » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:06 PM UTC

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…

I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership.

I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking"

14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, when money flowed easy from both investors and customers. There has been zero market pressure to put thought into building products.

In the case of dropbox in particular, any long term customers (such as myself) can confirm that there has clearly not been a coherent product strategy for at least the last few years.

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

#164

Post by ilyt » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

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…

Imagine thinking that because Big Company Does it it must be sensible and logical because they are Big Company so they don't make blunders like that.

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

#165

Post by ilyt » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

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.

"Dipped their feet" might've been better description.

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

#166

Post by maeln » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

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…

I mean, who knows, maybe they have a legitimate use for employees with skill in the ai field.

But it does smell like most tech bubble in history. Every publicly traded company has to somewhat fit the last au gout du jour tech in their announcement/roadmap/hiring to satisfy shareholder and bump stock prices. Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ...

Although I get that the idea behind is that nobody want to miss "the next big thing", so if you can afford it, might as well invest in it, and if it is a flop, oh well, but if it does end up being the actual next big thing, you might have saved your company.

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

#167

Post by flavius29663 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

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…

- search your stuff using very fuzzy searches? Imagine looking up documents that are related to all your car purchases? - image search based on a person's face, like google does - build recommendations based on your documents, in general, just start using your documents to help you, in a privacy aware way, rather than just storing them.

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

#168

Post by cmh89 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #116

smcl wrote: post #2

Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are re…

Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals. The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of. It is much more social science than engineering.

>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.

Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods.

If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at a nice round number

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

#169

Post by hbn » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

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.

Google One's tiers are better, but they're still kinda nonsense. The first 2 paid tiers are 100GB and 200GB which are fine. But then you have to jump up 3.5x the cost to 2TB. Why can't they just offer finely-tuned increments of 100GB? Or even 50GB or 25GB.

I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly deserve to pay for 2TB cause you went 3MB over the 200GB limit. And for how cheap as storage is these days, I think the pricing models should be reconsidered.

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

#170

Post by ilyt » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

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…

YOu forgot:

* find someone that will actually want to pay extra for their subscription on that.