Dropbox to reduce global workforce by about 16%, or 500 staff • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by fnordpiglet » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:54 PM UTC

rco8786 wrote: post #54

soared wrote: 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…

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

Yeah I mean who else is going to extract all the data stored in customer drop boxes and feed it into a generative AI for drop boxes benefit? First you gotta fire everyone who sees a conflict of interest and a problem with invasively scraping all their customers private data entrusted with you.

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

#342

Post by lamp987 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

soared wrote: 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…

they will harvest your data with "AI" (everything is called AI today) and sell it to insurance companies.

combined with the biden depression, this makes it a good idea to fire employees and gain this new source of income.

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

#343

Post by paxys » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

gimme_treefiddy wrote: post #313

paxys wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It does increase engineering headcount because you are expected to add a lot of features to your offering that end users wouldn't necessarily care about, like DLP, eDiscovery, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, admin controls, compliance with a hundred industry regulations (HIPAA, FINRA, SOX), key management, custom retention policies, data residency. The larger increase comes from the fact that large companies aren't using the checkout form on your website to buy the product, but expect a dedicated team to negotiate the contract and help with product rollouts and customization across their company.

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

#344

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

soared wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by rchaud » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 5:59 PM UTC

nemothekid wrote: post #267

rchaud wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't! That's the most galling aspect of this gigantic waste of money. That you're calling it a "new market" is precisely the problem --- when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back. The "metaverse" is ironically set up to be Facebook's walled garden. It has no other use, it cannot be repurposed or made modular in any way. It's not a standalon…

> when you've sunk this many billions into something, you can't wait that long before needing to make that money back. The last 15 years of tech says otherwise. Tesla is the most obvious counterpoint to this example. I don't think the Metaverse is useful, but my issue with Facebook isn't that he poured 30B into what was essentially R&D.

Tesla is an automotive company whose finances and stock valuation work on very different principles compared to an ad company like Facebook.

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

#346

Post by plasticsoprano » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

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…

Have you used Box? Dropbox offers editor and view levels with some additional options to add a password, set an expiration, download or not while Box is over here with 7 different sharing levels. I've managed Box environments and I've managed Dropbox ones and the amount of data leakage coming out of the Box environments was not only more often but much grander on scale because people kept picking the wrong level of access.

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

#347

Post by jdeibele » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

Over time I've switched from Dropbox to Google Drive to iCloud as my primary way of storing files I want backed up and/or able to be shared.

Replacing the Dropbox client with Maestral https://maestral.app meant a much happier system with a lighter application running. Also no prompts for the SD card to be uploaded.

When Dropbox limited an account to 3 devices, it made sense to use Google Drive more.

Google kept changing the naming and functionality of its client. The final blow, though, is the way that they insist on showing a screen of files instead of the folders that were carefully created.

A lot of people don't use folders very much or at all and that's definitely the trend. But it means that all the work somebody does in organizing their files is thrown out the window.

Google Drive seems like it's more and more forcing people into having a Google Account even if they use a hotmail or yahoo email address.

iCloud with a family subscription means that a family of 5 can have all of their devices and files backed up for $10/month. BackBlaze for laptops and desktops is $7/month these days so $10/month seems like a reasonable deal.

Dropbox decided that the business world was their market and that's reasonable.

For individuals, there still seems to be a market for file serving with no ads, good security and easy access for people regardless of their email domain. Say sharing photos from a family trip or the soccer games your kid played in.

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

#348

Post by UncleOxidant » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

soared wrote: 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…

> requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI

Yeah, well good luck finding people with actual AI experience right now because everybody's looking for them. They might have been better off to retrain some of the folks they're going to layoff. Hiring people with these skills can take a while. Maybe they could be bringing some folks up to speed in the meantime?

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

#349

Post by clnq » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #337

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #275

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…

Having an executive job confers high status. Being retired does not.

Wouldn't want to be Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer, Jack Welch, or Howard Schultz.

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

#350

Post by RestlessMind » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 6:07 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #141

rco8786 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine building a company that lets users store files online, seeing chatgpt released, and then laying off 16% of your company to.. use ai to store files better? I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working t…

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…

> If you want a recent example you can look at Facebook lighting almost $40 billion with their Metaverse product.

That's just your hindsight bias. Lot of companies have spent billions of dollars chasing apparently worthless product ideas. Some of them turned out to be big hits - electric car in 2009, social media based on 140 characters posting limit, online bookstore, a website to check out pics of your classmates and poke them etc.

I like the fact that Facebook was audacious enough to spend 40B dollars on trying out something new. If successful, it would have opened up a huge new field for tinkering, just like the wave of social media companies in 2009-10.