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

Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 1001 posts

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#261

Post by veggieroll »

voisin wrote: post #133
Shank wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what would that even look like? > Iwata ran the Kyoto, Japan-based video game company [Nintendo] from 2002 until his death in 2015. To avoid layoffs, Iwata took a 50% pay cut to help pay for employee salaries, saying a fully-staffed Nintendo would have a better chance of rebounding. [0] [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...

By taking that pay cut, how many employees could Nintendo keep that would otherwise have been fired? 5? 20? Certainly not in the hundreds or thousands. This just seems like virtue signalling. Edit: to expand on my point re virtue signalling: the article states the CEO took a salary cut, not total compensation (and it doesn’t elaborate on the value of the cut). Salary is a small fraction of CEO total compensation - th…

5 or 20 workers (and their families) who don't get jerked around for stuff way outside their control is an absolute win.

Right now, there is no actual downside for executives. Just less upside. Did they earn XX Million this year or XXX Million. Some tangible downside would be nice.

I mean, heck, why aren't they fired? And really, it's more then middle management where that'd make a huge difference. If bad performance led to actual shakeups in the entrenched middle management, we might actually see business practices change rather than continue on through the established fiefdoms and petty corporate politics.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#262

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

ramraj07 wrote: post #206
elric wrote: post #90

I'm always a bit confused by profitable companies with (presumably) large reserves laying off lots of people. I get that they want to remain profitable. But sure 500ish people could be put to some use? A new product, a new market, a spinoff. Whatever? Are you telling me that no one in such a big, wealthy company of clever engineers has any use for a bunch of talented people?

Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff. Of course they rarely succeed in doing that, but the idea is that these people should have been let go anyway but weren’t for various reasons.

That hasn't been my experience. I usually see the senior people with higher salaries being laid off.

At one company I worked at, a whole division got laid off because the director didn't like the manager of said division.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#263

Post by JohnMakin »

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…

> This is an incredibly uncharitable and shallow take,

So is yours.

> We don't operate in a perfectly legible world, especially more so when it comes to people. It's all bets and risks and whatnot.

What bet was dropbox taking by overexpanding their workforce by 20%?

> If you or anyone has the power to create perfectly aligned and efficient organization, I'm waiting here to see you build large multi-trillion dollar companies. Let me know how it goes.

This is an interesting statement. Dropbox is a single digit $billions company, not trillions.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#264

Post by dangus »

debacle wrote: post #255
mrthrowaway999 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem with DropBox is that it can't really compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon Drive, etc. It's too narrow of an offering.

Open the "More" menu in your Dropbox interface and I think you may be surprised at how many different products they have.

I am sure they're not trying to be a Microsoft of Google, but they're trying to make a niche in document handling, file sending, password management, a lot of those little things that are something of a pain for many businesses.

I think if you compare what Dropbox is offering at $15/user/month to Microsoft 365, there are a bunch of things that Microsoft isn't really covering or isn't covering as well (and vice versa, to be fair). For example, the ability to take e-signatures, document watermarking, facilitating out-of-organization file transfers, etc.

I also think they compete quite well with Amazon Drive, considering that Amazon Drive was discontinued.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#265

Post by TechDebtDevin »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #233
galactus wrote: post #149

[flagged]

He makes $1.5M. That's like 2 L7 jobs at Facebook. How much do you think he should make? $100k? He's worth $2B because he co-founded the company and the value of the company has sky-rocketed. Not because he paid himself $2B of corporate profits. $1.5M for a CEO is actually not much - because why get paid that much when you're already worth $2B? The median for a Fortune 500 is $17M.

I don't think people care about the CEO's compensation, I think its just getting old seeing these companies treat hours of labor as KPIs and not what labor actually is, people.

Mom and Pop businesses have to be careful when hiring because if they have to do layoffs they will be penalized by the office of unemployment insurance, and could make their rates soar to the point where they won't be able to hire again when things change. These consequences prevent mom and pop businesses and other mid size businesses from playing fast and loose with the people's livelihoods they provide. These tech companies budget in the severance, never even deal with the regulatory agencies that are meant to prevent this type of fast and loose hiring. I think companies like Dropbox and others need some sort of regulatory oversight in regards to how they hire and fire (if they are going to keep this pattern of hire and fire every cycle).

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#266

Post by wslh »

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.

But that view might oversimplify things from a business perspective, especially beyond the case of Dropbox.

When a company has ample cash reserves, a common strategy is to leverage the opportunity cost. This can mean growing the team or investing in ventures with both planned and unplanned outcomes. Take Microsoft or Google, for instance: both have a long history of projects and acquisitions that might be considered failures, but these bets were possible because they had the resources to try, even if some failed to pay off. This approach acknowledges that some investments will succeed, while others are simply part of exploring new growth avenues.

Time is the resource that you cannot recover.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#267

Post by jimbokun »

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…

So head count can only ever go up in a company, never down, regardless of circumstances?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#269

Post by jeswin »

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?

Twitter fired 80% of their staff; and they've been releasing features faster than when they had 4x more people. I suppose work can expand to occupy whatever available headcount - nobody cares whether it's useful work or not.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#270

Post by tjpnz »

Shank wrote: post #70
pizzathyme wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion, but I don't understand this type of comment. It sounds like people want executives to get some kind of punishment or pain as a consequence of laying people off. But what would that even look like? A fine? That would probably make no practical difference, and would discourage them from making changes that need to be made. Fire them? Then you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver se…

> But what would that even look like? > Iwata ran the Kyoto, Japan-based video game company [Nintendo] from 2002 until his death in 2015. To avoid layoffs, Iwata took a 50% pay cut to help pay for employee salaries, saying a fully-staffed Nintendo would have a better chance of rebounding. [0] [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...

It should be added that layoffs are not commonplace in Japan. What you'll see instead are bonus cuts and salary reductions (at most 20 percent). To do US style layoffs you would need to show that the affected department was directly involved in a line of business the company has abandoned. If this isn't the case the employees stand a good chance of successfully suing the company in court. And then there's the reputational damage which would be considerable in a country where lifetime employment is valued.

In other words this kind of behavior wouldn't be viewed as all that surprising locally.

Post reply on HN