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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#301

Post by sct202 »

gcr wrote: post #213
absoluteunit1 wrote: post #29

The severance package is great! I don’t think I would be upset (unless I was extremely passionate about a project I was working on)

This is a bullshit package because of the healthcare. I was laid off from a different company with access to 18 months of COBRA. Dropbox is offering a third of that. Lots of job searches take longer than 6 months, so the employees are going to be left high and dry right when they need it the most. For the non-Americans, my COBRA expenses are about USD$2,000/month for me and my partner. I’m paying as much for healthca…

I wonder if they meant paid COBRA of 6 months, bc 18 months is like the minimum to offer continuing coverage. COBRA coverage is a Federal Law for large employers.

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...

"Q11: How long does COBRA coverage last? COBRA requires that continuation coverage extend from the date of the qualifying event for a limited period of 18 or 36 months. The length of time depends on the type of qualifying event that gave rise to the COBRA rights. A plan, however, may provide longer periods of coverage beyond the maximum period required by law."

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#302

Post by Draiken »

qeternity wrote: post #145
cma256 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't really get why layoffs mean that the company was not managed correctly. Let's say you believe you have an opportunity that will double the value of the company, with a 30% probability, or cost the company 10% of it's value. This means it has an expected value of +21%. This is pretty good, and exactly the sort of thing shareholders want from their management. So you increase headcount and pursue the opportunit…

When they hire as part of the push for that 30% chance, are they telling them that they have a 70% chance of being laid-off if the bet doesn't pay out?

If it's "just a bet" and not mismanagement, then we should tell people that, shouldn't we?

The reality is that these bets are only bets for the people getting hired/laid off, and they don't even know they are betting in the first place. Even worse because we're not talking about simply losing money here. Losing a job is many times a life changing event in real people's lives. It's not like someone betting on a stock.

That's why there should be consequences for the ones making those decisions. They get the most rewards, but none of the punishment. How's that fair in any shape or form?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#303

Post by dragonwriter »

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?

Because circumstances change and evaluation of projections and optimal employment numbers under them change, and it's never optimal to hire enough people to actually assess that with minute-to-minute updates.

> There's something to be said about spending within your limits and not splurging on the next shiny object.

There is something to be said for hiring and cutting slowly rather than rapidly in response to changing circumstances, and that is that, under the material incentives in a competitive capitalist economy, it is a poor strategy for a corporation.

> Way back when it was called cost control and operating within a budget.

Guess what happens quickly when you are good at operating within a budget and the projections on which the budget is based changed and so the budget changes going forward?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#304

Post by alwayslikethis »

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…

> how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need

The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates:

> we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies

> (1) He may resign.

> (2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.

> (3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.

> There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both.

source: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#305

Post by higeorge13 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #146
colechristensen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running a SaaS that isn't customer-interaction heavy, you can usually get away with dropping about 80% of your technical staff (if, of course, you pick the correct 20%, which is not easy). Having worked in several startups through the early growth stage, it's just surprising how much you don't get more done with, say, a 500 employee company than a 50 employee company. There is a ton of room to grow less and…

Staffing your business (or even team) with the right number of people to accomplish a job is a real challenge that the majority of managers don't engage with, instead simply trying to grow their little kingdom to the largest size they can, both for intrinsic power reasons, and also to foster greater jobs for themselves later on. If I see a manager put "led a team of 40" on their resume, in the interview, I ask "did y…

Yeah but usually these people are top candidates and occupy the other engineering manager positions, and you, managing a super productive team of 5 or 10 instead, don't even get into a single interview there. And that applies to every single company I have applied to.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#306

Post by colechristensen »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #146
colechristensen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're running a SaaS that isn't customer-interaction heavy, you can usually get away with dropping about 80% of your technical staff (if, of course, you pick the correct 20%, which is not easy). Having worked in several startups through the early growth stage, it's just surprising how much you don't get more done with, say, a 500 employee company than a 50 employee company. There is a ton of room to grow less and…

Staffing your business (or even team) with the right number of people to accomplish a job is a real challenge that the majority of managers don't engage with, instead simply trying to grow their little kingdom to the largest size they can, both for intrinsic power reasons, and also to foster greater jobs for themselves later on. If I see a manager put "led a team of 40" on their resume, in the interview, I ask "did y…

>many hands make light work, but

I'd like to emphasize further the but. The speed of tasks scales with the inverse log of the organization size.

In other words, as you get bigger, every project gets slower, regardless of how many people you have working on it. A project that would take a week in a tiny organization might take a month in a medium organzation and 2 quarters in a large organization. Sometimes there are good reasons for this, sometimes not.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#307

Post by insane_dreamer »

kiba wrote: post #253
insane_dreamer wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last paragraph could have been taken directly out of the defense contractor lobbyist handbook. Congratulations. Seriously -- we don't have military commitments to "underpin the global order". We have military commitments to "protect our political and economic interests" -- and who do those benefit? The American people? Nah, not really. But the American people are the ones footing the bill for it, choosing to red…

Seriously -- we don't have military commitments to "underpin the global order". We have military commitments to "protect our political and economic interests" -- and who do those benefit? The American people? Nah, not really. But the American people are the ones footing the bill for it, choosing to reduce our own quality of life in order to exert power over other nations (and invade them at will). Of course, it's our…

You've drunk the hegemony koolaid, my friend.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#308

Post by galactus »

randomdata wrote: post #248
vundercind wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an outlet for general frustration with the justification for high executive compensation (and returns on capital, for that matter) often being "they have much more responsibility and risk" when the actual downside is typically nonexistent, and even if there are consequences, the outcome is something like "LOL still richer than any ten of you combined will ever be", i.e. the "risk" is all fake.

> "they have much more responsibility and risk" Perhaps you've misinterpreted that statement? It is the board that takes on greater risk with executives as compared to other employees. The executives are given the keys to the kingdom, which means only an exceedingly small group of trusted individuals can be considered for the job. By the transitive properties of supply and demand, when supply is limited, price goes u…

The thing is, high executives have become a self-perpetuating class entrenched in corporate boards, this is the reason CEOs comoensation keeps skyrocketing, not supply and demand. And this entrenchment obviously also stifles accountability.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#309

Post by abeppu »

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…

> Honestly, I would not hire a single manager from these big companies because they operate in an environment where they're playing with monopoly money and don't know what reality is.

In part, to unpack why part of this glib take is missing the complexity, "don't know what reality is", is that finding reality is slow and costly. Perhaps your team provides a platform which is used internally by several other teams building various products. It supports a bunch of use cases, but it's hard to evaluate the actual ROI of the platform you provide, both because no one knows how much better/worse those products would have been without your platform. Would they have taken months longer to implement? Would they have not been possible without spinning up a team like yours?

Further, some of those products actually are used by paying customers, and others are still in development. Of the products used by paying customers, it's unclear which they would actually pay to use vs which they use because it's available in their subscription basket (e.g. is Dropbox Paper making money or is it just that some Dropbox customers use it but would pay the same sync subscription if Paper was killed?). Of the products that are not yet in customers hands, how should you value them? If your small team supports multiple in-development products, that must be worth something even if they're not revenue-producing yet.

Similarly, suppose you're a manager who runs a team building a product which has dependencies on multiple platform/infra teams -- do you really have visibility into the real costs that your team's requests create? Can you really know the ROI of your team, to guide choices about various investments?

This kind of ambiguity means that even when leadership wants to see which teams are really contributing value and how much, it's quite difficult to see. Teams may optimistically estimate their own value because they cannot see all of the costs to which they contribute, or because they cannot see which revenue-affiliated use is actually valuable.

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