Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/an-update-from-drew

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

518 1024 2 years ago

blog.dropbox.com

"As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision" Oh hey another one that takes responsibility by taking on 0 consequences.

whyenot• 2 years ago

Whoa whoa whoa, he’s only taking responsibility for the decision.

mv46• 2 years ago

... and the circumstances that led to it!

Brosper2• 2 years ago

I mean yeaaa... it's just work. In big corporation. What do you expect from them? He will get bonus for "savings".

throwCursive2• 2 years ago

Resign? That's the obvious answer right?

mv46• 2 years ago

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."

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

There was so much that was disgustingly spot on in that show.

hylaride• 2 years ago

Was that the same scene where he said "Their failure is my fault...for trusting them."?

I just about had to change my underwear after that scene.

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u48vYSLvKNQ

same vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiKuxfcSrEU

mattmaroon3• 2 years ago

What consequences would you like CEOs to take on when they have to do layoffs?

malfist2• 2 years ago

Resignation. If they made a big enough blunder to need to lay off 20% of their staff, they're not capable of leading the company.

Why do we think they'd do any better next time if there are no consequences to their poor leadership?

qeternity4• 2 years ago

Genuine question: what do people want from a CEO in this situation?

What consequences do you want the CEO to face? A token reduction in pay? Being fired?

elric4• 2 years ago

Step down. Forfeit stock/options/golden parachute.

cma2565• 2 years ago

The latter. If you can not manage the company correctly and it leads to the job losses of hundreds of people not to mention the millions in salary that was wasted by their poor planning then yes they should be immediately relieved and not allowed to run any other company. They are clearly incompetent.

Considering dropbox is not facing some economic recession outside of its control we can only blame the CEO's incompetence.

hiddencost2• 2 years ago

50% pay cut

putting an employee elected representative on the board

negotiating the layoffs and severance with employees (e.g., giving folks the opportunity to voluntarily take layoffs to reduce the number of involuntary layoffs).

Jleagle• 2 years ago

How about not getting a bonus? Last year he got around $1M in bonuses.

triceratops5• 2 years ago

Meaningful reduction in pay, especially stock.

If they overhired so much the CEO has wasted a ton of shareholder money. Pay for performance, right? Perform poorly, you should expect less pay.

pizzathyme5• 2 years ago

I ask this myself. What is the point of both doing layoffs, and then also firing the CEO? That next person will probably be worse, won't have the learnings of the layoffs, and would probably increase chances of layoffs happening again.

KaiserPro• 2 years ago

The same consequences that a person lower down the ranks would have.

For example, if I lead a team that fails, the team will be disbanded and I will be either fired or demoted. (obviously if there are external factors I/we might be reprieved )

If the CEO leads an aggressive strategy that doesn't playout, they rarely get fired and certainly don't get demoted.

bigstrat20038• 2 years ago

At a minimum, don't say "I'm taking responsibility" when you aren't facing any consequences whatsoever. If an executive wants to talk like that, they best put skin in the game. Otherwise, shut up.

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

He should be fired.

If the company miscalculated, or mismanaged, to the degree that it suddenly has to cut 20% of its workforce in order to survive (or give shareholders what they want), then yeah, that's a pretty big mistake, and your head should be the first one to roll.

I bet you'd have a lot fewer CEOs calling for mass layoffs.

coldpie5• 2 years ago

They should face the same consequences as the people they are firing. Lose their health insurance (or pay COBRA), have a few months' worth of expenses in the bank, have to find a new job, that kind of thing.

I suspect you wouldn't see these comments if CEO pay was on the same order of magnitude as the people who actually work at the companies they run. Watching someone treat your livelihood like a toy, while also being rewarded with more money than any person will ever need, is a bit grating.

surgical_fire• 2 years ago

Something like this, maybe?

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...

I mean, this is actually taking responsibility for your decisions as CEO.

pizzathyme5• 2 years ago

Unpopular opinion, but I don't understand this type of comment. It sounds like people want executives to get some kind of punishment or pain as a consequence of laying people off.

But what would that even look like? A fine? That would probably make no practical difference, and would discourage them from making changes that need to be made. Fire them? Then you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver seat going forward, who also didn't learn from experience of going through layoffs.

Layoffs are awful. They affect lives and families deeply. But all businesses don't go up and to the right forever. Reductions are a necessary part of running competitive companies.

aprilthird20215• 2 years ago

Why can't the executive taking responsibility also take a pay cut and tighten their belt the way they expect the company to and the people who they've fired do?

ziddoap2• 2 years ago

They say "I take responsibility" and then.. don't take any responsibility. It's insult on injury.

How big of a bonus will this CEO get this year? Last year?

black_puppydog• 2 years ago

yeah, taking a personal financial hit on this would go some way to at least pretend to actually have tried preventing it. Not sure about this particular CEO's salary, but I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't finance a few engineers' salaries by cutting the CEO's, without it even hurting very much.

Not saying it's enough, not saying that's the only way, but I find it peculiar that this seems to be unthinkable.

Shank• 2 years ago

But what would that even look like?
Iwata ran the Kyoto, Japan-based video game company [Nintendo] from 2002 until his death in 2015. To avoid layoffs, Iwata took a 50% pay cut to help pay for employee salaries, saying a fully-staffed Nintendo would have a better chance of rebounding. [0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-sal...

netsharc• 2 years ago

Probably: just leave out the full-of-shit sentence...

There's an Indonesian joke based on the word "responsibility" which is "tanggung jawab". "Tanggung" in this context means to carry the consequences, and "jawab" is to answer. One can say to a friend "We have to share this responsibility. I'll do the answering, and you'll do the carrying of the consequences."

evoke4908• 2 years ago

A CEO should not be rewarded for recordbreaking layoffs with recordbreaking pay raises.

growse• 2 years ago

It's simply pointing out that "I take full responsibility" is empty, meaningless rhetoric and serves no real purpose.

It's often offensively insincere.

triceratops5• 2 years ago

Fire them? Then you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver seat going forward

Why?

who also didn't learn from experience of going through layoffs

That's actually a valid point. We don't commonly fire normal employees for mistakes. The counterargument is CEOs aren't normal employees.

marcelsalathe• 2 years ago

Agreed. But just say that. No need to pretend taking responsibility, which is defined as facing consequences when things go bad.

“As CEO, I’m truly sorry to those impacted. But I strongly believe that this change is what is needed now to make sure Dropbox can thrive in the future.”

tacticalturtle• 2 years ago

I think a start would be to stop saying the phrase “I take full responsibility for this decision” if you aren’t also publicly taking a pay cut.

There’s no need for a CEO to bring themselves and their feelings into the conversation. It’s this weird attempt at empathy that fails, because the CEO isn’t making any sacrifices.

Just say that there are layoffs. Most rational people who have been in any business for more than a few years recognize them as an unfortunate part of the business cycle.

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

100% agree, but the opposite is what happens.

Mass layoffs -- unless the company is actually tanking and on its last leg, which isn't the case with any of the tech companies who have been doing this recently -- cause the share price to rise. CEO pay, or at least bonuses, are often tied to the share price.

So a CEO is rewarded instead.

vundercind4• 2 years ago

I think it's an outlet for general frustration with the justification for high executive compensation (and returns on capital, for that matter) often being "they have much more responsibility and risk" when the actual downside is typically nonexistent, and even if there are consequences, the outcome is something like "LOL still richer than any ten of you combined will ever be", i.e. the "risk" is all fake.

mv46• 2 years ago

Yes, sometimes reductions are necessary. However, layoffs isn't the only way to reduce variable costs.

lr4444lr• 2 years ago

It sounds like people want executives to get some kind of punishment or pain as a consequence of laying people off.

No - as a consequence of poorly planning cost controls. It's not that the people don't need to be laid off for the health of the company, but that the executives who made the bad decisions don't get the boot along with them, in favor of more cautious or frugal leaders.

lm28469• 2 years ago

But what would that even look like? A fine? That would probably make no practical difference, and would discourage them from making changes that need to be made. Fire them? Then you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver seat going forward, who also didn't learn from experience of going through layoffs.

Well they're the one asking to "take responsibility" here, the fact that they claim responsibility yet nothing happens is exactly why people don't like this phrasing.

Also who the fuck else can be responsible anyways ? The cook ? The guy who mops the fucking floor ?

Eric_WVGG2• 2 years ago

Yeah that opinion is unpopular because it's deeply stupid.

“you would probably get a worse decision maker in the driver seat going forward, who also didn't learn from experience of going through layoffs” or you would maybe get a better decision maker who didn't have to layoff — or hire unnecessary — workers in the first place? Ridiculous speculation.

Responsibility without consequences just means failing upward. That's why we have a gilded executive class of people who are barely qualified to run a local Taco Bell franchise.

fullshark• 2 years ago

The point is words mean nothing from the C-suite, and are just tools to accomplish whatever labor/public relation goals they have.

a01232• 2 years ago

"Unpopular opinion", sure, how brave of you.

Simple: they sure love to talk a big game about responsibilities and taking responsibilities. Until it's time to actually do it. For the good of the company of course (if the company is in such dire straits, as the most highly paid employee - and probably not the hardest working one - why don't you take a big pay cut? For the good of the company of course).

That's what people don't take well.

It's amazing this still has to be explained.

zo12• 2 years ago

It's the grey goo of manager-speak. It rides both sides, but never truly picks one.

The other two options: blame employees(someone not you), or take some form of punishment as an individual.

I too do it sometimes, and I feel bad each time. I at least tell people what it is and that it's just the reality of the situation. I'm not gonna commit career suicide and jeopardize my family's livelihood but I also won't blame them. So I follow the meaningless middle road where the status quo mostly stays and we all at least learn from it.

hshshshshsh• 2 years ago

You can make money by either reducing head count or coming up with plans that involves generating more money with existing workforce.

Obviously you as a CEO failed at doing second.

Now question is do you fire yourself and try to get a better CEO or you choose to fire 20% and generate more profits.

If it's up to the workforce they probably choose to fire CEO. But if it's upto the CEO he choose to fire the 20%.

rurp• 2 years ago

Taking a hit on their giant salary seems completely reasonable to me. Having skin in the game makes people perform better in all sorts of cases, and I don't see why a CEO would be different.

Do you also object to sales reps or athletes making less money after a long period of performing poorly?

consteval• 2 years ago

It sounds like people want executives to get some kind of punishment or pain as a consequence of laying people off

Um... yeah. Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I want.

I used to work at a Dairy Queen. One dude there had been working there for a couple years. Unfortunately, one shift his drawer came up a dollar short. Our cutoff was 5 cents - a nickel - over or under. He was immediately terminated, of course.

He cost the company one dollar. A Dairy Queen cashier making minimum wage is held to a higher standard of accountability.

mrthrowaway9997• 2 years ago

People come in two flavors: conflict theorists and mistake theorists.

Conflict theorists think that every event is a result of power struggler. So if someone gets hurt, someone must be punished for that.

Mistake theorists think that the world is complex and sometimes bad stuff happens because most people operate with good intentions most of the time. Often, that means no punishment needs to be metted out.

To mistake theorists, conflict theorists look like ideological blood thirsty savages. To conflict theorists, mistake theorists look like enemy troops.

This is a gross oversimplification but it always shocks me to see how much more conflict theorists there are on hn now than before. So many comments here blaming the CEO or capitalism, most of which are going off extremely scant information.

flappyeagle6• 2 years ago

Your right. He should commit ritualistic suicide by slashing his belly with a short sword.

whamlastxmas• 2 years ago

While still titling it “A message from Drew”

game_the0ry• 2 years ago

Word. If CEOs were to actually take responsibility, they would fire themselves.

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

Stack ranking is back masquerading as (bi) annual layoffs

threetonesun• 2 years ago

It's more fun now though, because instead of being tied to individual performance, you need to make sure you're on a product team that is going to survive the cuts.

nextworddev2• 2 years ago

That was actually the norm prior to 2010. Tech was never supposed to be a stable career due to inherent innovation risk

jimberlage• 2 years ago

Honestly, this doesn't strike me as a bad layoff announcement, with one caveat.

I’m writing to let you all know that after careful consideration, we've decided to reduce our global workforce by approximately 20% or 528 Dropboxers.

Should be replaced with

I’m writing to let you all know that after careful consideration, we've decided to reduce our global workforce by approximately 20% or 528 people.

You should never use your pet names for employees in a layoff announcement. It makes an otherwise serious announcement seem tone-deaf.

giraffe_lady2• 2 years ago

Don't want to remind other workers that they share something with these workers. Solidarity can be contagious.

mv46• 2 years ago

It is my observation that most unicorn execs become tone-deaf and out of touch very quickly. Something about human nature.

Buttons840• 2 years ago

It's to remind them they are beloved "Dropboxers", and are part of the family... before terminating them.

hunter2_• 2 years ago

I've never been a big fan of any such language, regardless of layoff context. Do enough people prefer it that it's actually a net win for business by way of improved morale or whatever? I wonder if it's been seriously studied.

Then again, I'm also of the mind that email addresses (or whatever other contact methods) ought to belong to functional areas/positions rather than to people (other than for person-specific topics such as time off, personal development, etc.) so turnover doesn't lead to questions of where to send questions/requests. I assume this is an unusually inhumane outlook!

malfist2• 2 years ago

So beloved that they're willing to sacrifice them on the alter of stock price

qsi• 2 years ago

I agree it's actually a well crafted layoff announcement. I wouldn't even faulting for using Dropboxers. If layoffs have to happen there are much worse ways of announcing and implementing them than this. Still very unpleasant if you're affected... (been there...)

brk2• 2 years ago

The employee pet name shit is just really tired at this point. It's as bad as the job postings still looking for Rock Stars or Ninjas or whatever.

They're not Dropboxers, they're not associates, they are employees. Pretending otherwise is foolish on both sides.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

Dropbox was where I first encountered the infantilization of the workplace, with animated emojis all over your biannual performance review. It was a shock, having come from a real company run by adults. Now everyone thinks this is normal, at least at companies that use Slack where 40% of the traffic is animated emojis.

paulcole• 2 years ago

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.

giraffe_lady2• 2 years ago

Don't worry your imagination will develop over time.

colesantiago2• 2 years ago

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 Mode yet. I am willing to bet that that there are jobs in Dropbox that doesn't need to exist.

