Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#331

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:26 PM UTC

nop_slide wrote: post #316

gcr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The severance packages suck. COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6. Many job searches take longer than 6 months, so employees will be left high and dry right when they need it most.

> COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6. Are we in the same industry, where are you based? I got 2 months when I was laid off last year. I also know many tech people who got just 1 month.

Agreed. "Industry standard is to offer 18 months"!! Please let me know this industry, because it ain't tech where I live!

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#332

Post by hmmm-i-wonder » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

RivieraKid wrote: post #238

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?

Those employees were costing more than the value they were creating. If the marginal product of labor is lower than the marginal cost of labor, the company should reduce headcount. If higher, the company should increase headcount.

Arguably the value they were creating was influenced by the direction and application that labor was directed at. Redirecting that available labor at something more valuable would fix that as well wouldn't it?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#333

Post by racl101 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

baudpunk wrote: post #327

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.

Anecdotal: I know a lot of people who use Dropbox, I don't know even one person who pays it. They pay for iCloud, probably cause it makes the iPhone experience even more convenient, but not Dropbox. I also don't pay for it.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#334

Post by pc86 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

echoangle wrote: post #295

bhouston wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M That is insanely low for the CEO of a public company of Dropbox's size. But I suspect he owned a lot of shares in the company so when it went public, so he doesn't need salary, it is just a rounding error in terms of his wealth. EDIT: Yeah, he is worth $2B according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/profile/drew-houston/

I always wonder what gives these people the drive to continue. Maybe I’m lazy and lacking vision but if I were worth 2B, I don’t think I would go to the office every day just to get accused of mismanagement when I have to lay people off. I would take my yacht to the Caribbean and slack off.

Some people do exactly that but it's rare that someone will simultaneously have the drive to do something that will generate them billions of dollars and also be willing or able to just stop working at that point.

Also remember once you have that much money a lot of things become basically free, both figuratively ($100,000 to a billionaire is nothing) and literally (comped rooms, gifts, etc for basically every event and your company(ies) end up footing the bill for most of your expenses).

There's plenty of people who make $5-50 million in a windfall and are never heard from again.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#335

Post by Etheryte » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

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…

In 2021, the average S&P 500 CEO made 324 times what their company's average worker made [0]. The widest gap was at Amazon, with Bezos making over six thousand times as much as the average worker at his company. The report is from a few years ago, since then the gap has increased further. So yes, many companies could trivially retain hundreds if not thousands of workers simply by cutting the CEO's pay.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/these-20-companies-have-bigg...

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#336

Post by senko » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

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…

> Companies' need for people grows quadratically in proportion to the amount they are trying to do, not linearly.

That's fine. The question the poster raises is how come they have 500 over the number of people they need, if the amount of work wasn't reduced.

As a proxy for amount of work, we can take Dropbox revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/dbx/revenue/

If those people were needed but now aren't, does this mean Dropbox plans to do less "units of work" and decrease its revenue?

I think a more convincing argument is they overhired even when taking your argument into account.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#337

Post by pc86 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #331

nop_slide wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6. Are we in the same industry, where are you based? I got 2 months when I was laid off last year. I also know many tech people who got just 1 month.

Agreed. "Industry standard is to offer 18 months"!! Please let me know this industry, because it ain't tech where I live!

It's not any industry anywhere. Any layoff thread on HN is people saying what they wish things were but framing it as "this is how everyone else does it this one company is being greedy" when it's not the case 99% of the time.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#338

Post by racl101 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

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…

If You Want To Tell People the Truth, You’d Better Make Them Laugh or They’ll [unalive] You

-- Some famous person's quote that I paraphrased.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#339

Post by kristianc » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:29 PM UTC

yojo wrote: post #215

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…

My understanding is DropBox was trying to transition from sync and share to being a multi-product document-centric company (look at acquisitions like HelloSign). One possibility is they staffed up a bunch of projects on bets that ultimately didn’t turn into viable products, and are now pulling the plug.

The problem is that it’s unclear consumers actually ever wanted Dropbox to become any more than a sync and share company, or to deal with the resultant complexity that that will bring to what has been a beautifully simple product. But they had to do that to justify Sky-high valuations.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#340

Post by UnreachableCode » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:29 PM UTC

baudpunk wrote: post #327

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.

Where do the Wu Tang come in here?

And yeah, I do not pay for Dropbox either. I've got something like 17gb from pestering people for sign ups XD