Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#231

Post by newacct8086 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

Grakel wrote: post #131

hattar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer. Every time I encounter this I reconsider my Dropbox subscription.

I switched to sync.com 3 months ago, and never looked back.

[I'm being polite :)] I've been unable to find anything to make an informed opinion on what they mean by end-to-end encryption, which is prominently mentioned on the home page etc.

[I'm not being polite. #BeingThatGuy :)] My best guess is that they're using their own definition of end-to-end encryption. i.e., SSL for transit + encryption at rest = "end-to-end encryption". Whatever.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#232

Post by qmmmur » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

weeboid wrote: post #211

jjoonathan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope not. Every vertical company wants my files locked in their walled garden, but I want my files to be horizontally portable. This is a fight where it's nice to have a $10B company in your corner.

In the near future, storage will be a home appliance, with networking and command-and-control. As simple to use as a microwave, unlimited storage with service plans similar to changing water filters.

Is this sarcasm?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#233

Post by santoshalper » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

CedarMills wrote: post #180

jedberg wrote: post #168

This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?

Their UX has become worse, questionable design choices, and 2 GB limit is almost a joke. Chances are, if you're in the market, you just use something like Box which provides a lot more value for free.

I'm a long time user and when people talk about the UX (many, not just you), I am always puzzled. What UX are you speaking of? For me, Dropbox is just a folder on my hard drive with no real UX to speak of. It's the ultimate "gets out of my way and just works". Are you talking about the web site?

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#234

Post by throwaway894345 » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

simoneau wrote: post #174

drawkbox wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare needs to be disconnected from the employer. Public option and private and all healthcare benefits need to go to salary. It would make workers able to change jobs easier, businesses able to start and compete with others/countries easier, and would reduce ageism as well as going direct to consumer it would help the fixed pricing market of healthcare/medical services and supplies. We don't get our auto/home/l…

I don't understand why this doesn't get more discussion. It's a much more conservative step than "medicare for all" and would do a lot of good.

As I understand it, you need collective bargaining against insurers to keep individual premiums down. Employers do that today, and if employers just pay out their insurance spend to employees, the employees will get less insurance as a result. A single payer system means the government negotiates on behalf of all of the citizens, allowing it to keep costs down much more than our current system.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#235

Post by stuaxo » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

Part of me expected the message to be "Your storage is running out, upgrade to dropbox pro"

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#236

Post by notwhereyouare » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

I understand it's a management decision, but I'm curious as to why companies don't really start with "hey, we need to lay off 11%. Who here would like to volunteer. Here are the perks we are going to offer"

See how many that gets you. Then again, that might get you more than 11% if you aren't careful.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#237

Post by santoshalper » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #217

Dropbox is often cited as a success story when it comes to startups. But makes me think, is this what we should call successful companies? Companies that takes others money, grow the company until they've grown too much and need to fire people because of their poor decisions? Sure, Dropbox is a whole of 13 years old, which is infinity time on the internet, but considering the rest of the ecosystem with businesses (wh…

I don't think they've been a startup for quite some time. They are a mid-sized tech business, and sometimes businesses have to lay people off. It's the cycle of nature and inevitable as the competitive landscape changes.

Dropbox was a great startup, and is a mediocre corporation.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#238

Post by santoshalper » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #166

"6 months of COBRA" presumably means Dropbox will pay 6 months of COBRA premiums for departed team members? COBRA has a statutory duration much longer than 6 months.

Yes, it means Dropbox will pay you the cost of 6 months of COBRA. So let's say your premium is $1500/mo, Dropbox is going to give you up to $9k.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#239

Post by brundolf » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #201

brundolf wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that I (and many people) still want exactly the core product that Dropbox offers (and does better than anyone else), even if that's a smaller market than it was ten years ago. It makes sense that businesses would want to get all of their IT solutions from a single integrated company for simplicity's sake, and it makes sense that consumers don't mess with actual files as much as they used to. But for my o…

Perhaps your storage needs are low, but I feel like at this point once you're past 4-5TB, a Synology or QNAP NAS is a no-brainer for anyone even remotely technical. I need quite a lot of storage for my projects and am up to a 42TB Enterprise NAS at home w/ Fujitsu helium-filled drives. Probably more than Dropbox customers would ever want to spend, but well worth it for me. Even if I didn't need as much storage, I'm p…

I only use about 70GB right now; 2TB is as much as I could imagine ever needing.

That 70GB includes a modest collection of music from before the streaming era, a few videos, backups of old documents, Blender projects, Unity projects, a backup of all my photos from my phone (from the past few years), a couple archives of family photos (from the past few decades). I also back up product licenses and shell profiles there, for easy setup of new machines (which I highly recommend). The only important files that don't go in my Dropbox are my actual code projects, since those live on GitHub.

I use a whole lot more space than that when it comes to software, of course - Steam games, in particular - but there's no reason to put any of that on Dropbox because it can be trivially re-downloaded. I have 4TB of disk space on my desktop, but nearly everything outside of that 70GB is a glorified cache.

I honestly can't fathom how I would utilize 42TB of backed-up data storage, unless I decided to start torrenting. And anyway, a local NAS won't do me much good if the house burns down or gets broken-into. A cloud storage solution that presumably gets replicated across multiple data centers, and also mirrors local copies on all of my devices, is the most durable data storage solution I can imagine.

Re: Dropbox to cut 11% of its global workforce

#240

Post by jshawl » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #168

This is interesting because having layoffs at a company that should be going off like a rocket during a pandemic is odd. What is going on at Dropbox that prevented them from taking advantage of the huge shift to remote work?

I churned when Dropbox started removing features and asking for more money. e.g. limits on number of devices, more frequent nags, forcing me to unlink devices that had already been linked. I'm not going to be bullied into being a paying customer.