GrumpyNl• 2 years ago

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

surajrmal• 2 years ago

Software is complicated. If you keep writing new functionality, maintaining it slows down your ability to write more new functionality. Eventually if you want to ship more new features and not wait an extraordinary amount of time to do so you need more people. This doesn't scale super well so your headcount grows non linearly.

Companies develop a lot of bespoke features used by a handful of their customers. It might not be obvious to the average person what all of those features are. Additionally just scaling software to continue running with more customers using the product is not a trivial task as well. Adding more servers or making servers beefier only works until it doesn't.

skwee3573• 2 years ago

Being sorry - check

Takes full responsibility - check

Layoffs are still there

yieldcrv2• 2 years ago

how would you like the next CEO to handle it, for reference?

wahnfrieden2• 2 years ago

Conversion to worker coop

CoolGuySteve• 2 years ago

I would like for there to be a next CEO

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

With the resources that would otherwise be given to the excised one, is a good start

realusername• 2 years ago

A 20% layoff means either the market changed very very quickly or something went terribly wrong in the company strategy. Here it's the second scenario and I'd expect the CEO to be on shaky grounds after such bad results.

There needs to be more explanation on where the CEO screwed up that badly and the consequences for the management.

skwee3573• 2 years ago

These words mean nothing really. I expect the next CEO to not use meaningless phrases. How does "taking responsibility" works in his case? What does it even mean other than PR fluff?

randomdata8• 2 years ago

By letting a lower rung employee take the responsibly. This is giving CEOs a bad name and is only one step away from the board taking the heat.

glimshe• 2 years ago

If he was responsible for the conditions that led to the layoff, he could also resign.

BossingAround3• 2 years ago

How about describing what exactly taking full responsibility means for them in that particular situation?

Saying e.g. what is the impact on the situation for those responsible might be nice - no bonuses for next year? A plan in place so that this doesn't happen again? Stepping down as a CEO?

I mean, if I take responsibility for e.g. wrong tax filing, I pay the fine penalty, and/or go to jail.

Saying "I take responsibility" some kind of failure while having no consequences for said failure is not taking responsibility.

stonemetal12• 2 years ago

Stop saying "take responsibility" if they aren't actually.

If you knock a girl up and you "take responsibility" it means you getting married.

If you are in a car wreck and you "take responsibility" it means you are paying for repairs.

If you commit a crime and "take responsibility" you are going to jail.

So if a CEO is "taking responsibility" it should be something like that second case, dollars from their own pocket to the effected party.

coldpie5• 2 years ago

They should make whole those affected, as best as possible. The CEO, who is the responsible party by their own declaration, should distribute their personal wealth to those affected until all parties have approximately the same amount of wealth.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

Take a pay cut. Return last year's mega bonus.

Clent• 2 years ago

Claims to take full responsibility but since he has not resigned he has not taken any responsibility he has just said the words.

SoftTalker4• 2 years ago

That's not what it means.

As CEO, it's his responsibility to make/approve the decision to do the layoffs, or not. The buck stops with him. That's all that it means. It doesn't mean he's liable for any hardships.

TomK32• 2 years ago

Avoided the "20% more space at Dropbox" headline - check

layer83• 2 years ago

I was hoping for a 20% price reduction.

my_berner• 2 years ago

I think we'd all collectively blow our minds if a CEO said "I take full responsibility for the bad decisions and overhiring, so I'm resigning"

FirmwareBurner12• 2 years ago

Would the CEO resigning or getting laid off, make your situation any better if you were one of those laid off?

Feels like a weird hill to die on, and more like a crabs in the bucket mentality that doesn't change anything in the grand scheme of things. In the end I'm still unemployed and whatever happens to my ex-CEO doesn't change my situation one bit.

As I grew older and experienced my share of layoffs, I stopped caring about what happens to those responsible for me getting laid off, as my energy is better spent on improving my situation and my life instead of ruminating how Krama vengeance would make me feel better.

BoredPositron• 2 years ago

Took the responsibility right to his bank account.

Brosper2• 2 years ago

Anybody from Poland will be layed off?

mytailorisrich• 2 years ago

We continue to see softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business

In plain English it means sales are crashing with no change forecast in the immediate future.

electriclove2• 2 years ago

Company isn’t doing so great and future doesn’t look so great and people cost a lot of money so they are letting folks go who aren’t as valuable. This makes sense.

airstrike• 2 years ago

What doesn't make sense is hiring so many people to begin with. The writing has been on the wall about Dropbox for quite a while now

electriclove2• 2 years ago

Agreed! So many of these companies hired needlessly over the recent years.

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

Dropbox makes over 600 M per quarter and about $2.53B per year. They dont need to do layoffs. This is a choice to desctroy jobs to temporarily enrich shareholders to the detriment of the company itself. Classic short-term decision making. https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/dbx/revenue/

randomdata8• 2 years ago

Financially, perhaps not, but maybe the product is now done? I mean, what more can you really add to the service at this point? There is still work to do with maintenance, support, etc. but that doesn't require the same level of employment as when you are still building.

brk2• 2 years ago

How is it to the detriment of the company? I've been a dropbox subscriber I think since they launched. Over the years they've added some nice features here and there, but I feel like at this point they could scale all the way back to server admins and sustaining engineering and be perfectly fine. This is another case of I can't imaging what all of those people actually DO day to day.

absoluteunit1• 2 years ago

The severance package is great!

I don’t think I would be upset (unless I was extremely passionate about a project I was working on)

BossingAround3• 2 years ago

Really? 16 weeks of salary, or 4 months of pay. In my country, you get 3 months of pay as standard when you're fired from your job. Doesn't seem that great to me to be honest.

ahstilde• 2 years ago

It sounds like it's 25% better than what you get in your country?

nsxwolf3• 2 years ago

In the US, the minimum required is usually zero. The most I ever got was 4 weeks.

aprilthird20215• 2 years ago

In big tech in the US, 4 months is usually enough to find another similar job in the industry. Also in the US for mass layoffs at big firms, the minimum is effectively 2 months because you are required by law to give 2 months notice to workers about such layoffs, 2 months severance is a way to not have to give such notice.

Epa095• 2 years ago

But are you not expected to work those 3 months? 4 months of pay without work is decent, but not amazing.

ramraj072• 2 years ago

US salaries are quite a lot more; lifestyle creep is a thing but at least for developers they get paid a lot more than the average worker in the US than say in the Europe. Factoring that, 4 months is amazing.

opjjf• 2 years ago

Do you earn SF salaries in your country?

yellow_lead2• 2 years ago

I dunno. It may take 1-2 months to prepare for Leetcode style interviews, and this can be pretty mentally exhausting. Every time you fail to solve a leetcode question, it feeds your imposter syndrome, which is probably even worse due to getting fired.

FredPret• 2 years ago

If leetcode wasn't hard enough to make a good programmer fail now and then, there would be no point to it.

pembrook3• 2 years ago

Wow, that's horrible. And you might even have to stay at a 4 star instead of a 5 star resort in Bali when you take a vacation during your severance, job market is tough.

Even worse, you might have to miss one contribution to your FATfire investment account to deal with the extra risk. Compounded, that missed contribution might mean you'll have to retire at 46 instead of 45.

How dare these companies treat these people this way. They took the massive risk of working for an already-successful company at $250K/yr with a $200K stock package, and now fat cat Drew Houston dares to leave them with just an abnormally large severance after they are no longer needed.

bigstrat20038• 2 years ago

With all due respect, that sounds like a personal shortcoming to me. One can (and should) not take interviews personally. One also can (and should) be able to acquit oneself well at an interview even without prep time.

gwbas1c• 2 years ago

16 weeks + 1 week / year severance works out to 3-5 months.

Looks like enough time to prepare, take a vacation, ect.

harimau7772• 2 years ago

Considering how horrible the job market is right now, four months of pay may not go very far.

reverius423• 2 years ago

I've heard of folks with 10+ years of experience not finding work in 9 months or more.

gcr3• 2 years ago

This is a bullshit package because of the healthcare.

I was laid off from a different company with access to 18 months of COBRA. Dropbox is offering a third of that. Lots of job searches take longer than 6 months, so the employees are going to be left high and dry right when they need it the most.

For the non-Americans, my COBRA expenses are about USD$2,000/month for me and my partner. I’m paying as much for healthcare as I am for rent. Even so, it’s still financially better to take COBRA than pay out of pocket for my prescriptions.

erikw• 2 years ago

All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.

sct202• 2 years ago

I wonder if they meant paid COBRA of 6 months, bc 18 months is like the minimum to offer continuing coverage. COBRA coverage is a Federal Law for large employers.

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-a...

"Q11: How long does COBRA coverage last? COBRA requires that continuation coverage extend from the date of the qualifying event for a limited period of 18 or 36 months. The length of time depends on the type of qualifying event that gave rise to the COBRA rights. A plan, however, may provide longer periods of coverage beyond the maximum period required by law."

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

The severance package is great!

that's a function of how low the bar is in the US

_sword• 2 years ago

Makes sense and was only a matter of time considering it has essentially no revenue growth to date this year and Non-GAAP margins in the low-to-mid 30's %. With near-0% revenue growth, investors will expect a SaaS company to post 40%+ margins.

recroad2• 2 years ago

TIL that nobody knows what they're doing.

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need? What is management exactly doing during the time they went from 1 excess person to 500? Did they just hope the "macroeconomic headwinds" would become tailwinds? Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work, and maybe we should deal with that problem instead of hiring another team to place even more bets?

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.

Honestly, I would not hire a single manager from these big companies because they operate in an environment where they're playing with monopoly money and don't know what reality is. There's something to be said about spending within your limits and not splurging on the next shiny object. Way back when it was called cost control and operating within a budget. All that management theory seems to have been lost in the age of cash injections and valuations based on everything except retained earnings.

bhouston5• 2 years ago

Dropbox is public and has actual profits. I think your comment is not accurate.

Instead I think the company has plateaued in growth and thus they need to cut back spending otherwise they will have falling profits and no growth - which is worse than just no growth.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Are their targets reasonable? Or are they reaching for fundamentals that don't exist as a storage utility?

(Dropbox customer, pls just sync and store my data reliably)

Edit: Reply was as I expected, thanks bhouston, agree they are potentially at the mature stage

osigurdson• 2 years ago

Yeah, I just had a look at dropbox stock. I would have expected permanent cash hemorrhaging, but no they have a P/E of 15.

aprilthird20215• 2 years ago

how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

Not sure if you are serious or not, but understanding the output of knowledge workers is a famously difficult task.

FirmwareBurner12• 2 years ago

understanding the output of knowledge workers is a famously difficult task

That's why large companies don't look at individual worker output (performance reviews are mostly performative and subjective) and just look at stock prices and profits.

If "line goes up", it means workers as a whole must be doing a good job , even if individually many might not be good at their jobs, but as long as line goes up, nobody cares to look too deep into the hows and whys.

If line stops going up, then they start laying them off more or less randomly or forcing RTO, or such things regardless of individual performance.

jumping_frog3• 2 years ago

I have a offtopic but related question. Why are our taxes still calculated in stepwise bracket manner. Why not a smooth curve? We have the mathematical and technical knowhow to implement it. Coming back to the Dropbox layoffs, why was this decision a drastic stepwise reduction. Not a smooth curve over a period of say 1 year.

colechristensen2• 2 years ago

If you're running a SaaS that isn't customer-interaction heavy, you can usually get away with dropping about 80% of your technical staff (if, of course, you pick the correct 20%, which is not easy).

Having worked in several startups through the early growth stage, it's just surprising how much you don't get more done with, say, a 500 employee company than a 50 employee company.

There is a ton of room to grow less and maintain more, and it's a real struggle for a business to decide its product is done with major growth and the associated need for a large staff.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

Staffing your business (or even team) with the right number of people to accomplish a job is a real challenge that the majority of managers don't engage with, instead simply trying to grow their little kingdom to the largest size they can, both for intrinsic power reasons, and also to foster greater jobs for themselves later on.

If I see a manager put "led a team of 40" on their resume, in the interview, I ask "did you need 40 people? Did you need more, did you need less, and how would you have found out?" and the number of times this completely catches them off guard is staggering. It's like... did you choose that number for a reason? Or was that just the most you could fit in your budget?

And sure many hands make light work, but there's an inflection point where the sheer weight of your organization becomes a liability, where getting anything done or changed requires the involvement of so many people that most just don't bother unless it's an emergency. That's how you get corporate rot, and that's how you get all the massive companies we rag on here about all the time who have been making like, 5 products since before most of us were born that everyone fucking hates but everyone uses because everyone else does.

voisin5• 2 years ago

Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work

Product roadmap probably had some ambitious ideas that got scrapped when earlier steps proved to not be marginal revenue generators.

Jobs said it best: Dropbox is a feature not a product. All their efforts to make it a product (let alone a platform!) have worked against usability and alienated a lot of users. I am hopeful these layoffs signify a return to sanity in a company that seems to be leading the charge in racking up unforced errors.

tootie• 2 years ago

They were (I think) first to market with fast, cheap cloud storage but at this point there's just too much competition and not enough differentiation. I have only the vaguest awareness of them trying to build some value adds to make Dropbox more of a collaboration tool, but I've never seen it get any adoption. I'm guessing those are the LOBs getting cut with this announcement.

throwaway3133732• 2 years ago

I mean, imagine that you are leading a team of 4 people.

Are you sure that you will always be able to accurately tell if you need a fifth person or not?

Or you have a team of 5 people. Can you tell if you have a one too many?

tyingq• 2 years ago

Maybe not. But typically natural attrition rates would let a hiring freeze take care of most of this. Layoffs are kind of normal current day, but a 20% layoff is not.

spamizbad• 2 years ago

People are hired to deliver what's on product and/or engineering roadmaps. If the roadmaps are less ambitious, it becomes pretty easy to justify headcount reductions.

It's also less labor intensive to focus on a few core areas, making smaller incremental improvements than doing that PLUS launching big ambitious greenfield projects.

Also, remember how people used to say "Startup X is a bad idea because <established tech company> could just clone you in 6 months"? Well, those ideas are now back on the menu for entrepreneurs because bigger tech firms are now running too lean for quixotic defensive plays like that.

cj• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

It's actually a pretty simple risk/reward equation.

The risk of understaffing a company is greater than the risk of overstaffing a company.

If you overstaff a company, the solution is quick and easy. If you understaff a company, the solution is extremely painful and takes a very long time to fix.

E.g. it takes 1 day to fire someone, but 9 months to hire/onboard someone. So to ensure the staffing isn't a bottleneck for growth, the obvious answer is to err on the side of overstaffing.

