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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#221

Post by mrsilencedogood »

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…

It's always amazed me how much leeway and clemency leadership gets. I worked at a company that was always fairly intentional about their performance review process being a meat grinder, and they also did something that didn't look nearly dissimilar enough to good ole microsoft forced curve / stack ranking.

So if you were an IC and were on a project that failed (or even just didn't succeed enough), God help you. Many folks just quit when they saw a project going sideways, or tried to escape/transfer. Alternatively, people would report green statuses and hope someone else fell over first so they wouldn't be the root-cause.

Obviously this caused many problems. It was very hard to execute projects with lots of people or teams, and/or that took a long (>3mo) time. It came to a head when finally a major initiative missed another deadline "just barely" and it finally tripped circuit breakers and someone went in and did a full Inquisition. Yeah no the project was f'd and they basically just gave up ("pivoted") to an adjacent goal. Their official diagnosis/RCA was "people were too scared to report red, so everyone prettied up their status reports a bit, and that was compounded by each roll-up status report also prettying up the status.

Literally no leadership changes happened as a result of this. Then I got laid off. (Unrelated, just the big layoffs of 22. I was not directly involved in this, I was in big data and this was all happening in the main product infra stuff).

So yeah. Your project fails? Bye. But your f'd up performance grinder culture causes literally hundreds of people to behave so out-of-alignment with the actual company goals? Nah man stick around for 2 more years and leave at your leisure over some other petty squabble.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#222

Post by tonyedgecombe »

wakamoleguy wrote: post #137
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…

It has been even more than 500 excess employees. 300 were laid off in January 2021, and another 500 in April 2023. The percentages imply that headcount bounced around from 2800 down to 2500, up to 3100, down to 2500, up to 2600, and now down to 2100. These same macroeconomic headwinds have existed for some time now, and the fundamentals of Dropbox’s core business commoditization haven’t changed for the better.

I wonder how many staff they need just to keep the lights on. I bet it's not more than a tenth of what they have now.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#223

Post by jsbg »

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…

> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

If you bet on growth/new features but your current and future customer base are going out of business or downsizing and you have to switch to more of a survival strategy.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#224

Post by nextworddev »

threetonesun wrote: post #165
nextworddev wrote: post #3

Stack ranking is back masquerading as (bi) annual layoffs

It's more fun now though, because instead of being tied to individual performance, you need to make sure you're on a product team that is going to survive the cuts.

That was actually the norm prior to 2010. Tech was never supposed to be a stable career due to inherent innovation risk

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#225

Post by tootie »

voisin wrote: post #104
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…

> Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work Product roadmap probably had some ambitious ideas that got scrapped when earlier steps proved to not be marginal revenue generators. Jobs said it best: Dropbox is a feature not a product. All their efforts to make it a product (let alone a platform!) have worked against usability and alienated a lot of users. I am hopeful these layoffs sign…

They were (I think) first to market with fast, cheap cloud storage but at this point there's just too much competition and not enough differentiation. I have only the vaguest awareness of them trying to build some value adds to make Dropbox more of a collaboration tool, but I've never seen it get any adoption. I'm guessing those are the LOBs getting cut with this announcement.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#227

Post by Ekaros »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #207
throwaway2037 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile the S&P500 is up _23%_ this year As the saying goes: "The stock market is not the economy." Most of that gain can be attributed to six stocks. Dropbox is down about 6% year-to-date.

Fair point. Let's look at profits then. Net profit margin across the S&P500 is 12%, a YOY increase.

How is net profit margin calculated? Some weighted average or is it net profit of every company divided by revenue of every company?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#228

Post by mikeweiss »

a0123 wrote: post #168
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…

> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need? There never is an excess amount of workers (sure, there probably are 4-5 exceptions). What happens is that they need those employees, but instead are going to demand that the employees that are left pick up the slack. Which they will because they need a roof over their head. Those companies are merely cutting costs, they don't act…

It's not black and white like this. There is such a thing as having to many employees and such a thing as having too little. I think realistically, most of the time, it's a mix.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#230

Post by gcr »

andygcook wrote: post #208

For context, Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M: > According to our data, Dropbox, Inc. ... paid its CEO total annual compensation worth US$1.5m over the year to December 2023. That's a notable increase of 34% on last year via https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-dropbox-inc-nasdaq-... Even if Drew took minimum wage, that would save ~15 jobs assuming $100K all-in comp (which seems lo…

The severance packages suck.

COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6.

Many job searches take longer than 6 months, so employees will be left high and dry right when they need it most.

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