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Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

blog.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#321

Post by dragonwriter »

pizzathyme wrote: post #88
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...

This is probably the best answer in terms of what people want to see, that would also still give the company the best leadership going forward.

If the CEO taking a paycut materially reduces the size of what would otherwise be a large layoff on the basis if reduced cost savings, the CEO was way overpaid to start with. (And it probably doesn't change the number of people the firm can usefully employ under changed conditions, even if it provides cost savings, because the latter is based on whether employing them makes more money than it costs, to which external cost savings are probably mostly irrelevant.)

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#324

Post by matchbok »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #299

> "As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I’m truly sorry to those impacted by this change." As with other CEOs who say such things in similar situations - does this "responsibility" amount to anything? Like loss of salary or options or seniority. Or is this just empty words? I appreciate that this action is probably necessary to safeguard the business but, as s…

Most people understand that companies need to adjust in size. There’s nothing moral about it.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#325

Post by runako »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #260
andygcook wrote: post #208

For context, Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M: > According to our data, Dropbox, Inc. ... paid its CEO total annual compensation worth US$1.5m over the year to December 2023. That's a notable increase of 34% on last year via https://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-why-dropbox-inc-nasdaq-... Even if Drew took minimum wage, that would save ~15 jobs assuming $100K all-in comp (which seems lo…

Public company CEO pay is almost always paid by shareholders not by the company itself. It's so misleading that these "CEO compensation is 100x employee pay" stats always get kicked around like it is an apples to apples comparison. It's not. CEO's get paid in stock which they need to redeem from shareholders. Employees get paid with cash which them redeem from the company's checking account. They are different source…

Can pretty quickly see that the CEO comp # in question is not the stock. Houston sold many times more than $1.5m in stock in 2023. The $1.5m is likely direct cash and services.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#326

Post by whatshisface »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #282
JohnMakin wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

> What bet was dropbox taking by overexpanding their workforce by 20%? When asking this question, I think it's good to remind ourselves how much we don't know. We don't know if they overstaffed in a push to expand their business that didn't work out, we don't know if the had an older operating model that went from "efficient" to "inefficient" as scale and market dynamics changed. We don't know if advances in producti…

They could also be reducing their workforce because they decided to for human reasons and their value might go down by more than the cost savings.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#327

Post by baudpunk »

Kind of surprising to me, because I think I've tried every large competitor in the space, and have found there to be a gulf between the Dropbox UX and everyone else. I'm more than willing to pay their premium price. I was hoping Proton Drive would compete, but I felt like I was beta testing an inferior product.

I guess Wu Tang was right.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#328

Post by [deleted] »

jryan49 wrote: post #161
voisin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like this would be the few times where virtue signaling is probably a benefit. It can make all the people in the company feel like the leader is on their side, and maybe make the employees less resentful and be more productive.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#330

Post by Y_Y »

ryandrake wrote: post #281
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? This question always gets posted to HN, and is always the top comment whenever an article talks about how many people Company XYZ has. It seems like a lot of people just have never worked for a company that's growing (in terms of both profit and the amount of _stuff_ they are trying to do). Companies' need for people grows quadrat…

> This question always gets posted to HN, and is always the top comment whenever an article talks about how many people Company XYZ has.

Perhaps because there hasn't been a good answer yet.

> For every N people you hire, you'll need a manager to manage them, and for every N of those managers, you'll need a second level manager, and so on.

But clearly that's not absolutely necessary, because already we know that two uncoordinated companies can make 4 units with 20 staff each. If the second level manager isn't providing enough value in terms of eliminating duplicated work then they shouldn't be hired.

Of course diminishing returns are going to set in, and bureaucratic inefficiency is a law of nature, but I see your answer as more shallow a dismissal than the question deserves.

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