TLDR: You need to hire and onboard people before you actually need them. If hiring and onboarding someone takes 9 months, you need to guess how many resources you'll need a year from now, and hope that your estimation is accurate. (And obviously a lot of companies over-estimated how many people they would need, hence lay offs)

wakamoleguy• 2 years ago

It has been even more than 500 excess employees. 300 were laid off in January 2021, and another 500 in April 2023. The percentages imply that headcount bounced around from 2800 down to 2500, up to 3100, down to 2500, up to 2600, and now down to 2100.

These same macroeconomic headwinds have existed for some time now, and the fundamentals of Dropbox’s core business commoditization haven’t changed for the better.

tonyedgecombe• 2 years ago

I wonder how many staff they need just to keep the lights on. I bet it's not more than a tenth of what they have now.

elif• 2 years ago

This is literally every startup I've ever worked for. Grow before you need to, constantly expand your market. This is like 101 stuff

golol• 2 years ago

I suppose it is the following: 1. Maybe they didn't over-hire but instead the economic conditions changed. 2. Maybe instead of gradually letting go of people it is best to wait and then strike once and hard.

uhtred• 2 years ago

The problem is we live in a society now where everyone has a public platform to promote themselves (linkedin etc) and there are a lot of ruthlessly ambitious narcisists who put self promotion and resume building ahead of everything else.

So they muscle into a team lead or manager position and grow the team, because it looks good to post on linked in "hey I'm growing my team" and it doesn't matter if the team needs another person.

And who cares if the company is then stuck with surplus employees, not the person who hired them because they have moved on and up at another company.

coldpie5• 2 years ago

Actually, I know why. It's because they have too much money

Money was almost literally free for like a decade. I'm so glad that era is over, and I hope it never returns, but the period of adjustment as businesses discover that they have to actually have a business model again does suck a bit.

stevenAthompson4• 2 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but why would very low interest rates ("almost free" money) be a bad thing we want to avoid?

Isn't it for best if society keeps interest gathering, rent seeking, behavior to a minimum and instead encourages that more of the available capital is put to good use?

mrthrowaway9997• 2 years ago

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 operate in a perfectly legible world, especially more so when it comes to people. It's all bets and risks and whatnot.

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 companies. Let me know how it goes.

yojo2• 2 years ago

My understanding is DropBox was trying to transition from sync and share to being a multi-product document-centric company (look at acquisitions like HelloSign).

One possibility is they staffed up a bunch of projects on bets that ultimately didn’t turn into viable products, and are now pulling the plug.

debacle• 2 years ago

The problem with DropBox is that it can't really compete with Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Amazon Drive, etc. It's too narrow of an offering.

dangus5• 2 years ago

I think what people forget about layoffs is that all those "excess" employees who have been there didn't sit around doing nothing during the time they were there.

Those 20% of Dropbox staff wrote a bunch of code, made a bunch of sales, and did a lot of other tasks that will have an impact even after they don't work there anymore.

Even though they are being laid off, their contributions still have a positive impact on the company. Even the government treats it this way from a taxation basis: software that is written by engineers is treated as a depreciating asset that is amortized over 5 years.

In other words, if I write some code that consumes $100 worth of my labor, that engineering work is considered by the IRS to be an asset to the company with book value from now until 5 years from now. If I'm laid off, the company still has that $100 asset on their books, which depreciates over 5 years.

It's perfectly normal for a business to plan out their future based on uncertainty and risks. If they only hired people they knew 100% they would need forever, they'd miss out on a lot of opportunities.

Extending this logic far out enough and we could say ridiculous things like "How could IBM be so irresponsible to hire hundreds of thousands of engineers to make business mainframes when their marketshare will dwindle to a sliver in 40 years?"

The truth is that businesses need the employees that they need at a point in time, and that number is constantly changing.

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

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 companies. Let me know how it goes.

This is an interesting statement. Dropbox is a single digit $billions company, not trillions.

abeppu• 2 years ago

Honestly, I would not hire a single manager from these big companies because they operate in an environment where they're playing with monopoly money and don't know what reality is.

In part, to unpack why part of this glib take is missing the complexity, "don't know what reality is", is that finding reality is slow and costly. Perhaps your team provides a platform which is used internally by several other teams building various products. It supports a bunch of use cases, but it's hard to evaluate the actual ROI of the platform you provide, both because no one knows how much better/worse those products would have been without your platform. Would they have taken months longer to implement? Would they have not been possible without spinning up a team like yours?

Further, some of those products actually are used by paying customers, and others are still in development. Of the products used by paying customers, it's unclear which they would actually pay to use vs which they use because it's available in their subscription basket (e.g. is Dropbox Paper making money or is it just that some Dropbox customers use it but would pay the same sync subscription if Paper was killed?). Of the products that are not yet in customers hands, how should you value them? If your small team supports multiple in-development products, that must be worth something even if they're not revenue-producing yet.

Similarly, suppose you're a manager who runs a team building a product which has dependencies on multiple platform/infra teams -- do you really have visibility into the real costs that your team's requests create? Can you really know the ROI of your team, to guide choices about various investments?

This kind of ambiguity means that even when leadership wants to see which teams are really contributing value and how much, it's quite difficult to see. Teams may optimistically estimate their own value because they cannot see all of the costs to which they contribute, or because they cannot see which revenue-affiliated use is actually valuable.

krisoft• 2 years ago

What is management exactly doing during the time they went from 1 excess person to 500?

It is usually not the case that these people are standing around and doing nothing. It is more that they are working on initiatives and projects which the company is discontinuing now.

When the company has a lot of money investors expect them to spend some of it in finding new directions and opportunities. It's not all just spent on keeping the lights on, and the servers humming.

If they don't do this people in 3 years will be asking "What has Dropbox been doing all these years?"

If they are doing it right you are just amazed by the steady trickle of new features and services, and improvements which keep the company relevant in the years to come.

lokar• 2 years ago

Also, factors like quality, maintainability, performance, etc are open ended and hard to measure. So teams tend to just keep improving them. Some amount is critical, some is important, some is nice to have and some is just excess.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Sometimes I think that tech world has been after "growth" for too long. Instead accepting that at some point companies are reasonably mature. After which they can do more incremental development with lot less head count growth.

mateus1• 2 years ago

That’s such a naive take. For the past 5 years at least these layoffs are not about particular projects being discontinued or even improving the bottom line. This is about how people are expendable and their priority is investors.

a01232• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

There never is an excess amount of workers (sure, there probably are 4-5 exceptions). What happens is that they need those employees, but instead are going to demand that the employees that are left pick up the slack. Which they will because they need a roof over their head.

Those companies are merely cutting costs, they don't actually have any excess employee.

mikeweiss• 2 years ago

It's not black and white like this. There is such a thing as having to many employees and such a thing as having too little. I think realistically, most of the time, it's a mix.

jumping_frog3• 2 years ago

Maybe they developed all the features they thought were necessary and now can manage the features with less workforce.

briandear• 2 years ago

Or they hire Accenture.

bottom999mottob• 2 years ago

As a recent example, when you have "the great resignation" of 2021 turn into (in my view) "the great hiring" of 2021 followed by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse of 2023, it's obvious that hiring managers just follow what is trendy.

Obviously past results do not guarantee future, but what the masses follow is generally a recipe to disaster. I think that's why we're seeing the return/visibility of stacked ranking. Management theorists see one successful company trive or a former successful company fall, and then everyone follows suite because they're "data driven," not driven by first principles

artyom• 2 years ago

In my experience a lot of hiring in those big or publicly traded companies is to "build the structure to get promoted".

When you're big, investors and banks and auditors don't like flat structures with a lot of individual contributors. A vertical structure is a must to go public. The rest is people playing the game they're forced into.

FirmwareBurner12• 2 years ago

In my experience a lot of hiring in those big or publicly traded companies is to "build the structure to get promoted".

This comment should be at the top. Not just at the top of the thread, but at the top of HN homepage.

It's how during the pandemic many companies just suddenly doubled their headcount without any extra output in products or quality, and now we're seeing somewhat of a correction to that with all the layoffs.

It's how you see people in tech hubs climb to the top of some large companies despite never having worked longer than a year at any company. Nothing against job hopping but I ask myself what skills and value people like that actually bring, who have 10x 1-year of experience, as they're never in a place long enough get to see the end results of their work and decisions, if they're good or bad, they barely pass the onboarding stage.

It's also how many of these large orgs end up failing long term. Look at Intel now, or german auto makers, as the goal of each worker there becomes gaming the system to getting yourself a promotion at the cost of the org as a whole, instead of adding value to get a promotion, since the org is very bad at setting the right goals and incentives for the workers. Google and the like who have a monopoly with an impossible moat or an infinite money cheat can resist this enshitification much much longer than the rest of the companies.

I'm not even mad, in the end most people are just playing the game, they don't get to write the rules of the game, and the ones who do are out of touch with reality so they can't be mad when people try to game it for their personal advantage.

fakedang• 2 years ago

When you're big, investors and banks and auditors don't like flat structures with a lot of individual contributors. A vertical structure is a must to go public. The rest is people playing the game they're forced into.

Might be the first time I've heard this hot take out. What makes you think banks care what the org structure is for a public company? Banks don't care for size as long as the company is fiscally prudent and can prove it. They do check silly metrics sometimes like revenue per employee, but they really don't give a damn how your company is structured. By that metric, 2012 frat club Facebook wouldn't have been touched - yet they had like 10 investment banks frontrunning their book. In fact, I'd say 2012 Facebook IPO was the trigger for a lot of banks not caring about such silly things.

As a counterpoint to your argument, there are 200-500 employee biotechs not generating meaningful revenue that are trading publicly (and which went public without a SPAC play). The decision on who gets to go public falls on the exchange, not on the banks - they simply sell your stock to their investor list, and a flat structure with fewer than needed employees is actually a great selling point for a bank.

bluedino• 2 years ago

Most companies have a bunch of people who are literally doing nothing.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

Conversely, I also know folks where everyone is redlining in the org because they cut deep and folks who can leave are able to leave for equivalent or better roles. The market isn't great, but it isn't 1999-2000 or 2007-2009 either.

If you want another job, make it a job to find it, and you will eventually find it.

jsbg• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

If you bet on growth/new features but your current and future customer base are going out of business or downsizing and you have to switch to more of a survival strategy.

mschuster912• 2 years ago

Didn't they at some point see that they have more people than valuable work, and maybe we should deal with that problem instead of hiring another team to place even more bets?

Well, part of the overhire spree was to prevent other companies from hiring the talent.

IMHO, that's both disgusting and abusive.

TechDebtDevin4• 2 years ago

Labor = KPIs not People.

flappyeagle6• 2 years ago

how about you estimate a software project to within 20% accuracy? I've never seen it happen once for anything beyond the most trivial thing. have some humility buddy

wslh• 2 years ago

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.

But that view might oversimplify things from a business perspective, especially beyond the case of Dropbox.

When a company has ample cash reserves, a common strategy is to leverage the opportunity cost. This can mean growing the team or investing in ventures with both planned and unplanned outcomes. Take Microsoft or Google, for instance: both have a long history of projects and acquisitions that might be considered failures, but these bets were possible because they had the resources to try, even if some failed to pay off. This approach acknowledges that some investments will succeed, while others are simply part of exploring new growth avenues.

Time is the resource that you cannot recover.

jeswin• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

Twitter fired 80% of their staff; and they've been releasing features faster than when they had 4x more people. I suppose work can expand to occupy whatever available headcount - nobody cares whether it's useful work or not.

CharlieDigital3• 2 years ago

What is a fiefdom without serfs?

danity• 2 years ago

There is a tendency for managers at big tech companies to want to hire regardless of need and "build an empire", so they can then say on LinkedIn that they managed n number of people. Then they will move to another big tech company, rinse and repeat. At these companies, the more people you manage is translated by higher ups to responsibility and salary. There isn't much reward to keep a team small, focused, and efficient.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

This question always gets posted to HN, and is always the top comment whenever an article talks about how many people Company XYZ has. It seems like a lot of people just have never worked for a company that's growing (in terms of both profit and the amount of _stuff_ they are trying to do). Companies' need for people grows quadratically in proportion to the amount they are trying to do, not linearly. If it takes a staff of 20 to deal with 2 "units of work", it's going to take many more than 40 to deal with 4 units, more like 80. For 10 units of work, we're talking a staff of 500. You need all of these people to manage all of the growing internal network of complexity and yes bureaucracy that forms whenever you need to get people to work together. For every N people you hire, you'll need a manager to manage them, and for every N of those managers, you'll need a second level manager, and so on. You also start needing to actually deal with legal and regulatory compliance (rather than the yolo approach most startups take), you need to deal with HR and payroll for all these new people, you need to deal with power-of-2-scaling training and internal documentation needs. And all of those people you hire to do these things need their own managers and on and on and on.

I've never seen a company successfully scale what they are trying to do without needing a ton of people. Maybe every company I've ever worked at is just inefficient but I don't believe it.

faramarz• 2 years ago

And not to mention acquisitions come with their engineers, sales staff, support and management crew.

The leadership should have been rebalancing yearly and quarterly in small chunks so they’re not in a position like this. It’s also a strategic play, while they come out with their major AI move next. That’s my guess. Gotta satisfy that board somehow

Y_Y• 2 years ago

This question always gets posted to HN, and is always the top comment whenever an article talks about how many people Company XYZ has.

Perhaps because there hasn't been a good answer yet.

For every N people you hire, you'll need a manager to manage them, and for every N of those managers, you'll need a second level manager, and so on.

But clearly that's not absolutely necessary, because already we know that two uncoordinated companies can make 4 units with 20 staff each. If the second level manager isn't providing enough value in terms of eliminating duplicated work then they shouldn't be hired.

Of course diminishing returns are going to set in, and bureaucratic inefficiency is a law of nature, but I see your answer as more shallow a dismissal than the question deserves.

senko• 2 years ago

Companies' need for people grows quadratically in proportion to the amount they are trying to do, not linearly.

That's fine. The question the poster raises is how come they have 500 over the number of people they need, if the amount of work wasn't reduced.

As a proxy for amount of work, we can take Dropbox revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/dbx/revenue/

If those people were needed but now aren't, does this mean Dropbox plans to do less "units of work" and decrease its revenue?

