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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

#351

Post by esafak »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #215
cmh89 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals. Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods. If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at…

I think you are still trying to treat it as an engineering analysis. The question isn't "who is no longer necessary". The question is "do we think we can cut 500 roles (Y/N)" The 2nd question is a reasonable and useful business assessment. The first question is not relevant and has no real answer.

That can't be right. If you think you can cut 500 roles you then have to answer the first question.

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

#352

Post by d0mine »

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…

Use-case: ask anything you want about files stored in your Dropbox account (like https://chatpdf.com but for more files)

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

#353

Post by sarchertech »

RoyGBivCap wrote: post #291
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…

> That would be it. I won capitalism. Pet hypothesis: A lot of us say that, not being in the position to. But when you finally exit the working class and are no longer required to work, people tend to work on passion projects instead. Sitting on the beach gets boring after a while.

A passion project I completely understand. What I don’t understand is what the vast majority of wealthy CEOs are doing: let’s get 5% more people to view our ads, let’s get people to spend 10% more on cheap disposable crap etc…

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

#354

Post by pricci »

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…

A box where I drop all my documents and then I can ask questions. Seems useful.

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

#355

Post by s1artibartfast »

esafak wrote: post #351
s1artibartfast wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are still trying to treat it as an engineering analysis. The question isn't "who is no longer necessary". The question is "do we think we can cut 500 roles (Y/N)" The 2nd question is a reasonable and useful business assessment. The first question is not relevant and has no real answer.

That can't be right. If you think you can cut 500 roles you then have to answer the first question.

It isn't a driver of the decision. Who gets fired is a detail that gets worked out after the fact.

Leadership, based on their understanding and information make the decision to cut 500 and create a mandate to make it so. Then management is forced to decide who gets the axe.

It would basically be impossible to drive the decision the other way. You can't asses every individual for necessity. What would the threshold even be? The threshold depends on the number of people you want to fire.

There is no super computer that can calculate the outcome from firing \ 499 workers vs 500

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

#356

Post by malyk »

ramraj07 wrote: post #179
AJRF wrote: post #41

"These transitions are never easy, but I’m determined to ensure that Dropbox is at the forefront of the AI era, just as we were at the forefront of the shift to mobile and the cloud. We’ll need all hands on deck as machine intelligence gives us the tools to reimagine our existing businesses and invent new ones. And I'm committed to doing everything in my power to best position ourselves for the future and unlock our…

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.

if it's in your iphone photos library you can just type "passport" and then copy/paste the number out of the image.

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

#357

Post by vcryan »

iamjake648 wrote: post #327
vcryan wrote: post #322

It surprises me that Dropbox has more than 500 employees at all... that's a lot of people for a product that does one thing well that hasn't substantially changed in years... To be clear: I'm a fan. Just sincerely don't know the benefit of what could be a very targeted and strategic company in having so much staff.

I'm curious the size of the companies you've worked in, and what sort of support, legal, finance, etc requirements they've had. Companies aren't just made up of engineers. I see this same comment on every single one of these layoff threads and they always seem to be a bit disconnected.

Failed startups lol

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

#358

Post by lawrenci »

rchaud wrote: post #258
phendrenad2 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like companies are doing whatever the hype cycle demands. Two years ago it was all about having a huge headcount. Now it's about being "lean" but also "all in on AI". Smart engineers will take a 6 week bootcamp on ML and go right back to work.

Two years ago, it was Dropbox thinking that people really needed a word processor, so they built "Dropbox Paper"

That was 7+ years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Paper

Dropbox also never hired at a rate beyond their rate of revenue growth.

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

#359

Post by htrp »

https://jobs.dropbox.com/listing/4987352

>Role Description We are looking for a technical leader to help shape the Machine Learning agenda for Dropbox’s new initiatives. This will involve developing high impact ML solutions that touch hundreds of millions of people and a lot of data. From images to documents in every language, using the full range of Machine Learning techniques from deep learning, interacting with modern LLMs (natural language), computer vision, etc. and executing everywhere from mobile devices to large clusters on our back-end infrastructure.

They pretty much don't know what they don't know and are looking for someone to build it for them.

If I had to hazard a guess at the strategy, they are looking to build an in-house multi-modal model to power enterprise search.

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