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

blog.dropbox.com

301–310 of 413 posts

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

#301

How the F does a document storage company pivot to AI? The rush to AI is starting to look like an episode of Silicon Valley.

To be fair, documents context with things like semantic search could be the upcoming bottleneck for a lot of industry applications.

Even though a hundred+ QA products doing this (Chat with your files vibes etc) haven't had much success, they are ignoring the fact that trust is key to document storage, and that we haven't mastered correct context/snippet amalgamation yet - for example, one may want to include both statements that have high cosine similarity, and also statements with clashing natural language inference similarity (contractionary sentences). This gives the context window the statements needed to correctly reason and use logic from different parts of the document. Small things like order (e.g. grouping snippets from different documents together in per-document batches, and also ordering by page number the statements within each document) matter greatly.

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

#302
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 really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.

"Mr. Robot, categorize our customers in a monetizable way by inspecting the data they hold in their accounts."

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

#303

> You'll also have some time TODAY AND TOMORROW to wrap up and say goodbye to colleagues. As an European, I don't think I will ever get used to the fact that in the US people can be told "go home, you're fired" like that, effective immediately.

As a fellow European, I used to feel that way. Having lived in Canada for a while now, I prefer short notice periods.

It means that I can be more flexible in pursuing opportunities. Businesses also tend to be more risk-seeking because the downside of hiring someone is lower. That benefits me as an employee because it is much easier to get hired.

I’ve been laid off, so I also felt the negative consequences. The key for me was building an emergency fund. Granted, if a person is in an employer's market, the short notice system is terrible.

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

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snark aside, this is something that's always kind of baffled me. If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach. Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without…

Because no matter how many experiences you accrue or how much leisure you have, you're already dead on the geologic time scale. With that perspective, the best thing to do is keep on pushing. Despite whatever pain and headache that might bring, it's one act our short lives can use to push against entropy and the dying universe. If I ever come into such wealth, I'll spend it all solving as much as I can through my dir…

By actively working to make the world worse and increase the sum total of human suffering, à la Musk and Bezos?

If I ever came into such wealth, I think I'd spend my time going back to college to study linguistics. Maybe document some dying languages. Try to contribute to humanity a bit.

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

#305
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a testament to the Unix philosophy that after all these years, Dropbox has grown and morphed into something that people no longer enjoy, and yet if you simply followed that advice years ago, you would still have a system today that works exactly as you intended, and in 50 years when Dropbox is long gone as a company, that system will still be working as built, and even after you die, that system can be inherited…

I wish I shared your optimism that any kind of server I set up in 2007 would still be fully functional today without any kind of maintenance, let alone that it will still be around to serve my grandchildren. An FTP server already wouldn't serve my needs given that there's no such thing as mobile sync to an FTP server.

That's a fair criticism of the approach but I also think it's one of the strengths - protocols never change. So today with new requirements you'd need to figure out a new way to do it, but the old way still works, even if it doesn't meet your needs.

The irritating thing with a lot of software is that they start out like a hammer and in 10 years it's a multi-dimensional VR rangefinder with email. Well that's super cool but I want my hammer back.

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

#306
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…

A Norwegian cloud storage company - JottaCloud - just released an AI-powered search engine[0] that lets you search all your stored images based on descriptions instead of meta data.

This is an _excellent_ use of AI, in my opinion, because even if the search results are slightly wrong (they mostly aren't), you're OK with it, and you didn't have to do anything yourself except paying for the service.

[0] https://docs.jottacloud.com/en/articles/7262803-ai-powered-p...

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

#307
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…

Blockchain and NFT brings no real value to most people. My non techie wife and all her friends love ChatGPT and use it daily. My kids friends use it to do all their homework. Which is pissing off my kids as I won’t let them use it.

Good to know some parents still care and make an effort. I realy dread the day all new juniors comming from uni will be AI/chatgpt users and lack in a lot of other important areas.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously it’s embarrassing how leadership in many companies has ZERO vision for AI right now. Too focused on buying houses, drinking wine and riding horses. I think these people need to retire already.

Snark aside, this is something that's always kind of baffled me. If I built a company and eventually found myself in extremely high value (ie, 9 figures), I'd be looking to retire ASAP. That would be it. I won capitalism. Time to spend the rest of my life on Maui sipping Mai-Tais on the beach. Why anybody would want to continue to work when they already have enough wealth to live an extremely lavish lifestyle without…

Unfortunately I think the answer to "why keep working if you're already rich beyond the dreams of avarice" is "because it means you can keep being ultra-rich and powerful and famous". All your material desires will be met regardless, but you won't get to feel as important if you stop working.

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

#309
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 really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox.

I can think of plenty. Text-based image search, "find the latest TPI report last modified by so-and-so", etc.

Which isn't to say that Dropbox won't spend most of its efforts thinking up features that most users plainly don't need or want, and in cranking out buggy versions of these non-features at the expense of their core product. Like all these companies, once they get sufficiently long in the tooth.

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

#310
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it. LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing. I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some inf…

Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto br…

I saw far far more artists hating NFTs than loving them.

And the idea that an NFT has any "emotional resonance" is just weird.

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