I think a more convincing argument is they overhired even when taking your argument into account.

dragonwriter2• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

Because circumstances change and evaluation of projections and optimal employment numbers under them change, and it's never optimal to hire enough people to actually assess that with minute-to-minute updates.

There's something to be said about spending within your limits and not splurging on the next shiny object.

There is something to be said for hiring and cutting slowly rather than rapidly in response to changing circumstances, and that is that, under the material incentives in a competitive capitalist economy, it is a poor strategy for a corporation.

Way back when it was called cost control and operating within a budget.

Guess what happens quickly when you are good at operating within a budget and the projections on which the budget is based changed and so the budget changes going forward?

alwayslikethis• 2 years ago

how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need

The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates:

we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies
(1) He may resign.
(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.
There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both.

source: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law

corry• 2 years ago

Huh? It's obvious to almost everyone that Dropbox is in a tough position in that it's largely failed to expand its offering beyond the very original product and value prop, which is also being eroded by the other major players.

So they attempted to use DB's position to leap-frog into new product categories, which require big spend on R&D and related teams, as well as new heads for supportive teams (sales, marketing, support, etc).

It's not working, so they are pulling back and re-trenching.

That all seems pretty transparently NOT a "having too much money" problem.

ben_w• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

One of my dad's anecdotes, back when he was alive, was when he was interviewing someone for a job.

"Why did you leave your last position?"

"After six months, management noticed my entire floor was doing the same thing as the next floor."

rsynnott• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

Often with this sort of thing, the company is essentially sacrificing future revenue to cut current costs; projects get delayed or cut, but, hey, the balance sheet looks better for a bit!

The other reason it happens (and here the cuts would mostly be operational and sales) is if the company just isn't getting as many customers as it had expected.

slightwinder2• 2 years ago

Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

What you need can change over time. As I remember, Dropbox acquired a bunch of companies of the years, so maybe some of them originated from there. They also had many new products and tried to move into new directions, which probably also brought many new people.

anon29111• 2 years ago

As a former engineering manager this is obvious, in my opinion. Companies don't really like laying people off and PIPs are long and require work. If someone is underperforming, hiring a new person is easier. Alternatively, instead of retraining someone, hiring a new person is easier, and you just keep the old guys around doing whatever. Plus, once in a while they might actually offer something (they typically are very knowledgeable about past decisions)

Given how much money there is in these industries this strategy works for a long time.

The alternative is a harsher work environment that is common in other fields. Despite the popular belief on this forum, tech work has some of the most genteel management of all industries.

daft_pink• 2 years ago

i wish they would focus on what the users wants instead of making their client more and more invasive, and when I complain about it just explaining that they have a lot of privacy controls and I shouldn’t worry about their invasive client.

i would love to use dropbox over icloud, but I just want a drive that works and a way to turn off all their weird features.

vkazanov• 2 years ago

this is a good deal, better than most retention packages out there.

But why is every ceo feels obligated to use this kind of meaningless corpo speak in these emails? "Macro Headwinds", "full responsibility"?

rchaud• 2 years ago

PR-speak is the same everywhere. The audience for this is Wall St, not the general public.

dylan6044• 2 years ago

Gotta prevent panic in stockholders is the main priority of a CEO in publicly traded companies. They only concern themselves with the well being of their employees as much as how it affects the stock price.

ThrowawayR22• 2 years ago

Because they risk getting punished by angry shareholders and risk lawsuits and risk losing customers if they deviate from the corporate speak to say anything substantial.

teeray• 2 years ago

Responsibility would be the CEO also taking 4:1 odds on retaining his job.

bhouston5• 2 years ago

If you look at its earnings they have appeared to plateau and there isn’t a major offering planned that will change this.

I am reminded of Slack which has a similar history of rapid growth followed by a very competitive market and then significant slowing. Maybe Salesforce could acquire Dropbox and bundle it into their offerings or some other similar company?

aprilthird20215• 2 years ago

Slack shot their own selves in the foot iirc. They were miles ahead of any competitor, employees loved it, and then they just started gouging all their whale customers in contract negotiations, to the point that they started looking elsewhere...

If this isn't the full picture, let me know. I was at multiple companies trying to move away from Slack as the cost was not justifiable

mschuster912• 2 years ago

MS Teams was a large contributor as well to the downfall of Slack. It automates decently with the stuff most companies already have (AD, O365, and most importantly all that compliance bullshit), and nowadays it can even do landline telephony, providing enterprises with a way to reduce their exposure to Cisco crap on top of it.

In the end, Microsoft is IMHO once again abusing its stronghold on the market. Just the enterprise-compliance-integration stuff is more than enough to cause any medium or large company to move off of Slack or its competitors (e.g. Mattermost).

umeshunni2• 2 years ago

What are they moving to, though? I can't imagine that Teams is any better.

trmanb• 2 years ago

Crowded space, macro headwinds and too much middle management. It was difficult to foresee in 2020, but regarding the macro headwinds (elephant in the room) perhaps some billionaires should adjust their donation patterns:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/02/17/here-...

magicalhippo• 2 years ago

We’ve heard from many of you that our organizational structure has become overly complex, with excess layers of management slowing us down.

So we're making more significant cuts in areas where we're over-invested or underperforming while designing a flatter, more efficient team structure overall.

So a lot of middle management getting let go then?

umeshunni2• 2 years ago

That's been the trend at many companies recently. Cut a middle layer and consolidate.

GenerWork2• 2 years ago

Per Google, Dropbox had a net profit margin of 17% last quarter. Are they really hurting that badly that they have to lay off 20% of the company?

throwaway2037• 2 years ago

For a software services company, that margin is pretty low.

tschellenbach2• 2 years ago

Google rule of 40

GenerWork2• 2 years ago

I did, and found that it's supposed to apply to early stage startups. Dropbox isn't an early stage startup anymore. At what point will investors have to be content with lower returns that are still in double digits and better than the vast majority of companies?

elric4• 2 years ago

I'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?

jamil72• 2 years ago

It might be 500 middle managers which you can't do much with.

elric4• 2 years ago

It's not. And that's not a very nice take on something that's affecting 500 people (and their families).

dylan6044• 2 years ago

But which people: the sales/marketing, the developers that actually make the product, across the board? At some point, development gets to a stable and solid product, so revenue increases come from staffing up sales/marketing. So does that mean you can reduce the devs to try and increase new users or that you've overstaffed the sales/marketing? Maybe there's just too damn many middle managers? Will the cutting be a surgical blade or a broad axe?

siliconc0w• 2 years ago

I'm a libertarian in most things but I still don't like layoffs from profitable companies.

Like it's probably not good for our society that people have to up end their life every few years and probably move to find a new job.

Both my parents stayed in the same job for their careers and it meant they could stay in the same place, have kids, build ties to the community, etc. Seems important if you want to not die out as a society.

steveBK1237• 2 years ago

Both my parents stayed in the same job for their careers

My father was the same, BUT.. this is an INCREDIBLY risky thing to do career-wise in the modern era. Given how much tech advances and that we actually face international competition that a lot of our boomer parents didn't during their career, I don't see really any going back either.

Some of the worst layoff situations I've seen were guys who worked in the same company for 25 years.. long enough that their knowledge & skills was too company-specific, but not long enough to retire. Just because someone seems indispensable doesn't mean they are safe.

Having to drain savings for 1-2 years jobless after a layoff in the last 10 years of your career and reset at a probably lower salary can set back your retirement 10 years.

alluro2• 2 years ago

Fully agreed - yet, we as a society consistently and systematically trade (or let "others" trade) much more critical aspects of life, such as quality of air, water, food etc. for short-term profits, even though that very often has no clear/direct positive impact on any other comparably valuable aspects of our lives.

So it's no wonder that "some people losing their jobs and needing to move for a new one" is irrelevant, when the only goal is profit maximisation, even though we don't even understand what for.

randomdata8• 2 years ago

Like it's probably not good for our society that people have to up end their life every few years and probably move to find a new job.

The thing is, Dropbox is done (as in feature complete). Like when the construction of a building completes, many people are "laid off" because they aren’t needed anymore. Yeah, you need to keep some people around for things like maintaining the building, but not to the scale of the original workforce required to build it.

It is "good" that the excess labour is freed up to go work on the next "building". What may not be good is that the workers didn't think to associate with each other like construction workers do. Construction, being a much more mature industry, typically keeps a clear separation between the workers and the building so that then construction is done the entire excess group of people can be lifted on to the next project instead of all going their separate ways.

Software will undoubtedly go that way eventually. But it is, in the grand scheme of things, still early days for it as an industry. We haven't yet learned the lessons that older industries have.

asah• 2 years ago

As one friend put it, he "works for Silicon Valley Inc, <name of company> division."

ramraj072• 2 years ago

Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff. Of course they rarely succeed in doing that, but the idea is that these people should have been let go anyway but weren’t for various reasons.

_whiteCaps_• 2 years ago

That hasn't been my experience. I usually see the senior people with higher salaries being laid off.

At one company I worked at, a whole division got laid off because the director didn't like the manager of said division.

beezlebroxxxxxx3• 2 years ago

Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff.

In my experience, this is often an after-the-fact rationalization by people who "survive" layoffs to explain them, and a convenient justification by leadership for layoffs. If you've ever been in the room when layoffs are planned or discussed, the actual process is way more focused on blunt cost, personality of the people involved or on the chopping block, and is often practically a tossup considering "performance" is not really a clear or meaningful metric (actually, more often it's arbitrary for most companies --- they will find the metric they need to justify laying off someone). This phenomenon is greater the bigger the company and the more abstracted managers and leadership are from their lower level employees.

srockets3• 2 years ago

Many times the marching orders were to fire the high earners, assuming that the remaining, less well compensated workers, could together do the same work for less.

hello_moto• 2 years ago

For a company of Dropbox stature, "often" they target the people that get paid the most.

There are rationales behind it. The simplest one is that the product is matured enough so you don't need these so-called 10x engineers or seniors.

Then the lowest performers.

RivieraKid2• 2 years ago

Those employees were costing more than the value they were creating.

If the marginal product of labor is lower than the marginal cost of labor, the company should reduce headcount. If higher, the company should increase headcount.

hmmm-i-wonder2• 2 years ago

Arguably the value they were creating was influenced by the direction and application that labor was directed at. Redirecting that available labor at something more valuable would fix that as well wouldn't it?

vundercind4• 2 years ago

That is the current orthodoxy, yes.

Whether in the long term this is net-beneficial for a given actor in the typical case, is at best unclear. This marginal-labor-cost/benefit-in-a-given-moment accounting misses a large proportion of the harmful effects of a layoff.

When a bunch of companies in one sector do it, it does lower wages and reduce labor power to e.g. demand better working conditions. That part, is a benefit for companies. But it's not the result of one company doing what's best for their particular situation—it's a result of coordination, even if only by the understanding that "this is what you do, when there's an excuse to, and especially when you see others doing it". It's merely best practice then, not... collusion.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

Yes, but not in a way that blames the workers. If a product improves but margins don't (because say, interest rates), you have employees who all perfomed above expectations that can still get taken off because the current environment can't make money on anything through consumers (who are getting less buying power and cutting non-essential services).

I'd hope tech workers on a community like this could empathize with other tech workers in such an environment.

MrHamburger• 2 years ago

It is basically showing that company is out of ideas, so only thing which they mange to do now is bean counting.

ericmcer2• 2 years ago

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.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

once a piece of software became stable and profitable you would need a much smaller engineering staff than when it was being built

This is not generally the case, except in monopoly situations.

Your software product generally has a competitor, and they're busy trying to make theirs better than yours -- whether with more features, better integrations, whatever it is.

So your staff size generally stays about the same in order to build more features desired by customers to prevent customers from switching to your competitor and you go out of business. And certain features, by themselves, can be more complex than the entire v1 of a product. And/or involve massive refactoring, etc.

The companies that get to reduce their team size are often because they're in a monopoly position, and then customers suffer because the software gets stagnant and the features they need don't get built. That's capitalism failing.

Also, something like an internal chat app isn't always a bad decision. If your company is above a certain size headcount, it can literally be cheaper to build small tools than to license them. Especially when you can more deeply customize and integrate them, which you often simply can't with off-the-shelf software.

smileson2• 2 years ago

For real, at some point running development and product teams cracking on features for no reason is a real negative

software can generally be 'done' in the same way building a skyscraper can be

InkCanon2• 2 years ago

The present value of your org is your old products, all futures gains are from new products. The tech industry is littered with tombstones of companies that sat coasted on the success of an older product. Conversely there's a fascinating habit of really smart people in the right environment (Google, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC etc) to create things of enormous value. Things that were just a side project include AWS, Slack, the transistor and transformer architecture. All these companies are really trying to be incubators for the next 100x thing.

majani2• 2 years ago

What you are talking of is only possible in companies where the founder didn't take VC investment. Once you take VC money, you get on the treadmill of infinite growth to satisfy investors. That makes companies do strange things in pursuit of this impossible goal. Like hiring for the sake of showing growth in headcount, hiring people to branch into unrelated verticals, hiring people with big resumes just to say you have them on the team etc

crabbone• 2 years ago

Why not? Some companies do try this. It rarely succeeds though. The reason is that re-education en-masse, restructuring of the chain of command, re-allocation of resources are hard. Most businesses at some point enter the phase where the inertia is the strongest driving force: they only need to apply a tiny fraction of initial force to keep the lights on. At this point, trying to restructure is bound to be very hard.

Maybe, if the company can foresee and realistically assess the problems it's about to face, it may gradually prepare for the transition. I've seen this happen at my friend's job at Dell storage division: some storage product failed, they tried to reshuffle the teams to start working on something else, with some code reuse from the previous one. It still didn't go well, and a lot of people were still let go (because the initial effort of developing a new product cannot really accommodate an army of various kinds of extra personal that's necessary for mature product). They sort-of survived, but with a huge loss.

Hilift• 2 years ago

Remember Better, the mortgage company? They were briefly notable for laying off 900 people on a Zoom call. However, no-one asked why a re-envisioned mortgage application/process was failing in the best possible market. My opinion is Dropbox most valuable commodity is the millions of Windows PCs with a system level scheduled task that is vulnerable to "hijacking"... basically they are a data stream.

kshahkshah• 2 years ago

It was not failing in the best possible market. Better was a successful lender for mortgage refinancing. Better struggled to establish itself within the purchase market which has far more complex relationships.

beezlebroxxxxxx3• 2 years ago

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?

