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

#381

Post by abledon » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

time_to_smile wrote: post #163

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…

I have a hard time believing you have serious experience working in a tech company anywhere near leadership. I've worked at a pretty wide range of tech companies throughout my 15+ year career. When I was young I would ask myself "what is leadership thinking!?", my realization later in my career was simply: "oh, they're not thinking" 14 year old and younger tech companies have only existed during a tech boom period, w…

remember dropbox "Paper"... what was that?

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

#382

Post by palata » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

ditonal wrote: post #294

hbn wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain still hasn't had a killer app that made people want to use it. LLMs do. Guess we'll see if it's really flexible enough to fit into a lot of business models, but it's not exactly the same thing. I don't see it as the wildest thing that say, a corp using cloud storage might want an LLM trained on all their documents so instead of searching for where X employee who left the company 3 years ago stored some inf…

Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto br…

Disclaimer: I think that we should not use blockchain (here we disagree), and I am not a big fan of generative AI (I think we kind of agree here).

> I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can [...] say "there's absolutely nothing there".

Blockchain doesn't solve anything other than cryptocurrencies that was not solved better before. But that leaves this one thing: cryptocurrencies; blockchains does enable cryptocurrencies in a way that was not possible before.

The problem I have with cryptocurrencies is that I don't want them. That's not a technical argument, that's more a preference of what I believe society should do.

So there is not nothing, but web3 is bullshit IMHO.

> You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work.

Well, it's hard not to be excited by something that you don't really understand but that may bring you money. Doesn't mean NFTs are desirable. BTW you talk about them in the past, so somehow you do realize that apparently they were not desirable enough to survive, right?

> Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations

I totally agree with that. I don't want Big Data to steal my data, use it to train models, and sell that back to me. I wish there would be a way to account for copyright and licensing in a decent manner, but I fear that the rich will win (that's capitalism, right?).

Just as much as I believe that Bitcoin made more harm than good, I believe that generative AIs have the potential to make more harm than good. The problem is that companies don't think about whether they should do something - only whether it is profitable. And people typically love to not think about it and just happily try and support all those cool techs.

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

#383

Post by hbn » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:28 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #379

hbn wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually g…

For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table. Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Fi…

I mean I'm not arguing that I shouldn't have to pay. I just think the tiers and prices are bad.

If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."

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

#384

Post by occamrazor » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:39 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #312

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Dropbox in particular excels at sharing documents with others outside your company, but that is also where there is obviously the most risk. > Currently, I find Dropbox's enterprise permissions management tools pretty difficult to use. These two sentences were one after the other. So which way is it?

Dropbox can be at the same time the best solution and nevertheless hard to use, if the other solutions are less powerful or more confusing.

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

#385

Post by justeleblanc » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:41 PM UTC

stefan_ wrote: post #65

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says “about 16%”. I don’t think the number in the article should be taken as an exact count. > it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves". Any big layoff involves, or is possibly the result of, shifting goals. Company goals change, especially as chang…

When one number is given as exact, and the other prefixed with "about", your intuition is that the exact number is not in fact an exact count? That is very odd.

What were you expecting? Scientific notation with error margins? "We fired 5×10²±5 employees"?

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

#386

Post by somsak2 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 9:43 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #345

nemothekid wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

if it were actually valued as an automotive company, it wouldn't have anywhere close to its current valuation

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

#387

Post by nathants » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

pdntspa wrote: post #99

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…

Really tired of how everyone is always trying to take over the world. Can a utility just stay a utility?

shareholder primacy. it’s not the only strategy, but it is the most common.

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

#388

Post by nathants » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

cronix wrote: post #302

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…

> I really don’t see how new ai capabilities lead to big layoffs and new opportunities for Dropbox. "Mr. Robot, categorize our customers in a monetizable way by inspecting the data they hold in their accounts."

this is a good argument for e2ee for a non technical audience.

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

#389

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 11:12 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.

Or Amazon.

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

#390

Post by Freedom2 » Thu, Apr 27, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #89

travisgriggs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe happy for employees 501 through 504 who were on the chopping block, but because Round Numbers Are Nice(tm), got to keep their jobs!

But they went from comfortable but low performers, to literally the worst 5 employees in the company.

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