Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#921

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:04 AM UTC

reverius42 wrote: post #827

wahnfrieden wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do it to suppress wages, not only because of economic instability. It’s worked - wages are down across industry. Wage suppression is one of the responsibilities of a well run business (the CEO together with HR hires consultant help for this or they hire a benefits and wages role, and it’s referred to as market positioning)

It's pretty cynical to say that wage suppression is one of the responsibilities of a CEO. But perhaps not off the mark. If only we had the equivalent on the other side to balance the equation. Some kind of a group of individual employees, who work together to counter wage suppression efforts.

historically in tech, that group is some new competitor that "disrupts the industry" and either becomes a new power respecting talent for a while, or gets bought out by a megacorp and given that huge salary once again.

That's really the main saving grace for this industry; the scalability that a few employees can still provide a solution that makes corporations with hundreds of thousands of workers sweat. That's why they surged salaries so aggressively in the 00's and half the '10's

That's also the reason why unionization will be a hard argument among tech workers. Slowly starting to happen in the games industry, so that at least confirms there IS a breaking point somewhere for that to happen.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#922

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:10 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #720

GiorgioG wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they don't. Well run companies have cash reserves and expect to have periods of ups and downs. They don't pray to the alter of the next quarterly report.

> Actually they don't then they probably should not saying I should go work for McKinsey, just noticing that unnecessary payments are likely happening. companies don't exist to employ people. employees exist to help companies. just make everyone a decent shareholder with decent liquidity and move on when the employee isn't necessary.

>companies don't exist to employ people. employees exist to help companies.

Companies in society exist to serve the customer, provide labor opportunities, and overall stimulate the economy (all of which is needed to make money).

This mentality above is exactly why the latter half of Millensials and Gen Z were demystified by the labor market and simply don't take the kind of "loyalty" narrative of the older generations. You can't talk family, layoff "family" every 2 years regardless of talent and pretend that "hard workers get rewarded". So you'll get the bare minimum, you will get no overtime when you request it (especially if you aren't paying 1.5x), and you probably won't even get the long dead 2 weeks notice when I move on.

You can't expect much more "help" when you can't give the basic modicrum of respect to your help.

> just make everyone a decent shareholder with decent liquidity and move on when the employee isn't necessary.

most jobs don't have RSUs. Not even in tech.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#923

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:17 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #633

mrthrowaway999 wrote: post #583

I'm sad to see so much venom in these comments. HN of old would have tried to delve into the details and find something to learn from this.

This literally happens every single time there is a big layoff announcement on HN; at this point it's completely predictable. People love these stories as a place to vent (not that I necessarily blame them), but I do find that these kind of stories always attract the lowest quality comments. E.g. "Why hasn't the CEO committed harakiri!" Which is always a bit sad to me because I think the biggest mistake (especially i…

we've seen so many of these stories, the same narratives (which are just that. words, not actions nor plans), and no further insight on their real reasons.

What is there to say or inquire about? The human element is way more important.

>to think that a layoff is the end of the world and the absolute worse possible thing that can happen to someone.

Short of sickness or death of a loved one, I struggle to think of anything worse than losing my livelihood out of nowhere.

I guess if I owned a house and it burned down? I can insure that at least. Job insurance seems to be dead these days.

Car accident? if no one was hurt that's much less worse. I can rent a car until insurance figures itself out.

What kind of dismissal is this? Have you ever been laid off? I'm genuinely wondering what your mindset here is when you made this comment.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#924

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:22 AM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #773

mrthrowaway999 wrote: post #583

I'm sad to see so much venom in these comments. HN of old would have tried to delve into the details and find something to learn from this.

We've learned it because we've seen this movie many times over the past couple of years (the catalyst perhaps being Musk's decimation of Twitter): it's become acceptable -- and perhaps not only acceptable but expected -- to suddenly cut a significant percentage of your workforce in order to "drive growth", with some BS platitude (the details of which vary a bit but they all read pretty much the same). It's not venom,…

I saw the venom the other way. People are losing their livlihoods and I see such dismissals as

- "You shoud have saved more money"

- "oh well you'll get a better job soon" (have not seen the job market the last 2 years)

- "They were probably low performing workers anyway, they deserve it"

- "It is what it is. Business is going to business"

- "The CEO's are just doing their job"

I hate it. We can't even come together as a community, which consists of many tech workers, to empathize with our peers. No wonder we can't rise up and bring about change from grassroots.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#925

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:27 AM UTC

mrthrowaway999 wrote: post #611

staunton wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's keep trying. What learning opportunities do you see in the details here?

