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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#211

Post by NKosmatos »

kraig911 wrote: post #183

Dropbox my one critique is can you please make it affordable again. I just can't justify the cost as there are cheaper services out there. I don't care about PDF signing etc. I fear OneDrive/Google Drive are eating you lunch because it's a hard sell to be competitive against them price wise.

Exactly!!! I stopped being a customer when they lost touch with their customer base. They decided to become something else, adjust plans however they thought, introduced useless featured and all these while riding the money train. I feel sorry for those being laid off, it’s not immediately/directly their fault. It’s the management and the product responsible that should take the blame.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#212

Post by foobarian »

skwee357 wrote: post #111
foobarian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean he's just stating what his job is. CEO is responsible by definition. He's saying "Hey all this is my job."

No, responsibility is not a word. Responsibility is an action. If I'm on-call, I'm responsible to carry my laptop with me and be available immediately to fix critical issues. I don't just say "I take responsibility of being on-call", and the leave my laptop at home, get drunk and fall asleep in a bar for the weekend. That's called being irresponsible.

I see. But that's still like doing your job. I do my job for being on-call by having my laptop with me and phone on, etc. If do my job badly I get fired.

So this CEO is saying, "if I do my job poorly I understand I could get fired."

But, did he/she do their job poorly? That's the thing I can't figure out quite yet. It seems it was bad for the laid off people, but maybe not for Dropbox?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#213

Post by gcr »

absoluteunit1 wrote: post #29

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)

This is a bullshit package because of the healthcare.

I was laid off from a different company with access to 18 months of COBRA. Dropbox is offering a third of that. Lots of job searches take longer than 6 months, so the employees are going to be left high and dry right when they need it the most.

For the non-Americans, my COBRA expenses are about USD$2,000/month for me and my partner. I’m paying as much for healthcare as I am for rent. Even so, it’s still financially better to take COBRA than pay out of pocket for my prescriptions.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#214

Post by bluedino »

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…

Most companies have a bunch of people who are literally doing nothing.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#215

Post by yojo »

mrthrowaway999 wrote: post #160
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 operat…

My understanding is DropBox was trying to transition from sync and share to being a multi-product document-centric company (look at acquisitions like HelloSign).

One possibility is they staffed up a bunch of projects on bets that ultimately didn’t turn into viable products, and are now pulling the plug.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#216

Post by cma256 »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #185
cma256 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. If you can not manage the company correctly and it leads to the job losses of hundreds of people not to mention the millions in salary that was wasted by their poor planning then yes they should be immediately relieved and not allowed to run any other company. They are clearly incompetent. Considering dropbox is not facing some economic recession outside of its control we can only blame the CEO's incompet…

What if managing the company correctly requires hundreds of people losing their jobs? I understand the anger in this scenario as employees, but I don’t think doing layoffs means leadership is clearly incompetent. Running a company is hard. Doing layoffs definitely says something about the company’s values and current standing, but I don’t think it necessarily means the CEO is bad.

> What if managing the company correctly requires hundreds of people losing their jobs?

It occurs to me that there is no failure of performance a CEO can produce and be held responsible for. Are these CEOs really so irreplaceable that when they bet incorrectly they can't be replaced?

20% of employees have been fired. The CEO directly cited mismanagement as the cause. And yet, its impossible to fire him because "its a learning experience" or "think of the upside!".

A CEO being fired does not mean the company falls into the abyss. The company still exists and can hire a new CEO. I'm certain there are plenty of fools more than willing to risk the livelihoods of 20% of Dropbox's staff in exchange for a mansion in Miami.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#217

Post by throwaway313373 »

tyingq wrote: post #157
throwaway313373 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The common argument against relying on natural turnover rate is that the most competent workers are also those who are the most likely to leave because it is easier for them to find a new/better job. So if a company just freezes hiring instead of doing layoffs it will experience a reduction in the competence of their workers.

I don't know if this is empirically true or not, I haven't seen any statistics. But I don't see any obvious logical errors in this reasoning.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#218

Post by seunosewa »

jeffbee wrote: post #175
IshKebab wrote: post #144

Kind of crazy that Dropbox has 2600 employees no? What do they all do? Isn't Dropbox finished? I guess there's a very small number maintaining the core Dropbox stuff and most of them are working on speculative projects to increase revenue (e.g. this Dash thing they mentioned)?

> Kind of crazy that Dropbox has 2600 employees No, the HN consensus is they are massive geniuses for moving out of AWS. Nobody here ever accounts for the extra datacenter, hardware platform, hardware ops, infrastructure ops, etc.

I'm sure that they did their research before making the big move.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#220

Post by recroad »

cma256 wrote: post #50
qeternity wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The latter. If you can not manage the company correctly and it leads to the job losses of hundreds of people not to mention the millions in salary that was wasted by their poor planning then yes they should be immediately relieved and not allowed to run any other company. They are clearly incompetent. Considering dropbox is not facing some economic recession outside of its control we can only blame the CEO's incompet…

Yes, fired. Just like a head coach of a sports team.
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