I think a lot of the low hanging fruit in tech has been eaten up, bought up and consolidated, or actually was recognized as much more difficult and expensive than they actually thought. The leadership talent and vision in a lot of these companies is also painfully lacking. In short, to answer your last question: probably not. And I think they're terrified that Wall Street is going to notice.

aylmao• 2 years ago

I agree with both comments. ~500 can surely build some amazing tech, smaller teams have done more. I personally do think there's still a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit left, especially with the boom of possibilities due to AI, or simply what one can do with modern CPU/GPU performance, new browser APIs, modern tech factors, etc.

I also do agree and think leadership talent and vision in a lot tech companies is painfully lacking. This are the companies that could burn some money and use their wedge in the market to build some really cool things, but they wont. I guess to some degree, ironically, the money they're making might be part of the problem.

InkCanon2• 2 years ago

The "exhausted low hanging fruit" model IMO has been wrong since the industrial revolution. The fundamental problem is it's based on the heuristic of fixed demand + technology saturating the demand. It's really the opposite - technology is an ever expanding fractal, and the larger the surface area, the more things are needed. For example compilers are having a huge boom now because hardware is increasingly performance demanding and heterogeneous.

slightwinder2• 2 years ago

Every new product or market usually also needs additional investments, maybe even new workers with relevant domain knowledge. And Dropbox did try new products and markets, but what if it's not working out? Should they continue until money runs out?

And some interesting part of this announcement is the mentioning of the grown overcomplex management. This kinda smells of some shrinking for health-benefits. For some reason or another, they grew into a wrong direction, and maybe now remove the unhealthy parts to be able to operate better.

jayd16• 2 years ago

What's the alternative? Busy work and shrinking equity value until things turn around or I get a much more abrupt layoff?

I think I prefer the severance, the full disclosure, the opportunity to find another job and the possibility to keep teams together at a new thing.

elric4• 2 years ago

It may well be that there is no alternative. Maybe Dropbox did try everything, maybe tried to let those 500 people work on producing different products or on finding other sources of income, I don't know. And I get that it's important for a business to keep itself afloat. But it's a recurring phenomenon in larger tech companies that I find puzzling.

Many of the answers in this thread have been perfectly reasonable. And I'm probably kidding myself when I think that "if I were that CEO, I'd do things differently".

anon29111• 2 years ago

The company could put them to some use, or they could get capital and launch their own ventures. It's equivalent from a market perspective, except the one you suggest requires unnecessary coercion (forcing the employees to work on something they may not have signed up for).

At the end of the day, the american market place is distinguished in that venture capital, especially in tech, is very accessible. Being laid off seems to be a bonus in the hunt for VC money.

It's the same reason companies return dividends. Sure, they could use the money for R&D and launching a new product, or they could send the money to investors so that they can scour the marketplace for a new technology of their own choosing for investment. The first one unnecessarily takes investor money for a project they may not have signed up for, whereas the former maximizes their freedom to invest in what they find interesting

ac29• 2 years ago

I'm always a bit confused by profitable companies with (presumably) large reserves laying off lots of people.

According to their financial statement, Dropbox has more liabilities than assets. So yes, they have a large cash reserve, but with an even larger debt offsetting it its hard to argue they are in a good overall financial position.

ilamont• 2 years ago

A new product, a new market, a spinoff.

Five or 10 years ago, they were doing a lot of this. Dropbox Paper ("a collaborative online workspace that allows you to create, share, and edit documents and notes with your team") for one. It's still active but it never took off. I was just notified that there is some sort of migration taking place which is probably related to the RIF.

bsimpson2• 2 years ago

They also bought that indie email app that was a peer of Inbox.

Neither exists anymore.

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

Interestingly enough, I once worked at a company that saw how huge amounts of money could be made taking the exact opposite approach.

This all came about because this company had built a couple of hugely successful, and profitable, enterprise software products. So this company then decided to plow a ton of money into building out other products. The company was also pretty famous for having a high employee bar, and their college recruiting process was kind of legendary for attracting top CS and other tech grads.

However, this company discovered that building follow on successful products, even with lots of really smart people, is extremely difficult. As a not-perfect analogy, think of all the "one hit wonders" out there in the music industry. Beyond those one hit wonders, the vast majority of the rest are basically two hit wonders. Point being, once you've built a really successful product, even if you have tons of smart people, there is no guarantee that plowing money into another product will give you a positive ROI.

So this company realized this, and then saw there were a lot of other small-to-midsize software companies who were similar: they had one or two really successful products, but then were trying to use money from that to expand and grow into other areas, usually with little or no success. So this original company pivoted their business model: they went out to buy these "one hit wonder" software companies, immediately stopped any investment into other products, laid off as many people as possible and outsourced the operations and maintenance of the few successful products to low-cost locales (at the time, India and China) and then essentially just milked the subscription revenue until the product slowly petered out. That is, they weren't really investing in big new features in the product, but the product had a lot of existing customers who didn't (or couldn't) move off of it right away, so often they had at least a couple years of milking the existing revenue dry. I called it "the world's most successful and depressing business model".

My overall point in telling this story is that when you ask "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?", that often times the answer is "Correct!" People tend to underestimate how difficult it is to build successful products, even if you've already knocked one out of the park.

bsimpson2• 2 years ago

"Killed by Google" has a similar problem.

Google has killed products that could be entire companies if they weren't attached to the Search Ads firehose.

A $100 dinner could be an annual splurge if you're making minimum wage, and an arbitrary Tuesday if you have a quarter million dollar salary.

Executives think the same way about revenue streams. When they have one product that makes $$$$$ in revenue, they think "not worth my time" to consider another that makes $$. Really frustrating for the people making and using the lower revenue product, but it's why Google feels like a "billion users or bust" company.

sgerenser7• 2 years ago

Was the company Computer Associates (now part of the Broadcom conglomerate)? Sounds exactly like their playbook.

Seattle3503• 2 years ago

My guess is Oracle.

monero-xmr• 2 years ago

It’s better for cash cow companies to acquire startups with PMF and real revenues. Let the market experiment and then pay for the successes. Investors and founders win, the company doesn’t waste it pretending to be a startup. Any other cash should be returned in dividends or buy backs.

teqsun• 2 years ago

Was this Insight Software? I usually wouldn't ask since you didn't volunteer the name, but seeing as throwaway is in your username I'd figured I'd ask.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

So this original company pivoted their business model: they went out to buy these "one hit wonder" software companies, immediately stopped any investment into other products, laid off as many people as possible and outsourced the operations and maintenance of the few successful products to low-cost locales (at the time, India and China) and then essentially just milked the subscription revenue until the product slowly petered out.

well that's just a dreadful experience. Couldn't innovate so they instead became a very alluring anglerfish with no intent to help stimulate the American economy at all. Successful and depressing business model indeed.

Such a shame how little respect tech gets unless we're spamming buzzwords to rich people. really ruined the reputation of "tech will make everyone's lives easier!"

nitwit005• 2 years ago

I had a product manager at Salesforce tell me he went around trying to build support for a new reporting product. He was eventually taken aside by some coworker and told they don't build new products at Salesforce, and bought companies instead.

And they did indeed later buy multiple companies, including Tableau, in that space.

GrumpyYoungMan• 2 years ago

Which can make business sense if you take into account both the probability of the project failing to deliver a competitive product (always high no matter how slick the pitch deck is) and the probability that it gets no traction in the marketplace even if it is as good as the competition. Buying an existing successful product and its customer base can be much lower risk even if it is the more expensive route.

Ray20• 2 years ago

bunch of talented people

Very bold assumption

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

Why do people still think like this? Have we not had enough layoffs these years from nearly all companies in tech with so many configurations to realize that this isn't just targeting new or incompetent people?

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

It absolutely says a company is done innovating, and shouldn't expect any large growth from now on.

And somehow, the P/E of its stock almost always increases... Forcing it to double down on growth, that it can't do anymore.

Corporation governance is broken nowadays.

kermatt• 2 years ago

Companies become myopic past a certain stage.

New products take time to mature into revenue generating things.

Cost savings from layoffs are immediate.

Manuel_D2• 2 years ago

Dropbox was barely cash-flow positive (basically meaning profitable excluding equity compensation) when it had its IPO. It's been having trouble expanding from the consumer space into the business space, and I wouldn't be surprised if its profits are slim.

Also, they've repeatedly tried to create new products. Carousel, Mailbox, and others. Dropbox has had little to no success outside of its core business. While it does that core business very well, it has stiff competition, and the market seems to be already tapped out.

quitit• 2 years ago

I feel like leadership and vision are lacking at DropBox, so they don't have any good ideas of what to do with the staff they've got. They should be exploring new opportunities which leverage the skillset of their existing employees, this would diversify them from the effects of OneDrive and GDrive.

For example with AI alone we've seen an incredible number of new file services dedicated to just serving models, and DropBox has totally ignored that need.

Instead they regularly add bitsy, poorly implemented, "us too" features to DropBox which adds friction to common workflows - then provide no way to customise these features away for people who do not want them.

Perhaps to them they see this as evolving the product and keeping it relevant, but their approach doesn't address why Google and Microsoft are eating their lunch, nor does it take their eggs out of one basket.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

They could, but they would need to be paid as well; a new market, spinoff, product, etc are all investments, and all investments are gambles.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

We're in "safe money mode". A.K.A they want as few people working on as sure a bet as possible. Likely overworking those few people in the process.

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?

not the shareholders. they never cared about clever engineering. Not unless [buzzword] is involved.

switch0072• 2 years ago

I expect to see more of this as companies see their disappointing revenue projections as we approach a common end of FY.

GiorgioG4• 2 years ago

Spineless executives with their corp speak - they're layoffs.

colesantiago2• 2 years ago

It seems that after the rampant hiring spree in the 2020s, it could benefit some business leaders to implement 'Founder Mode' in their organizations.

Surely that should fix things?

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Kind of crazy that Dropbox has 2600 employees no? What do they all do? Isn't Dropbox finished?

I guess there's a very small number maintaining the core Dropbox stuff and most of them are working on speculative projects to increase revenue (e.g. this Dash thing they mentioned)?

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

Kind of crazy that Dropbox has 2600 employees

No, the HN consensus is they are massive geniuses for moving out of AWS. Nobody here ever accounts for the extra datacenter, hardware platform, hardware ops, infrastructure ops, etc.

seunosewa• 2 years ago

I'm sure that they did their research before making the big move.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

This is a stack ranking layoff. They will fill the roles with new roles to teams they believe are more vital to achieving company goals. Pretty much every tech company has operated this way the last couple years. They’ve fired 10-20% and have replaced all those heads pretty much across the board.

digitalsushi• 2 years ago

and then after the first full clock cycle, middle managers are hiring people to fire them, to keep their core dev team intact so that it can solve problems that take longer than 90 days

golly_ned• 2 years ago

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.

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

You know what's better than a great severance plan? Keeping your job.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 2 years ago

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-...

gcr3• 2 years ago

You can’t be serious. This package sucks specifically because of the healthcare.

Industry standard is to offer 18 months of COBRA, not 6. Job searches frequently take way longer than that.

COBRA is a huge deal for departing employees. My single largest expense is health insurance for my partner and I, more so than even rent.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

Industry standard is to offer 18 months of COBRA, not 6. Job searches frequently take way longer than that.

job searches taking 6+ months is exactly why this whole process is broken. I I could get quick rejections and considerations, being laid off wouldn't even be that bad.

7thpower• 2 years ago

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

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

The "core" demographic of HN probably sees this as standard, if they were ever laid off to begin with. The commenters at the very least seem to be (or claim to be) on a very high end of tech that doesn't realize that not all US layoffs give you 3 months severace standard.

coding123• 2 years ago

Should companies reduce salaries instead?

kraig911• 2 years ago

Dropbox 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.

NKosmatos• 2 years ago

Exactly!!! I stopped being a customer when they lost touch with their customer base. They decided to become something else, adjust plans however they thought, introduced useless featured and all these while riding the money train. I feel sorry for those being laid off, it’s not immediately/directly their fault. It’s the management and the product responsible that should take the blame.

Destiner• 2 years ago

you're not a target customer anymore.

they need $$$ from enterprise, everything else is a distraction.

HEmanZ• 2 years ago

OneDrive/Google can afford to take a loss on you, they are effectively selling you storage at a loss. Dropbox can not do this.

sk11001• 2 years ago

Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

It's been a product for 17 years.

onion2k4• 2 years ago

A feature of what? Surely Jobs didn't expect a feature of Windows, OSX, Android, Linux, and ChromeOS to all seamlessly interact with one another.

I don't doubt that Jobs might have seen Dropbox as a feature that Apple could have implemented across the Apple ecosystem, but that's a pretty limited view of where the value of Dropbox lies.

ghusto• 2 years ago

It's a product that I was willing to pay for (until I required native E2E encryption). _iCloud Drive_ is a feature, mostly — aside from the fact that you still have to pay for it to be useful, so kind of still a product.

Steve Jobs was wrong about many things, and this was one of them.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

People bring up the old naysaying comment about DropBox from some HN user years ago like it was a bad comment.

Maybe people like bad products, and make bad products rich all the time?

You can make a good product and go out of business, sometimes through actually no fault of your own too.

I agree, Dropbox is a feature - and it shouldn't be a product.

bigstrat20038• 2 years ago

I left Dropbox when they added (and preemptively enabled) a checkbox that shared your data with them for AI training. I refuse to do business with a company that will just unilaterally invade my privacy like that. They can make it as cheap as they want, I'll never go back.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

Selling data is always the last play for all businesses that have data.

Either you never give it to them in a way that can be sold (e.g. fully encrypted), or you expect them to sell it when the leaders need to increase cash flow.

jjnoakes2• 2 years ago

Citation please, about Dropbox training models with customer data?

talldayo• 2 years ago

Funny how Hacker News spent the past 15 years laughing at anyone questioning the viability of Dropbox as a business, but then after two years in a down market half the site is begging them to be cheap again.

What's the matter? You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?

Honestly, it's a lot more enjoyable than I expected. Internet enabled, easily expandable (my setup is 5TB), can quickly setup a plex server for media, and can easily up/download any files needed from anywhere I have connection. And I feel I only scrathed the surface of potential. One of the more useful investments I made this decade.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

I stopped using them when they refused to work with valid windows paths - to wit, files and folders with emoji in their names.

Now I pay for google drive instead.

andygcook• 2 years ago

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 low to me for a tech salary). 500 employees is more like $50M/year, and probably more.

