Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#351

Post by racl101 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

UnreachableCode wrote: post #340

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

Dropbox ain't nothing to duck with.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#352

Post by GrumpyNl » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

colesantiago wrote: post #122

paulcole wrote: post #5

I’m 22 and work on a 3-person team so it’s hard for me to imagine why a company would more than 4 or 5 total employees.

> I’m 22 and work on a 3-person team so it’s hard for me to imagine why a company would more than 4 or 5 total employees. You're not wrong. I've seen companies with less than 10 employees make around $9M ARR within the first 3 years, and some with around 50-100 employees that can't even reach 100K ARR. The smaller your startup the more faster you can go, Dropbox's main issue is that they haven't implemented Founder M…

Looks to me, they started to over engineer their product, just for a storage platform, you dont need 2500 people.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#353

Post by randomdata » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

galactus wrote: post #308

randomdata wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "they have much more responsibility and risk" Perhaps you've misinterpreted that statement? It is the board that takes on greater risk with executives as compared to other employees. The executives are given the keys to the kingdom, which means only an exceedingly small group of trusted individuals can be considered for the job. By the transitive properties of supply and demand, when supply is limited, price goes u…

The thing is, high executives have become a self-perpetuating class entrenched in corporate boards, this is the reason CEOs comoensation keeps skyrocketing, not supply and demand. And this entrenchment obviously also stifles accountability.

How does this self-perpetuating entrenchment not become a factor in what establishes the supply and demand, instead managing to exist as something off to the side?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#354

Post by renewiltord » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:32 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.

Yeah but if you were worth $10m, $100m, $250m, would you take it easy? If you would, then you wouldn’t get to $2b.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#355

Post by 7thpower » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:32 PM UTC

golly_ned wrote: post #172

This is a great severance plan. 1. 4 months pay + 1 week per year of tenure. 2. Receive Q4 vests. 3. Upcoming approved leaves paid in cash. 4. Year-end bonuses paid. 5. Keep company devices.

It is a great deal. The core demographic of HN has been very fortunate and does not understand what the norm across industries is.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#356

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:33 PM UTC

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #287

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. If you're actually good at your job, you typically end up with an even better job: https://hbr.org/2018/10/research-when-getting-fired-is-good-...

The linked article is specific to executives and kind of confirms what most are complaining about here. > a 10-year study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition. Despite that, 78% of these executives eventually made it to the CEO role. An executive can make a series of awful decisions and still…

Most employees can as well - IFF you move to different companies.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#357

Post by 39896880 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:33 PM UTC

racl101 wrote: post #338

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.

You’re allowed to say kill on Hackernews

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#358

Post by echoangle » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #334

echoangle wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, it’s probably that this drive is what allowed them to be billionaires in the first place.

Just to rant a bit more: the Wordpress situation makes this point even more crazy to me. Mullenweg has about 400m and instead of retiring and enjoying life, he’s arguing with anonymous users on Hacker News. No offense against hacker news but defending my life decisions on HN isn’t exactly the first thing I would do if I could do everything I ever wanted. Like, go buy a plane and take flying lessons, or go scuba diving? Nah, I’d rather justify myself on the internet.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#359

Post by jchw » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

bbcbby wrote: post #329

I don't understand why people are still using dropbox. pcloud is one time payment and much less expensive. Why would people still use dropbox?

Lifetime licenses for cloud services is the worst deal imaginable. Even if you're not getting billed, you still cost the service money to continue using it. It's basically the same as a freemium model, except when you get rug pulled later, you're also out the money you paid on a "lifetime" license.

Plenty of examples of how long "lifetime" licenses really last in the modern era. See TeamViewer for example.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#360

Post by duped » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 3:35 PM UTC

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…

> Layoffs suck and no one wants to do it, but sometimes it's needed to save the ship.

Layoffs are the trolley problem but you get to pick how many people are lying down on each side of the track and if you want yourself to be one of them.

That said, if one reaches the conclusion that under their leadership they were forced to downsize by 20% (either due to over hiring, failure to reach revenue/growth targets, whatever) that should make that person one of the people on proverbial tracks. Compensation has little to do with it.