Just off the top of my head: every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy. If I had more time, I would love to understand the fss market better and also what impact ai is having there. I don't see a Q3 earnings report from Dropbox, but as others have pointed out in other comments, Dropbox seems to have been doing fine financially.

"every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. "

I did. Even stretched it out to 9 months (getting a freelance gig out of nowhere helped). But it's been 13 months with no full time work.

>Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy.

It did not. Not everyone's making 300k at Google.

>If I had more time, I would love to understand the fss market better and also what impact ai is having there.

nothing short term, but the usual suspects come about as usual. Trendsetting from Twitter, ZIRP, tax code changes affecting how to amortize tech salaries, an anticipation of a downturn in the evonomy, and AI speculation (not really affecting tech, but other areas).

Those are each worth their own post, but this is againa topic talked about a lot . Since this has happened a lot.

And yes, this wasn't a layoff of necessity. That's the "venomous" part about it. Why Wouldn't I be mad at blatant greed?

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#926

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:34 AM UTC

cjblomqvist wrote: post #754

hankman86 wrote: post #463

The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is. Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are…

Du you have sources for this? Now I'm not much better but I actually think there are several studies that show correlation between layoffs and worse than average performance.

It absolutely affects morale for the "suvivors". you don't just cull a fifth of your company like cattle and expect the remainers to be blissfully ignorant. Also, top performers seeing this, even if they survive, will definitely start shopping around. It's an awful move for companies in the middle-long term. T

The titanic was warned over a day in advance. It then took 3 hours to sink. You can absolutely be sinking but look to be productive for a while. Especially if the company just wants to tread water instead of grow. And I hope they have enough lifeboats ready when that time comes.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#927

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:43 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #627

formerlurker wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, reduce people to numbers and accept the suicides?

Perhaps the better lesson is that tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea. I realize that's difficult in today's performative world, where an quick perusal of LinkedIn shows loads of people that are "passionate" about banking compliance or insurance claims or whatever. Many companies have also have fostered this false idea that companies are a "family". That is always false. Th…

>tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea.

We can talk philosophy all day long. I just want to pay rent, respecfully. People telling me to "upskill" seem tonedeaf to this.

And this isn't some thing unique to tech. All jobs dried up. I wouldn't be worried otherwise if I could find ANY work right now.

>But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with.

okay. Other companies don't. I got a month of severance and saved up 6 months.

It's been 13 months. What now? I'm not starving but only by dumb luck.

>Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.

No it results from peopel stresse on how to survive. Maybe be real and look outside the FAANG bubble every once in a while. I'm not worried about Dropbox, but everything else in this BS economy that pretends to be soaring.

I don't belive you have any sympathy given this comment. You just want blame anything except the environment and people not magically being prepared for 6, 12, 18+ months of unemployment in what was very recently a "hot market".

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#928

Post by ghaff » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:53 AM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #904

ghaff wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a former employer I (voluntarily) left. I ended up spending a good couple hours driving my 7-year old laptop which I rarely used to a FedEx dropoff and I'm sure it was promptly recycles. But I wanted make sure all the loose ends were tied up.

on the opposite side, I had some nearby management literally come to my house 30 minutes after my layoff to collect my equipement. I didn't even have time to process the layoff; I had to disconnect my entire setup, lug it downstairs, and have it ready to lug into someone's truck faster than I could order a pizza.

That's just petty and one would think nearby management would have better things to do. Whether or not people "should" a lot of folks have their personal and work stuff pretty intermixed and need time to disentangle and may not even have a personal laptop. I guess there could be an element of not wanting to give ex-employees time to copy off work info but still (and, if they're that worried, they should be able to just do a remote wipe)... I've always tried to make a point of keeping an off-work copy of anything I want to keep and isn't confidential.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#929

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 11:58 AM 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…

If this is "saving the ship", more companies need to remember what a shipwreck is.

Re: Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

#930

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Oct 31, 2024, 12:00 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #510

JediPig wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why people should build a huge ass f-u fund and not look back.

Yep, this is what I do. Individual responsibility is an unpopular idea these days but the way I look at it, I am the one who is ultimately in charge of my family's wellbeing. That is far too important to entrust to a corporation's generosity or the whims of lawmakers.

I was responsible and still got punished. What do I do?