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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

#391

Post by Freedom2 »

dheera wrote: post #62
smcl wrote: post #2

Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired 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 re…

> Nice, round number. 500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.

[dead]

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

#392

Post by grimmx »

I'd love pay Dropbox money and let them keep their workforce hired. I've used their free service for years, and WANT to sign up for a plan and pay them something, but their paid plan options are silly, I have 4GB for free, their starting paid plan is 2TB for $12CND... that's a big leap and way more storage than I need. I'd be happy with 100GB plan, or a 500GB (1/4 the size of their starting 2000GB plan), for $3 would be more storage than I need, and a much more enticing reason to sign up.

I've brought this up before to their support team. But I guess they aren't interested in small fish accounts and only want 2TB whales signing up.

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

#393

Post by osigurdson »

cableshaft wrote: post #87
osigurdson wrote: post #47

>> “ We’ve believed for many years that AI will give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work” I’ve speculated that this is the rationale behind some of the recent layoffs. Finally we get some confirmation. As a heavy OpenAI user, I think it is a premature optimization.

It didn't read to me that they're laying people off because they think ChatGPT lets them need less employees, which is what most of the fearmongering (which may in time be justified) has been about A.I. From what I read it sounded like they're making a major shift to investment in A.I. technology, and dropping departments in their company that don't align with that new direction (while aggressively hiring in the A.I.…

So the new competition landscape will be: OpenAI, DeepMind, whatever Elon comes up with and DropBox AI? Seems like a jump.

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

#394

Post by coldtea »

rco8786 wrote: post #370
coldtea wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> snark incoming - Imagine thinking you understand the product strategy for a 14 year old, publicly traded company with thousands of employees without working there or having any sort of insider knowledge. Snark incoming. Imaging a society so shitty that you have to try to "understand the product strategy for a 14 year old publicly traded company" That is, one society in which companies dont go about their business,…

I don't really understand what you are saying. That companies shouldn't have product roadmaps? That product roadmaps are mutually exclusive to sustainable growth or healthy profit? That companies using new tech are only doing so to prop up stock prices? Something else?

What I'm saying is obvious:

1. that companies should have specific product areas and focus, and not pivot all over the place, as mere profit-seeking machines.

2. that companies embrace all kinds of BS trends, hyped technologies, and empty vacuum BS solutions looking for a problem (from NFT, web3, metaverse, blockchain)

3. that companies (as in this case) also embrace valid technologies (like LLMs) that have no real application to their products, and will just retrofit them in some ugly BS way nobody asked for, just to send the signal "we're still cool, we're getting on the next bandwaggon, buy our stock"

4. that the current behavior (actually, for decades now) is not about "sustainable growth and healthy profit" but about stock market games, and about endless unsustainable growth that destroys their core offerings and alienates customers

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

#395

Post by cwilkes »

mieubrisse wrote: post #132
soared wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t really need to know their whole product strategy, I just can’t even come up with plausible uses for AI that meaningfully change the company enough to require a layoff. I disagree on tour last point, organizations that have data useful for bespoke models store it in aws/etc whereas organizations with random files that they need to share across teams use Dropbox.

There's a thing I saw on LessWrong a while ago where he says, "Before declaring a thing impossible, ask, 'Have you put 5 minutes on the clock and just brainstormed?'" In that spirit, here's me doing this about AI at Dropbox: - Get consent from users and train a personalized AI on user files, to answer questions like, "Where is my meeting with Thiago?" - Provide built-in support for number crunching on unstructured me…

Those are great applications of AI. Still doesn’t explain about how DropBox canning 1/6th of the company will help them do that.

I can see DropBox making some interesting features for their products around AI. That’s going to require manpower to do it. Manpower that’s probably a little nervous about staying at a company that just did layoffs.

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

#396

Post by oxfordmale »

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…

There are many good use cases for AI, however, permissions is not one of them. The current gen AI makes things up and would likely give a member of the cleaning staff super admin to allow them to clean the data.

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

#397

Post by oxfordmale »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #284
qsort wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are loads of options and it's too easy to get something "wrong" if you inadvertently miss checking the right checkbox. This seems the exact opposite of what the current crop of AI is good at.

The AI doesn't need to be the end-all-be-all of defining permissions. But it's not hard to imagine a couple of areas where AI could help: 1. Letting users enter desired permissions setting in a natural language, and then the AI recommending checkbox settings, and, importantly, explaining these settings. 2. Useful as a monitoring/alerting system for DLP. Most DLP systems already use some sort of machine learning for i…

There is a reason permissions are not defined in natural language. Language is imprecise and that is why security is so hard to get right

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

#398

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

oxfordmale wrote: post #396
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…

There are many good use cases for AI, however, permissions is not one of them. The current gen AI makes things up and would likely give a member of the cleaning staff super admin to allow them to clean the data.

People aren't arguing that AI alone makes all the permissions decisions. It's not hard to see a big leap from DLP solutions, which currently already make copious use of machine learning, to permissions auditing, monitoring and recommendations in the first place.

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

#399

Post by zdbrandon »

dhammack wrote: post #292
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #177

So hopeful. People are so hopeful that AI will pan out favorably for them, even when their arguments are a stretch. On this thread, there’s the following sentiment… “Dropbox has access to your data so they are well positioned to do some AI stuff on your data.” But also you have your data so you could work with really any party you want, and Dropbox has few advantages by being an existing custodian. Custodian status p…

On the broader point though, there certainly are some companies that have access to unique datasets that they can take advantage of. Meta and Google come to mind as obvious ones, probably Microsoft too. Apple I'm less sure given their privacy stance. Any others?

Apple's stance of "it never leaves your device" seems to be working so far.

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

#400

Post by Obscurity4340 »

samstave wrote: post #188
LightHugger wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will use AI to scan your files so that they can do things with the resulting harvested data.

EXACTLY AI is allowing for massive monitization of what was previously "flat file" style data. Dropbox, as I mentioned, has always 'not been you friend' - now they are just a more powerful 'not your friend'.

That's why there's Cryptomator
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