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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

#181

Post by ilyt »

dheera wrote: post #62
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…

> Nice, round number. 500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.

Round number (whichever base is rounded off to) also shows it wasn't some company-wide movement to cut some fat but someone come up with the number beforehand and told underlings to make it happen

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

#182

Post by JeremyNT »

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…

It's probably best not to think of Dropbox the company as being about the product "Dropbox." It's a huge company and as with all megacorps their goal is to become bigger through whatever means they have at their disposal.

Maybe they'll come up with something of value to bolt onto what they do today, or maybe they'll add a totally different product to their portfolio, or maybe they'll pivot away from their current business entirely, or maybe they'll just waste a bunch of money chasing the current fad.

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

#183

Post by coldtea »

ilyt wrote: post #165
palata wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"Made some BS PR headlines, while not even having a clue how to do anything with those things, and surely not anything worth their customer's while" is an ever better description.

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

#184

Post by spacemadness »

afavour wrote: post #42
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…

Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech c…

As long as we stick with the economic incentives we have in quarterly stakeholder capitalism, it will forever be this way. You can’t fix it by appealing to people’s sense of bettering the world.

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

#185

Post by mindtricks »

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 could see how it might be used as a "memory" to some of these AI-generated workflows. As content is generated, having it stored, indexed, and easily discoverable would be important. If the users of these AI tools are individuals and small groups more than big corporations, there may be a market here for Dropbox to tune its product line towards.

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

#186

Post by vikingerik »

great_psy wrote: post #124
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.

Shouldn’t those prices be affected by moores law ? I think I remember the tier prices being roughly the same since the service came out. I get that salaries went up which adds to price, but over time it feels like storage price should go towards zero.

This comes up all the time regarding Dropbox, why can't you pay less for a less-storage tier?

The answer is you're not really paying for the storage. You're paying for the servicing. The application with its network connectivity and data transfer, plus the overhead costs of billing and support when necessary.

The proposition may look like "$100 for 10 TB", but that's not a ratio that you can halve or whatever. It's $100 for 10 TB and all the network servicing and support apparatus, which doesn't change if the storage amount does.

It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a tier for less than 100/year, it's that they don't want to. We around HN know about reducing headaches by avoiding pathologically cheap customers. Dropbox makes more profit overall by getting some of the would-be cheapos to round up to 100/year and letting the rest walk.

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

#187

Post by dreamcompiler »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #142
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.

iCloud

iCloud is perfect if all your machines are made by Apple.

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

#188

Post by samstave »

LightHugger wrote: post #97
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…

They will use AI to scan your files so that they can do things with the resulting harvested data.

EXACTLY

AI is allowing for massive monitization of what was previously "flat file" style data.

Dropbox, as I mentioned, has always 'not been you friend' - now they are just a more powerful 'not your friend'.

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

#189

Post by spi »

Hamcha wrote: post #93
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…

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…

I'm pretty sure Google is already using plenty of "AI" behind these functionalities. Heck, image classification was the very beginning of the current "AI summer" a dozen years ago!

Not nearly everything in AI is ChatGPT, not quite all is NLP for that matter, there's still plenty of interesting things which are improving. Dropbox might well be pivoting to improve their e.g. photo/video offering with AI, but they might as well have started that 5 years ago.

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

#190

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

codedokode wrote: post #95

Why does Dropbox have so many employees? Isn't it just a small program for synchronizing files? What are all those developers writing?

Just like clockwork, the "I have no idea what this multibillion dollar company actually does now, so let me comment on how they must have way too many employees and how it could be built in a weekend" HN comment is in.

I feel like HN should just autogenerate these comments now for stories like this (perhaps with a helpful response explaining what the corporation actually does do and giving some examples of corporate jobs that are a necessity at a certain size).

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