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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

#311

Post by nsxwolf »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #275
birdyrooster wrote: post #224

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…

This is what always frustrated me about people like Steve Jobs. Don't you like, ever enjoy stuff?

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

#312

Post by jgalt212 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #199
spamizbad wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in this industry for two decades (and a Dropbox user since its public launch) the "product strategy" of most of these companies is close to just spitballing. If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product. To add to that, Product leadership at technology companies has evolved to be much less technical, so they aren't going to have any deep…

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…

> Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk.

> Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use.

These two sentences were one after the other. So which way is it?

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

#313

Post by gimme_treefiddy »

paxys wrote: post #262
seanalltogether wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> Having an enterprise product automatically increases headcount by 5x

Can you expand on this. Why is this the case. Does it even mean increase in engg headcount, if so why. Can you link to somewhere if possible. Always had this question, and this pattern is very similar in other places. So maybe it works?

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

#314

Post by swsieber »

ramraj07 wrote: post #222
Thrymr wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the ability to recall private information like that will more valuable to you, the user, or to data aggregators, advertisers, and service providers? Is there enough extra revenue in expanding services to Dropbox users, or will they inevitably become another data scraping company (perhaps with a veneer of "anonymization" to supposedly protect your privacy)?

As of now I trust Dropbox not to use my information or sell it to anyone else. In fact I pay them pretty penny not to. Is there any evidence that they’re violating that assumption?

There is in face public evidence that they take good care of data, even when building an in house OCR engine, https://dropbox.tech/machine-learning/creating-a-modern-ocr-... :

> We began by collecting a representative set of donated document images that match what users might upload, such as receipts, invoices, letters, etc. To gather this set, we asked a small percentage of users whether they would donate some of their image files for us to improve our algorithms. At Dropbox, we take user privacy very seriously and thus made it clear that this was completely optional, and if donated, the files would be kept private and secure. We use a wide variety of safety precautions with such user-donated data, including never keeping donated data on local machines in permanent storage, maintaining extensive auditing, requiring strong authentication to access any of it, and more.

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

#315

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

tapoxi wrote: post #118
meling wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree… I wish I could buy Dropbox’s minimal feature set: syncing files. And that they’d improve that feature rather than adding features I don’t use or want.

I'll happily recommend https://syncthing.net/ , it's open source, end to end encrypted, and peer to peer (your machines send files directly to each other).

I actually want a central server, because the main thing I'm worried about is a fire or flood taking out both my computers at once, in which case the sync to a central server works as a backup.

(I don't have proper backups beyond Dropbox, because I'm pretty happy for stuff I've actually deleted to stay deleted. Just, in case of a hard drive failure or something similar, I can sync back from Dropbox. That's all I feel I need. Maybe there's something better?)

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

#316

Post by fHr »

fullshark wrote: post #279
afavour wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to my mindset a decade ago I've become so cynical about the whole SV tech scene. There's value there, of course: Dropbox was a fantastic service when it first came out. But these companies are incentivized to keep expanding until they occupy the entire universe. Now Dropbox wants to be my word processor. Next it wants to use AI to touch up my photos or whatever the hell because AI is the New Hot Thing tech c…

You aren't cynical enough. This incentive structure is what keeps us employed and our salaries going up and you should encourage it (assuming you're a laborer). If companies weren't doing this they'd hire to build a product with a minimal feature set and then layoff at a much larger rate once it was done. In other words, encourage this mindset wherever possible, it's going to be what causes the next wave and spike in…

Honestly there are just to many SWE then. FAANG just paid moonsalarys and lot of bad SWE joined the space who ofcourse never get to FAANG or only for 1 axed project but still are in the space not needed at all with I worked FAANG on cv. We can't all be SWE. The skilled will survive it no doubt.

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

#317

Post by nodogoto »

roncesvalles wrote: post #227
ramraj07 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to be able to just ask dropbox what my passport number is, or to find the file my auditor gave me last year with recommendations.

I can get my passport number by pressing the Windows key, typing "passport" and pressing Enter. I don't know if I'd want AI to come into the mix, or even Dropbox for that matter. There is no substitute for being organized.

[dead]

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

#319

Post by hbn »

gizmo wrote: post #263
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…

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 w…

Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually giving you 2TB of storage space if you're using all of it.

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

#320

Post by xboxnolifes »

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…

Well, if the market hurts 15%, needing companies to find a 15%, wouldn't you expect layoffs to be around 15%, which would be similar for most companies?
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