Of course, Drew Houston's net worth is ~$2B and he could technically loan Dropbox Inc money personally to save the jobs, my guess is a lot of his net worth is actually Dropbox stock that he would have to liquidate and would affect the stock price materially. He would also need to follow insider trading laws too and can't just up and sell vast amounts of stock on a whim. Most executives are on pre-approved schedules to sell any stock to avoid triggering insider trading.

The severance package Dropbox is offering is pretty good - 16 weeks of pay + an additional week for each year of tenure, impacted employees get their Q4 equity vest & prorated bonuses, everyone keeps company devices, an offer for extra time + help for people on visas, and job placement help for everyone.

Dropbox is a public company that is profitable, but not really growing through their flagship product. No growth is more or less bad on Wall Street. They also haven't really had a major hit since their initial file-sharing product and missed some shots they probably should have hit (mainly vs. Notion with Dropbox Paper, Mailbox acquisition, etc). With many systems moving away from "files" and to "cloud objects" like Figma, Notion, etc, their workhorse product might be going away over time too. They need the time and focus to find that next S-growth curve.

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

gcr3• 2 years ago

The severance packages suck.

COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6.

Many job searches take longer than 6 months, so employees will be left high and dry right when they need it most.

nop_slide• 2 years ago

COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees. Industry standard is to offer 18 months, not 6.

Are we in the same industry, where are you based? I got 2 months when I was laid off last year.

I also know many tech people who got just 1 month.

cruffle_duffle4• 2 years ago

COBRA is the single largest expense for departing employees.

Life pro tip: Do not use COBRA!!!!! It is almost always much, much cheaper to find an ACA compliant healthcare plan on your state's health insurance market. For one thing the plans will often be cheaper (though with fewer features). For another ACA plans qualify for tax credits, etc and COBRA doesn't.

When I got laid off I made one of the worst financial mistakes of my life keeping my employer's high-deductible plan via COBRA. I stupidly figured it had to somehow still work out to be cheaper than shopping for private insurance. Boy was I wrong! Between the "high deductible" part and the fact the plan wasn't able to qualify for tax credits I overpaid my medical expenses by about $10,000 over the course of a year. Had I gone with even a "bronze" level ACA compliant plan that would have been cash in my pocket that would have helped out a lot while I was looking for work.

The big reason was my medication was like $800/mo. And on my employer's plan once I hit my $3500 deductible it went to $0/mo. This wasn't a problem when my former employer picked up most of the insurance premium for my high deductible plan but with COBRA you are paying the entire premium! And for my use case, medication was my top medical expense so I was paying a hefty premium for a fancy health plan that didn't actually cover my expenses.

A "regular deductible" ACA plan would have made much more sense in my unemployed scenario as the premium was not only lower but the medication was generic and would have only been like a $23 copay!

Always, always bust out Excel and compare the full cost of healthcare on different plans. Compute the total cost of your medications, how & when you'll hit things like your deductible, what tax credits & deductions apply, etc. What made rational financial sense while employed might not make sense when unemployed or buying your own health plan. But you have to find out for yourself. Rarely does it make sense to continue paying your employers health plan via COBRA. After loosing your job you have like a 30 day window to switch plans before you will be locked into your COBRA plan for the remainder of the year -- do not dilly dally around, figure it out now!

anon29111• 2 years ago

My advice is to simply go on Medicaid.

When I was laid off in 2023, my mom and aunt told me to go on Medicaid. I thought it was a bit ridiculous since I had already made well above the poverty line, and was planning on still pulling in a substantial amount in the same year despite the lay off (I was laid off in January). I was going to pay several thousand a month for COBRA, and I thought my mom and aunt were crazy, since they are the sort to claim everyone's using welfare (my aunt retired early and is on medicaid, since her income is zero, so I guess she has some evidence to support her claim).

Anyway, so I did look into it mainly for the 'I told you so' aspect, to 'prove' to her that the social safety net did not exist as she imagined it.

However, to my surprise, it did, and within an hour of filling in the form online, I got free medicaid for my kids, and highly subsidized marketplace plans for my wife and I. In my state, medicaid eligibility is based on expected income / week. According to the man on the line from the state, even if I did end up making more, since my expected income was $0 (being unemployed), I still qualified! My wife's premium / month was like $100 (she was pregnant so qualified for more).

I did tell several colleagues about this, but they didn't believe me and forked over thousands of dollars.

In my state, medicaid is superior to my old PPO plan. For one, there is no co-pay and my daughter ended up needing major orthopedic intervention (severed finger) and we paid $0 out of a total cost of $150k. Although you're assigned a doctor, it's still essentially a PPO plan (you can see whomever you want whenever you wanted, so we stuck with our old doctors).

So, please avail yourself of the very safety net you pay for. COBRA is basically always a bad deal. There is almost certainly a subsidized plan out there for you. There's a pervasive myth that the social safety net doesn't exist in the USA and I almost lost $10k (or more with my daughter's incident) because I didn't do the obvious. I also learned that should I ever want to leave my job to start a business, I honestly really don't need to worry about health insurance.

grepfru_it2• 2 years ago

That’s actually a pretty low salary but I just looked up their revenue numbers and it’s not looking that hot. They are also hemorrhaging cash this year. His salary and the performance of the company were probably a good foreshadowing of the layoffs

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

His salary and the performance of the company were probably a good foreshadowing of the layoffs

As is standard. My recommendation to anyone that works in a corporate environment is that if you want to know whether the company will be at risk of layoffs in the future, become good friends with someone in sales. When the sales leads and activity start to drop (or growth rate starts to slow), you can usually be assured that layoffs will eventually follow. In my experience the sales folks were always the first to clean up their resumes and start the job hunt because they knew what was coming.

bhouston5• 2 years ago

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/

echoangle6• 2 years ago

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.

BonoboIO• 2 years ago

I think even the Mozilla CEO made more … I looked it up as I wrote this.

Nope … the Mozilla CEO makes 6.9M a year which is insane.

In comparison Drew is underpaid by a factor of 50 or more.

foobiekr• 2 years ago

It’s not “ridiculously low.” Before the layoff they were 2700 people. That’s like a VP2 at most large tech companies and 1.5M total comp is spot on for that level.

Workaccount24• 2 years ago

Public company CEO pay is almost always paid by shareholders not by the company itself.

It's so misleading that these "CEO compensation is 100x employee pay" stats always get kicked around like it is an apples to apples comparison. It's not.

CEO's get paid in stock which they need to redeem from shareholders. Employees get paid with cash which them redeem from the company's checking account. They are different sources of money.

It's so annoying that this keeps getting repeated, on and on and on. It's totally disingenuous.

JohnMakin3• 2 years ago

Yes, but we can all agree that stock/$ is pretty fungible and can be exchanged for goods and services in pretty much the same way. So effectively, it is apples to apples.

runako• 2 years ago

Can pretty quickly see that the CEO comp # in question is not the stock. Houston sold many times more than $1.5m in stock in 2023. The $1.5m is likely direct cash and services.

pjc502• 2 years ago

The company's checking account also belongs to the shareholders, albeit indirectly.

The remarkable thing is how readily shareholders will accept narratives which give the CEO very large amounts of compensation. The notorious $50bn is a high mark: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/06/13/tes... - but that is very much taking value away from shareholders and handing it to the CEO in huge amounts.

ericmcer2• 2 years ago

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.

eweise2• 2 years ago

Yep. last time I got laid off, I got paid through that day. nothing else.

giancarlostoro2• 2 years ago

And all the debt you pile up while struggling to get hired.

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

In many countries severance package is guaranteed by law.

duped6• 2 years ago

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.

Matticus_Rex3• 2 years ago

that should make that person one of the people on proverbial track

That's a satisfying thing to say, but as practical advice it's absolutely terrible.

Often that person's leadership wasn't the problem, but even when it was, that doesn't necessarily mean that the company will be better-off without them. And that's the question -- what will make the company most likely to be the most successful going forward? Even if the current trouble is because of some of that leader's mistakes, the answer is often to keep that leader. Sometimes it isn't.

steveBK1237• 2 years ago

Generally leaders are not going to fire each other.

So sometimes a doomed strategy will be pursued far longer than you'd expect, barring some board or activist intervention.

Some of it is self interest, some of it is hubris.. but also one can easily blame a bad run on some broader economic situation, specific competitor actions, or right strategy with wrong team (so fire the team) .. this works for a while until it doesn't.

amelius• 2 years ago

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

But they always fire the weak employees, not the ones that can easily help themselves.

Maybe we should have some laws that randomize the layoffs ...

onion2k4• 2 years ago

they always fire the weak employees

This is definitely not the case. Companies use a lot of different mechanisms to choose who to lay off, and it's rarely entirely performance based.

heyjamesknight• 2 years ago

This is a joke, right? If a company is underperforming, then the underperformers are the first to go. Market economies require efficiency. Capital flows in the direction of success. Impeding this flow with regulation is a great way to create a malfunctioning economy.

indy• 2 years ago

Isn't firing the weak employees the correct long term strategy? Especially with regards to ensuring that the remaining employees stay employed

JAlexoid3• 2 years ago

Why would you fire your best and brightest? That would be like throwing out good fruit, when there are spoiled ones.

No, it's a very poor idea to force companies to lay off at random.

s1artibartfast22• 2 years ago

Im not sure if you are sarcastic or not.

If not, I think you have a highly unrealistic opinion of who the company operates for.

infamouscow• 2 years ago

When layoffs are random, it engenders a profound sense of betrayal among those who have diligently gone the extra mile. It severs ties and creates a chilling effect, dampening the morale of those who remain.

Employees, acutely aware that their efforts might be disregarded in the next round of cuts, become increasingly disincentivized to exceed expectations. The result is a workforce more focused on survival than excellence, fostering an environment where mediocrity thrives.

Clubber• 2 years ago

But they always fire the weak employees

What you are referring to is called rightsizing and it's taught in business schools, but almost never implemented well. I would guess it's because it takes to long to figure out who's weak and who's not and they are in a hurry to cut costs.

hiddencost2• 2 years ago

Uh, drop box cost per employee is likely closer to $750k, not $100k.

pclmulqdq10• 2 years ago

That $1.5M comp package is about 2-4 employees being laid off. It's not very many people.

It's also insanely low for a CEO, but about right for the CEO of a company in decline (which dropbox is).

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew

Drew is developing a habit. 16% last year

edit: 11% before that: https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/8916/html

alberth• 2 years ago

It's less of a habit and more indication of a matured business.

Their revenue has only been growing ~5% (and slowing to just 1% most recent quarter).

When you aren't growing, you must focus on operation efficiencies.

Rule of 40, now being applied to margin.

pjmlp8• 2 years ago

Nope, MBAs have to learn exponential growth is impossible to accomplish forever.

Companies should be managed to be profitable, while paying employees and business expenses.

Anything other is a pipe dream that eventually blows up, but since only employees suffer while the MBA guys go to become CEO of yet another adventure, who cares. /s

anon29111• 2 years ago

The myth of exponential growth is not that companies can't grow exponentially forever (since that's the case for most companies) but rather that the valuation of these companies depends on exponential growth (it does not). Most public companies in the United states do not experience the exponential growth many tech startups do, but do perfectly well for themselves, their customers, and their employees.

No one is pushing for exponential growth. If a company wants to stop, declare a dividend, and be done with it, and let investors choose a new rodeo.

otteromkram2• 2 years ago

I have an MBA and am not a CEO. I'm probably better at developing software than you, too.

But, I do get a chuckle out of what you believe is a "diss," when you're actually stating that MBA holders will not only do better in life, but they'll also control your fate.

Keep that narrative alive; I love it!

apwell23• 2 years ago

$100K all-in comp (which seems low to me for a tech salary)

ic1 at dropbox is 175k and ic4 is near 500k, ic5 near 700k.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/dropbox/salaries

Do they really need such highly paid engineers? Are they really doing anything that innovative, new or first on market.

They could probably save these jobs by adjusting the comps.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

This is how Musk stripped 80% of twitter. Take that as you may.

Remember that Dropbox (like Twitter) is HQ'd in San Francicso.

thrownaway5612• 2 years ago

I still hate the fact that people can borrow money against a stock. Stock should be sold, period. That is how the market sets a price for stock, through the volume of it being sold and bought. By allowing people to borrow against a stock, let's them get the money for the stock while still holding it. That artificially increases the stock price and value.

trallnag• 2 years ago

Isn't this also the case with mortgages?

currymj• 2 years ago

probably whoever makes the loan will hedge, maybe by shorting the stock. or buying puts, but then whoever sells them the puts will hedge by shorting the stock.

if they decide not to hedge, then it must be because they don't think they're exposed to much risk, which basically means they like the stock and would be willing to own it. it feels like it mostly works out.

carabiner4• 2 years ago

Why is the CEO's TC relevant to layoffs?

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

No growth is more or less bad on Wall Street.

In other words, this is to satisfy Wall Street.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

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

wg0• 2 years ago

Not sure if it is relevant but after firing 500 people, the stock price is almost up by 2 dollars between 29th and and 30th October.

Next - we have to raise our prices.

Probably lazy money invested for gains takes its toll on the rest of the society.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

You are welcome to start a business that competes with Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon, and see if you can survive without raising prices or making bets that may not succeed and cause you to fire people.

lucasyvas• 2 years ago

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.

Ah yes, there it is. Maybe roll yourself into the 20% at least.

yalogin• 2 years ago

I don’t know how but over time all the “new fangled” tech companies have the same approach to hiring. They just keep growing headcount as its own workstream. Google started it I think, their HR just interviews and grabs the talent without a need. Matching employees to a role that already got hired to a company is just insane. That is the reason why I never interview with anyone that wants to do a generic hire. These HR folks are purely assessed on how many they hire and so they keep hiring.

This just makes me respect the old school processes that apple and nvidia follow that much more. They are the best run companies in tech

Sivart13• 2 years ago

Once you're a big enough company hiring needs to be its own workstream just to keep up with attrition.

bloqs• 2 years ago

This happens because of the culture of "if you dont spend your budget it gets cut"

andyjohnson02• 2 years ago

"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 someone who has been at the sharp end of a number of redundancies, I wish leaders would be honest:

"We tried stuff but it didn't work. I was and am in charge, and I'm staying. We're making you redundant because we need the money more than we need you."

Obviously no leader would say such a thing. But the people affected (and thas not just those being made redundant) deserve honesty, not platitudes.

matchbok• 2 years ago

Most people understand that companies need to adjust in size. There’s nothing moral about it.

andyjohnson02• 2 years ago

(Your comment was dead but I vouched for it because I want to explain why youve failed to appreciate an important distinction.)

tldr: the redundancy is not the announcement

I think people (and I include myself) do understand that companies need to adjust their workforce. I think that decision is not wholly moral in nature. But it does have a moral component - and Dropbox seems to appreciate that somewhat in the assistance they're providing the people who are leaving.

But what isn't moral is an individual announcing publicly that they take responsibility for acts that cause trauma to others (however constrained that decision was) while in reality that responsibility-taking involves no consequences at all the individual. None.

In the large train station in the city where I live, the automated voice announcements "apologise" for train cancellations. I'd argue that this is as empty and insulting as this CEO's email - because no responsibility has in fact been taken. The CEOs words and the announcement software are as morally empty as eachother.

racl1013• 2 years ago

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.

39896880• 2 years ago

You’re allowed to say kill on Hackernews

penguin_booze• 2 years ago

"I earn the big money because I make decisions and I take risks (with others lives, but let's not talk about that). My decisions haven't worked; my risks haven't paid off. I'm however letting you take the hit, because I'm too important for that kind of shit. I've more decisions to make, and risks to take. My family is fine; my pay is fine. It's just you who are affected.". -- Your CEO, who still makes more money that you do (or don't), no matter what.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

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.

But I will be glad to see that my salary and bonus increased a bit this year :)

tinyhouse• 2 years ago

It's clear they are preparing for an acquisition. They are profitable with great gross margins and cash in the bank. With 20% workforce reduction they are going to be very attractive to the salesforce of the world.

whalesalad• 2 years ago

I'm surprised that a company like Dropbox needs so many employees. ~500 being 20% implies the total workforce is 2500 people. HOW?!

I feel like the product could do just fine with 100 employees.

baudpunk5• 2 years ago

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.

racl1013• 2 years ago

Anecdotal: I know a lot of people who use Dropbox, I don't know even one person who pays it. They pay for iCloud, probably cause it makes the iPhone experience even more convenient, but not Dropbox. I also don't pay for it.

baudpunk5• 2 years ago

Yeah, that makes sense. If I wasn't a PC user, I'd probably be utilizing iCloud as well.

UnreachableCode• 2 years ago

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

racl1013• 2 years ago

Dropbox ain't nothing to duck with.

seandoe• 2 years ago

cream

turnsout• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, having been in client services, I saw Dropbox use plummet on both the client and agency side once the pandemic hit. People switched from syncing files to working directly on the same document in the cloud (e.g. Microsoft Word -> Google Docs, Keynote -> Google Slides, Sketch -> Figma)

In 2024, I wouldn't invest in any company that's based on "Files"

moystard• 2 years ago

The premium experience does have a heavy price tag attached to it since they repeatedly increased the pricing. In the UK, the first plan is now £7.99 / month.

This eventually led me away from Dropbox and I am now an iCloud user - the convenience and cheap prices eventually convinced me, even though I wish a Linux client existed.

leoapagano• 2 years ago

Pardon—what does Wu Tang have to do with Dropbox?

baudpunk5• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBwAxmrE194

protonprivacy• 2 years ago

Can you share more about your experience, which platform you were using and what features you were looking for so that we can share it with the team?

baudpunk5• 2 years ago

Proton Drive through Proton Unlimited. I have my e-mail setup through Proton already, so the plan was going to be to consolidate, and use Proton for cloud storage as well. I have since downgraded back to Mail Plus. The reason being a pretty bad experience with Drive.

I honestly don't remember the fine-grained details, sorry, but it had something to do with waking up one morning to my remaining storage being consumed by every file in Drive being duplicated, with a title "(overwritten 21h4m)" or something like that appended to each one.

I can't remember what caused it, but what I do remember is that there was no way to remediate it through the Drive app itself. Meaning, if I wanted to return my drive back to its original state, I would be burning my own time to write the script to do it, or I would be burning my own time to research some other solution. I couldn't believe the feature was shipped in that state.

In my opinion, if there exists a feature that leads to all of my files being duplicated, then it shouldn't be released unless there has been thorough testing against that feature's ability to remediate the fubarred status that it has enacted to "protect" my files. In this case, I think the feature was version history.

So the three conclusions I could come to were that there was little to no testing, inexperienced engineers, or a project manager that isn't managing the project particularly well. In any case, I don't want to feel like I'm beta testing features with my most important files, so I went back to Dropbox and its more mature app. Haven't looked back since.

bbcbby• 2 years ago

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?

pc866• 2 years ago

rsync is free why would anyone use anything /s

jchw• 2 years ago

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.

maxehmookau• 2 years ago

As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision

CEOs need to not say this, unless they're quitting too.

tqi• 2 years ago

TBH it feels like Dropbox has a pretty fair earnings multiple at the moment (~4X). Have we reached a point where tech companies have been around long enough that they can / should enter a sort of maintenance mode? It feels like there is a company version of the Peter Principle. Why do they (Dropbox specifically) need to continue to "innovate"? Wouldn't it be better for all parties if they just focused on maintaining the best possible version of their core offering at the lowest cost? Maybe Dash (or whatever) will work but most likely it won't, and investing in that initiative puts their whole business at risk.

jordanb3• 2 years ago

Alternately we have entered a phase where layoffs have metastasized as a thing to do so much that executives are being asked about it. "We've noticed you haven't done any layoffs yet, can you explain that?"

dsnr• 2 years ago

enter a sort of maintenance mode

There exists such a mode: it's called dividend distribution. But currently DBX and many other tech companies aren't paying any dividends to stock holders. So if it's not growing and not paying dividends, what is the company doing?

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

Providing goods/services. Perhaps the qualifier "being publicly traded" will help

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

pretty fair earnings multiple at the moment (~4X).

Dropbox's EBIDTA is 14.67, but most Software Companies tend to have an EBIDTA of 28.

Dropbox is significantly underperforming compared to their peers.

Furthermore, cloud file storage has become commodified and Dropbox missed the DLP, DSPM, and AI Search train.

Have we reached a point where tech companies have been around long enough that they can / should enter a sort of maintenance mode

Absolutely not.

If you do not innovate as a software company, you risk becoming commodified.

And if BUs within a company fails to execute on their innovation or GTM strategy, they will be let go.

rsync• 2 years ago

"Wouldn't it be better for all parties if they just focused on maintaining the best possible version of their core offering at the lowest cost?"

Yes, absolutely.

There is value in new features and functionality but there can be so much more value in a predictable, stable tool that can be depended on and returned to.

There are people who cancelled their first account with us before dropbox existed and have returned, post-covid, to find a familiar tool to be picked right back up again.

This has been immensely valuable to a great many people and we wouldn't dream of ever changing it.

steveBK1237• 2 years ago

Very 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.

alpb• 2 years ago

They've been doing 20% layoffs two years in a row now.

steveBK1237• 2 years ago

Yeah that's "run for the exits" territory to me. Especially considering they are already below pre-COVID staff levels it appears.

TechDebtDevin4• 2 years ago

Severence is only so they can dodge regulatory scrutiny. They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and was a line-item in the burden category for those employees when they were hired.

seneca• 2 years ago

There's really no pleasing some people. Companies make cuts and don't give generous packages, they're evil. They give a package and it's just so they can dodge scrutiny.

This kind of no-win complaining is tiresome.

spit2wind• 2 years ago

What regulatory scrutiny do you mean? They don't need to provide severance, as far as California law seems concerned. I'm not a Californian, but an Internet search shows they're an at-will state. So it seems like everything is on the (legal) level.

Aurornis• 2 years ago

That might be true if they were doing bare minimum severance packages, but they’re not. They’re doing substantial packages.

Claiming that it’s to please regulators when it’s far and away better than the average severance package is an irrational claim.

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

Not one-and-done, at least step 3 in a potential routine:

16% in 2023: https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew

Or, before that, another 11%: https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/node/8916/html

I wish them well, things look rough.

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

it strikes me that more big companies would rather have a one-stop shop full of 80% solutions than pay for 100 different SaaS.

Strongly agree (unfortunately I might add, because I'm not a fan of "the big just keep getting bigger). When it comes to data management, tons of companies are really concerned about access controls, policies and DLP (data loss prevention). In my experience setting up these policies and rules correctly, and appropriately monitoring them, is very difficult and easy to get wrong (many data breaches are a consequence of this). This is especially common when you need to bidirectionally share content with third parties, you may want to give some of those parties access control rights on some data buckets, etc.

I was at a previous company where we were essentially all on Google Workspace. Google Drive's access controls for sharing with third parties used to really suck, though they've improved in recent years. We had teams that wanted to use Dropbox enterprise because their third party sharing features were much, much better. The problem is that I spent a ton of time learning all of the access control and management policies in Google Drive (which aren't great, mind you), and then I needed to spend another large amount of time learning an entirely different interface and set of rules for Dropbox. I almost had a breach because a checkbox buried down somewhere was checked incorrectly. Also, adding Dropbox meant I had a host of additional SOC 2 compliance checks that I needed to validate.

Meanwhile, sharing features in Google Drive (of Google Workspace) have largely gotten "good enough", as of the past couple years.

steveBK1237• 2 years ago

Case in point - when it came out almost 20 years ago it was ground breaking.

Meanwhile, every single desktop OS, mobile OS and cloud provider basically has had this functionality in some form for maybe 10 years now.

If you are a home user in Google or Apple ecosystem, its all native and seamless. If you are a corporate setup in Microsoft or Google ecosystem, its all native and seamless there as well.

Not clear what the standout features of Dropbox would be now.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

Ah that sucks, I wanted to work for them a while back

meindnoch• 2 years ago

This is the first wave of the LLM layoffs.

onion2k4• 2 years ago

That's quite unlikely. If Dropbox could save a decent amount of their engineering effort using LLMs with 20% less people, then they could also increase their engineering effort by a decent amount using LLMs and keeping the same workforce. Assuming the team aren't completely useless, being able to go faster would be significantly more valuable than any cost saving made here.

krogus• 2 years ago

I dont know… i felt like the eng facing llm work at my company was distracting and not useful. I can only see Dropbox and others obsessing over LLMs as clinging to relevancy. At the end of the day we will just get a chat bot and a handful of niche projects AI investments paid off for

hankman86• 2 years ago

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 often fundamentally unhappy in their role. While the short term impact of being made redundant can cause some distress, these people can still use the occasion to reset their careers.

So all in all, no reason for grief.

formerlurker2• 2 years ago

So, reduce people to numbers and accept the suicides?

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

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. The best companies are more like a team, and when things start to go south, sometimes people on that team are cut.

Ironically, I think the professions where people really are passionate and see it as a "dream job" (think professional sports teams, actors, musicians, artists, etc.) generally have a much healthier view of their employment in the first place because they realize how tenuous it is to begin with. Point being, if you're considering suicide if you lose your job, you should be in therapy long, long before it gets to that point.

One final note: before I get the pushback of "that's all nice to say until you have no income and are living on the streets!", let's get real for a moment. First, I have a ton of sympathy for people who are laid off - it sucks and can be very destabilizing. 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. None of these people are going to starve, and nearly all of them will be able to eventually find employment (if perhaps not at the same exact high salary as Dropbox). 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.

whatshisface4• 2 years ago

They don't know which 20% needs to be cut. That's why they wait until something unrelated to their business internals (market downturn, other companies are cutting) happens to try.

jordanb3• 2 years ago

I remember seeing somewhere an analysis that layoffs do not improve medium or long-term stock performance for companies performing layoffs. But if layoffs are coordinated sector-wide they can have a big impact on employee compensation in the sector by creating a reserve army of unemployed.

adamc2• 2 years ago

Evidence, please. From what I've seen in person, it doesn't work this way at all. Companies don't have a great fix on whom to cut, and it usually just makes the other employees feel stressed (and start looking at other jobs), while the unemployed suffer very significant life stress.

VirusNewbie2• 2 years ago

I was originally a huge fan of dropbox, and still a customer, though reluctantly these days.

Dropbox has fallen so far behind many other companies. Google photos search is amazing, it merges people even if they don't have contacts, it has really good image recognition, it has some sorting/ordering amongst many various dimensions.

Why can't I make small edits to text files in dropbox? Why haven't they added any useful apps?

Why are they not the best photo organizer/searching system?

rsanek4• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that knowledge work isn't really a bell curve, it's more of a power law. https://www.hermanaguinis.com/pdf/PPsych2012.pdf

cjblomqvist• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

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.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

You think that people who are doing nothing all day are unhappy?

Protestant work ethic got you by the gizzards.

We call it "rest and vest" here in the tech retirement homes of companies known for being "chill" like Microsoft, Linkedin, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Intel (historically), etc

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance.

Sorry, but I call BS on this

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

Remember how there used to be a blog (or maybe it was a Tumblr, I forget) that documented every "Our incredible journey" post that inevitably announced the start-up's closure?

I think we need another one for "An update from <company>", as this has seemingly become the standard subject to use when you're announcing layoffs or data breaches. I saw an identical headline earlier today from Sony announcing a studio closure:

https://sonyinteractive.com/en/news/blog/an-update-from-play...

carabiner4• 2 years ago

This guy takes "full responsibility," even.

Quothling2• 2 years ago

When a CEO takes full responsibility for these things it doesn't mean that they submit themselves to the punishment that internet users might want. It's the CEO telling their impacted employees that, no matter how well you did as an employee, you would still have been impacted. It's the CEO showing you empathy for the hurt they cause you for having failed to steer the company in a viable direction.

These messages are obviously never going to be well received, but at least people can find comfort in the fact that it's because Dropbox is shifting direction and strategy and not because they were bad employees. Stuff like this happens in business. Maybe you've focused on private sales and want to shift to enterprise sales or fund investments at which point your company no longer needs it's sales and marketing departments because the company mission will be radically different. Changing course is a CEO taking responsibility for the company.

It is what it is.

geodel4• 2 years ago

Indeed. "An update.." is a trend in lot of enterprises nowadays, probably taking cue from SV companies.

jordanb3• 2 years ago

"A difficult decision"

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

I always think it's a bit weird how people put so much effort and angst into (over)analyzing the language that execs use in layoff announcements in the first place.

