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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

#261

Post by chrisco255 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #191

Anyone know why the ~15% number keeps showing up in recent layoffs? The startup I was at recently laid of 15%. I'm pretty sure it wasn't for (public) optics, because the layoff didn't get any press coverage. And based on the startup's business, I very much doubt the layoff was triggered by ChatGPT's success. My best guess would be behind-the-scenes VC strategizing, but this is happening even with publicly traded comp…

It's like a safe sounding number that cuts back on expenses but doesn't spook your existing employees and investors. Besides, you can always do another 15% in six months if need be. If you say, "we're laying off 70% effective immediately" it will sound like the ship is going down.

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

#262

Post by paxys »

seanalltogether wrote: post #111
cushychicken wrote: post #36

500/0.16 = 3125 That's a much leaner headcount than what I would expect for a company with as large a market footprint as Dropbox.

And yet I can't help but wonder what they need that many people for? The core of dropbox is still file syncing with extra tooling to enhance that. Figma had just over 200 people when they sold to Adobe and that is a pretty complex application.

Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x. Sales reps, account managers, CSMs, solutions engineers, forward deployed engineers, priority support, compliance...

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

#263

Post by gizmo »

hbn wrote: post #169
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.

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…

I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some.

I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.

Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.

But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.

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

#264

Post by ppeetteerr »

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 imagine that leveraging AI to answer questions about documents, or helping with documentation composition, could be an expected feature by DropBox customers.

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

#265

Post by rchaud »

maeln wrote: post #166
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 mean, who knows, maybe they have a legitimate use for employees with skill in the ai field. But it does smell like most tech bubble in history. Every publicly traded company has to somewhat fit the last au gout du jour tech in their announcement/roadmap/hiring to satisfy shareholder and bump stock prices. Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ... Although I get that the ide…

> Happened with the dot-com bubble, web3, metaverse, cryptocurrencies, "BigData", ...

CIOs love this one weird trick to boost shareholder value!

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

#266

Post by ghaff »

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…

"AI" (or whatever you want to call it) is real. I'm still on the fence around whether LLMs are as transformative--at least over the next few years--as some people think they are. But they're useful even in their current state.

I also had a batch of photos to process from an event and updated my Lightroom. The new Denoise did a really nice job with these relatively noisy/highish ISO pics. And the Adaptive preset to punch up the subject (speakers at an event) was pretty nice too.

Not game changing IMO but a nice workflow addition.

NFTs on the other hand always felt like beanie babies. Blockchain in the enterprise distributed ledger sense felt like it had some potential use cases although I was always pretty skeptical which seems to have been justified.

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

#267

Post by nemothekid »

rchaud wrote: post #246
Aeolun wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product That’s only because it failed (and the jury is still out on that). If it works they’ll conquer an entirely new market right from the start. Certainly a much better long term strategy than hoping they can keep up their advertising revenue.

It won't! That's the most galling aspect of this gigantic waste of money. That you're calling it a "new market" is precisely the problem --- when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back. The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalon…

>when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back.

The last 15 years of tech says otherwise. Tesla is the most obvious counterpoint to this example. I don't think the Metaverse is useful, but my issue with Facebook isn't that he poured 30B into what was essentially R&D.

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

#268

Post by lostlogin »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #187
wahnfrieden wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iCloud

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

It really isn’t.

The time macOS changed my default to having all my files in the cloud rather than local was a truely scarring experience.

The price is high and ‘family sharing’ is a minefield.

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

#269

Post by teolandon »

donohoe wrote: post #173
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…

snark incoming - so you're saying that you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge?

No, GP was just saying we should give Dropbox the benefit of the doubt, because Dropbox understands the product strategy more than any of us do. Including GP.

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

#270

Post by emdashcomma »

dspillett wrote: post #115
bentt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually love this angle. Personally trained models based on our own data. They have the storage infra. They also have a means of distributed compute since they are installed on so many PCs. If they werent an annoying and aimless product I would be excited!

> Personally trained models based on our own data. This leads back to one of the AI promises if the earlier Internet, before WWW when Usenet, Gopher, and a number of other ideas, were where we were heading, and for a time after WWW's popularity before search engines hit certain quality/coverage levels: an intelligent search agent trained on information about you that would go off and scour the various data resources…

This reminds me of the first 25 seconds of this clip from The Matrix: https://youtu.be/Smwrw4sNCxE
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