Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 413 posts

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

#231

Post by deeviant »

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…

Yes, Dropbox's genius strategy is completely inscrutable by us mere mortals.

> It's also not much of a reach to imagine use cases here. AI trained on a company's corpus of internal documents is an extremely common idea right now. DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.

What could go wrong in dropbox invading their customer's privacy to scrap out a few pennies mining their data?

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

#232

Post by kokanee »

stingraycharles wrote: post #194
Hamcha wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eh, I worked for a video analytics startup in 2016 and we had investors (and a CEO) who were desperately pushing to do stuff with AI because everyone was doing stuff with AI. Needless to say, the startup ended up alienating their customers and eventually failed and “exited” for a five figure sum. The current “wave” of AI and deep learning and whatnot has been going on for almost a decade, longer than blockchain and d…

My take is that there has been an ongoing "AI/ML" hype cycle, but this latest craze is a more specific LLM hype. I expect to see a chatbot that can help you derive insights from everything you've uploaded.

For Dropbox, I predict that this will go exactly the way Dropbox Paper went.

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

#233

Post by JustSomeNobody »

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…

> We’ve been bringing in great talent in these areas over the last couple years and we'll need even more.

How many of the laid off "team" members could have been retrained?

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

#234

Post by hbn »

passion__desire wrote: post #207
hbn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You want per mb pricing like AWS has per second billing on their EC2 machines?

I mean that would be ideal, if it reasonably scaled as I uploaded/deleted.

But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.

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

#235

Post by vidarh »

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…

Especially because they've already at least partially solved one of the big challenges: People already trust them with their data. As long as they do nothing to betray that trust (such as e.g. training models on the private data and making them accessible outside the organisation) they have a massive starting advantage over organisations that will need to convince customers that it's ok to upload sensitive information to somewhere new.

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

#236

Post by carlmr »

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…

>DBX is sitting on a trove of data that is specifically well-suited for building bespoke, company specific AI models.

Snark incoming - if somebody at Dropbox reads this they might have an AI strategy now. I think your idea is amazing. But I think that a lot of publicly traded companies are now "doing something with AI" like a headless chicken without any deeper though on why.

But your idea is good!

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

#237

Post by lotsofpulp »

ilyt wrote: post #170
mieubrisse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And deliver it at a sufficiently better performance/utility to price ratio than Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon/Meta can, and they might price it at zero.

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

#238

Post by hbn »

AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote: post #209
hbn wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you worry about Google dropping and discontinuing the service ?

Not really for Google Drive. I feel like they have too many enterprise customers using it to be able to just pull the rug on it. And Google Photos is essentially just a photo-specific UI for Drive.

If they did actually kill it, I can always export and move somewhere else, though it'd be a pain in the ass. In the meantime, it's like the only Google product I think is actually good and worth paying for.

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

#239

Post by caskstrength »

qsort wrote: post #204
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add my 2c because I'm getting a little annoyed that folks who only have familiarity with Dropbox's consumer offering seem to think they have any idea what they're talking about. In an enterprise, it can be extremely difficult to ensure your permissions are what you want them to be: that people can share things easily with the right groups, but also that sensitive data is not inadvertently exposed. Dropbox in par…

> There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.

> This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.

Yeah, last thing I want when trying to share a file with people outside of my organization is some opaque kafkaesque chatgpt-wannabe model telling me "I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that".

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

#240

Post by [deleted] »

brianwawok wrote: post #89
travisgriggs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe happy for employees 501 through 504 who were on the chopping block, but because Round Numbers Are Nice(tm), got to keep their jobs!

But they went from comfortable but low performers, to literally the worst 5 employees in the company.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN