"As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision" Oh hey another one that takes responsibility by taking on 0 consequences.
Remember Gavin Belson? "But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."
Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
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Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#372Earlier 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.
Type A people who become CEOs don't dream of sitting around on yachts.
Some might be driven by money, but at a certain level it probably switches to a sense of responsibility, but also, it's intoxicating to be at the top where you don't really have to work in the same way, but get to direct what happens. People enjoy power. People enjoy the secrets of what happens at the top. People enjoy the recognition (within their peer group). etc...
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#373Kind 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
cream
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
hey gotta do something on the toilet
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#375For 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…
Seriously, that severance is awesome. Of all the tech workers struggling, the ones from companies big enough to throw 4+ mo severance packages are not the ones I am worried about. Any smaller company your severance is a pat on the back.
Yep. last time I got laid off, I got paid through that day. nothing else.
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#376I'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?
It always seemed common sense to me that once a piece of software became stable and profitable you would need a much smaller engineering staff than when it was being built. The opposite seems to happens and orgs 10X their engineer headcount once they start making money.
It makes sense to keep some high performers and a few redundancies to stabilize/modernize it and make small improvements, but it feels like tech got really bloated with these massive corps who were trying to burn as much as they could to keep all the VC money flowing. Take like Uber having a team that built and maintained a chat app just for internal use, and every single big org having a bunch of teams responsible for various "some_dumb_name" that is the "custom X for 'Y'" where smaller teams just use the OS solutions to those problems.
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#377For 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…
Seriously, that severance is awesome. Of all the tech workers struggling, the ones from companies big enough to throw 4+ mo severance packages are not the ones I am worried about. Any smaller company your severance is a pat on the back.
And all the debt you pile up while struggling to get hired.
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#378Dropbox my one critique is can you please make it affordable again. I just can't justify the cost as there are cheaper services out there. I don't care about PDF signing etc. I fear OneDrive/Google Drive are eating you lunch because it's a hard sell to be competitive against them price wise.
Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#379Earlier 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…
> 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…
How is my comment uncharitable?
The OP made strong statements with weak backing. Their statements were also placing blame. Your profile says you're an SRE--can you imagine a post mortem with that kind of attitude?
Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction
#380Very generous severance packages and companies/laders should be commended for this. If it's a one-and-done big cut with generous packages to save the company, then good on them.
Somehow overhiring and maintaining said headcount long enough to need to do a 20% cut is probably less commendable, but not exactly an outlier there in the current climate.
I've always wondered about all these standalone "point solution" companies and how durable the model is. In the current climate of reduce M&A, and cost consciousness there is no one to sell to. And as the big platforms - AWS, Azure, GCP continue to grow.. it strikes me that more big companies would rather have a one-stop shop full of 80% solutions than pay for 100 different SaaS.