It's a layoff. Yeah, it sucks, and no matter what the CEO says people will be pissed. Better to just take the same good advice as when starting a new relationship: "Just ignore everything they say, and only consider what they do." I.e. is the severance package good? Are folks given some assistance/recommendations finding new jobs? If so, I couldn't care less about what the preamble in the layoff announcement looks like.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

t's a bit weird how people put so much effort and angst into (over)analyzing the language that execs use in layoff announcements in the first place.

It's professional passive-aggression. That's more angering than just saying "we need more money, we are laying off people". That "language" is what you're expected to do in the office half your life and it's a tiring waste of time keeping up false pleasantries.

If you don't know, look up the Umbridge effect. Sometimes the petty evils that pretend to be civil stings harder than the pure evils. Not many of us have a Voldamort in our lives. We all have an Umbridge.

switch0072• 2 years ago

Nailed it. We got "An update on..." when they cancelled our Christmas parties.

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

They used this exact phrasing a year ago, lmao. Building rapport, The CEO has a name. Hi Drew.

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/a-message-from-drew

azemetre4• 2 years ago

Something weird I noticed about Dropbox: I cancelled my paid account two years ago. I had 5 terabytes of storage being used (mostly shitty concert vids and food pics).

Everyday they email me telling me I’m over my limit. They always “threaten” to delete the data but it’s been two years since I cancelled.

My Qs are: why are they hoarding my data for so long? Why would they want to do this? How cheap is storage for them to want to do this? How likely is it that they have sold my data to train various LLMs with?

flappyeagle6• 2 years ago

You can just delete your data dude. No one is forcing you to keep it there. They’re generally not going to do something destructive because of unpaid bills. It’s nice of them

azemetre4• 2 years ago

But why do I have to log into Dropbox to do this? I haven't logged into the site in 2 years and don't plan on it. I just find it odd that they keep threatening to delete my data but from where I'm standing it looks like they will keep my data indefinitely.

I'm not forcing them to do anything. I terminated my service and they're still keeping my data. Seems like shitty consumer rights that they'll just keep the data regardless of what I do.

That's what I'm trying to figure out, if others have similar stories.

tantalor• 2 years ago

sold my data

Sure the license agreement would not legally permit that.

I wonder what kind of legal recourse you would have. There's obviously copyright infringement, but I think state laws like CCPA include remedies for violations.

layer83• 2 years ago

If they delete your stuff, you almost certainly won’t resume your subscription. The cost of storage may be lower than the benefit from re-subscriptions, and possibly the cost of actually implementing and maintaining an automated deletion process in compliance with all jurisdictions.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

Maybe they are just good people and don't like to do evil things like deleting someone's life memories?

adamc2• 2 years ago

This is a company, so no.

stego-tech• 2 years ago

Incredibly disappointing, but not surprising. Dropbox is no longer in its growth phase, and needs to settle into maintenance mode - enjoying a steady stream of revenue while continuously optimizing expenses, with a bit set aside for R&D to try and find the next big growth opportunity. Severance packages look really good, with the caveat that these figures really should be _the default_ in Corporate America at this point, like our EU peers.

I just wish the language in the announcement reflected this reality. Instead, it feels like a lot of desperation measures from current tech companies: overly optimistic to the point of naively dismissing or ignoring reality, and believing that if we just keep building then we’ll continue to grow forever.

tschellenbach2• 2 years ago

The same forces that enable high tech salaries, also make layoffs more likely.

- The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done

The end result is that if companies are spending their max, if there's a shock to the market/system etc they have to cut. You'd see this less if there was more padding/ less competitive pressure/lower salaries.

I think that's fine and the system is working as intended. People should be freed up to move to other roles where they can be productive. Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.

The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense. There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.

njtransit• 2 years ago

A somewhat sensible take, but the issue isn’t just healthcare. A lot of your life is based off of long-term, fixed cost cash flow. E.g. you can’t pay less on your mortgage just because you got fired. Even with savings, getting laid off is highly disruptive, and, if done as part of a broader downturn in the market, you may never recover the required cash flow to enable your lifestyle.

wbl• 2 years ago

Avoid lifestyle creep! I have to say I'm bad at this myself: somehow it all adds up, while each individual expense doesn't look so bad.

jes5199• 2 years ago

honestly this is one of the reasons I prefer pre-IPO companies, my salary is lower until they do a buyback or an exit, but it ends up basically in the same place over the long term. This is how I was able to put a downpayment on a house without consciously "saving up" for it. Obviously there's some risk but I've had two buybacks, one IPO, and two acquisitions since 2012

lazide2• 2 years ago

Just wait until you have to deal with child support and imputed income.

Getting fired/laid off is about the only thing that can save you.

midhhhthrow2• 2 years ago

This why we need the tiny home movement combined with progressive property taxes - 0 prop tax bracket for lowest 20% property values If you have mortgage then you don’t really own your house.

enugu• 2 years ago

There seems to be an analogy to servers being capable enough for usual demand(income>spending), but fails due to some downtime for some servers(out of a job) or peak loads(medical emergency). This can be amortized by having data centers serving multiple apps(social security, insurance - but they dont always exist).

One main fault in the analogy is that in an economic crisis, there is a vicious cycle of income loss which leads to lower demand leading to more lost jobs. This coordination failure can be handled by fiscal/monetary policy. Whereas server failure, even when widespread due to a virus doesn't happen recursively like that.

sokoloff2• 2 years ago

bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired

That doesn't seem the least bit weird to me. If I choose to leave a job (or relationship), I could quite sensibly feel differently if that same job (or relationship) chooses to leave me.

miningape4• 2 years ago

Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.

Really? You think its weird that someone leaving impacts that person more than their manager, team, or company?

A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while. When someone is layed off or fired they have to go find a new job, their income streams dry up, and are forced to rely on savings. People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.

Are you fucking kidding me? "Which is a bit weird" I'll tell you what's weird: management who doesn't understand that their employees rely on them more than they rely on the employee.

Of course its fine when someone chooses to leave their job, they've made contingencies and planned around it. Whether it's through savings, another job, or the lottery, people have at least some idea of their plan when they leave a job.

Goronmon• 2 years ago

A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while.

Yeah, I'm curious how someone can have an opinions on workplaces and workers and not seem to have personal experience with the subject, especially in a community like this.

Do they just come from a wealthy family so the stance is "Getting fired isn't a big deal, just ask your dad to cover expenses until your next job."?

mrthrowaway9997• 2 years ago

People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.

I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat.

What you say is true about low or even medium income jobs. But most of the cuts are to tech workers and their managers, ie. people best equipped to manage in this kind of event.

desbo• 2 years ago

The idea that someone's response to being fired should be the same as a manager's response to one of their reports quitting is hilariously out of touch.

ironmagma6• 2 years ago

It kind of ignores the core asymmetry of capitalism, that those with the capital are the ones with the power. Nobody can do a background check on a company to see who they laid off or fired before they work there.

not_your_vase3• 2 years ago

  > high tech salaries

Are they really high? They are not that different from UPS driver salaries.

Just the other day I clicked on the website of some random law firm's career page. I wasn't happy with what I saw (in the context of my own career). Some researchers with 1 year of experience with starting salary of 450k+... tech salaries look high as long as you don't check other professions.

stoniejohnson3• 2 years ago

They were high in 2013.

ZephyrBlu2• 2 years ago

This doesn't really make sense. What is a "researcher" at a law firm? Lawyers at top firms are on fixed pay schedules, starting at 180k as a 1st year going up to something like 450k after 8yrs (?).

Tech is high earning. It gets beat out by high finance and partner-level roles in e.g. law though. If someone is earning 450k in their first year it's probably similar to a quant finance role.

csomar4• 2 years ago

They are not high. But most companies have business leadership who sees software developers as annoying and weird nerds. Explains why they are spending all their money on compute so that they can replace them with machines once and for all.

mulmen20• 2 years ago

Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done

Do you have any evidence of this? There are unfounded claims of “productivity metrics” but I have never actually seen one.

E: I realize this is a poor choice of words after saying productivity metrics don’t exist. What I mean is my tasks are easier to complete in a WFH environment than they are in an office.

I have been far more productive from home. The constraints around communication necessitate effective documentation which enables asynchronous communication which alleviates scheduling challenges which improves delivery.

Maybe managers need to go in to the office to rub elbows but ICs definitely don’t.

itsoktocry• 2 years ago

I have been far more productive from home.

Same. It's been a boon for me, and I genuinely enjoy my work, so it's win win. But anecdotally, I know people who abuse it.

On net, remote work is a plus: less commute, less pollution etc etc. And even the abusers, it's not like those people were highly productive in the office, I'm sure.

gruez5• 2 years ago

Do you have any evidence of this? There are unfounded claims of “productivity metrics” but I have never actually seen one.

see: https://archive.is/CKGbV

progbits• 2 years ago

remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done

If you can't tell remote employees are slacking then you also can't tell if they are slacking in the office, you are just getting fooled by thinking presence implies work.

So tired of hearing this "argument".

ghaff6• 2 years ago

There's also COBRA, and the exchanges in the US. Frankly, even if you're eligible for Medicare it really isn't any cheaper if you're a current or recent high earner. But, in any case, it's about $7K/year for an individual who doesn't otherwise have coverage for a spouse etc.

pc866• 2 years ago

There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net

There is, it's called Medicaid.

slater2• 2 years ago

They said reasonable, not "endlessly-patched-up nonsense that conservatives want to gut at every turn"

jedberg3• 2 years ago

That's not really a solution. You have to be broke to use Medicaid. They expect you to fully drain all your assets first.

I shouldn't have to sell my house to get medical care.

teractiveodular3• 2 years ago

FYI, Dropbox does not merely allow remote work, it's a fully remote-first company. There's a couple of offices for get-togethers and a few people physically staffing data centers, but everybody else works wherever they want to.

marcosdumay2• 2 years ago

Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.

That's because people have a single employer, while companies have several employees.

That's also why employees are protected, while companies are mostly not. And yeah, the US doubles down on the problem by linking health insurance with the job.

deeviant• 2 years ago

Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done

Do you mind expanding on this? How does remote work change the standards of how much work somebody has to get down?

Powdering7082• 2 years ago

Being able to stay in the country is also tied to employment for plenty of people

bruckie• 2 years ago

Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.

When you leave, your manager loses 1/N of team productivity. When you get fired, you lose 100% of your income.

I bet the manager would be more upset if the entire team quit. But even then, they'd still have their job—for a while, at least.

BobbyJo• 2 years ago

Yeah, the stakes for the two sides of that transaction are completely different, so equivocating rational responses on either side makes no sense. OP lost me there.

nradov4• 2 years ago

Eventually we all get fired. It shouldn't come as a shock. This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles should live below their means and keep at least several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments.

I do understand that it can be challenging to save for young people with student debt starting out in a HCOL area. But I see older tech workers who ought to know better buying luxury cars and fancy gaming PCs and taking exotic vacations. Good luck to them when the next recession hits.

frmersdog• 2 years ago

It comes down to the concentration of wealth. Companies wouldn't have the capital to bid up salaries if they faced stiffer competition or couldn't access investment from a limited pool of investors (who all think the same), as is the case now. I know that "diversity" is a dirty word these days, but it's key. A large middle class, where each family has a small amount of money to put towards their diverse desires, is going to lead to a more stable economy than all of the money pooled in the hands of a small group with a much smaller set of needs. Dropbox should never have been able to hire so many people; that capital should have been in the hands of the larger public, who could have spent it supporting a more diverse set of hundreds or thousands of jobs (who wouldn't all be competing with each other for a limited number of seats in the "not laid off" lifeboat).

Put simply, these kinds of things are going to keep happening until our wealthiest (individuals/families/companies) are a lot less rich.

thaumasiotes3• 2 years ago

The market for talent is competitive.

A couple months ago interviewing.io posted something bragging about how "we do anonymous mock interviews. If people perform well in those interviews, they get introduced directly to a decision-maker at top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper." ( https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-... )

This annoyed me enough that I sent in an email complaining that their introduction process specifically notes that I am not eligible for anything, despite performance measured by the site as "highest ever achieved: 94th percentile" (so, knock that down a bit for being a high water mark), because of an insufficient number of years of experience.

They responded:

It really sucks, especially in this market, but this policy is a function of us having tried for years to get companies to take junior intros, and it didn't work. We offered to do it completely for free, too, fwiw, and no dice.

How competitive is the market for talent? Let's stipulate that, because of a lack of prior employment, I'm not qualified to have a job. How exactly would that situation change?

leeny2• 2 years ago

Founder of interviewing.io here.

Clarification: Just because companies don't want a 3rd party like us providing them with junior candidates, it doesn't mean they don't want them. Even back in 2017-2019, when the market was booming, we couldn't get employers to take our juniors... because they generally have their own robust pipeline.

So the solution is to go to companies directly, rather than relying on a 3rd party service like ours, which companies tend to use specifically for roles they can't fill on their own.

midhhhthrow2• 2 years ago

Healthcare attached to employment makes no sense ina world where people constantly need to switch jobs

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.

How is this weird? Your take is like the famous saying about the chicken and the pig both contributing equally to the egg and ham sandwich.

trod1234• 2 years ago

I disagree with your conclusion, you have several flawed premises.

The market has been slowly shrinking into fewer and fewer hands over time, which is why it has become more competitive over time. This has also led to cooperative behavior among the large marketshare companies in the sectors to disadvantage competitors, and employees.

Companies do not bid up to the max they can, because the executives take their cut first. The companies bids can only ever be the max of what is left after that, and varies by the greed of those people.

Interest rates would be the shock you described, but Tech unemployment as far as I can tell has until now been bulletproof, and uncorrelated with interest rate rises or falls. Its not rational to assume this market shock is a result of interest rates, AI is the only competitive alternative.

The issue is not that you're getting fired. Its that you can no longer get base goods needed for survival arbitrarily and without notice, and without capital reserves which are finite you are living on the street.

When the entire market as an entirety is contracting, there are no new jobs to move to in other fields.

Worse, the concentrated market is naturally incentivized to impose high costs on any job seekers to interfere in labor relations to create barriers to entry for competitors while suppressing wages for prospective workers.

This natural progression occurs when anti-trust fails, and money printing makes it worse potentially leading to either deflation (a collapse to non-market socialism) or hyper-inflation (a collapse to non-market socialism). Debt issued as preferential loans from a money-printer makes a company state-dependent/controlled apparatus even if its claim is that it is held privately.

The economy today is worse than 2008, much worse then the dotcom bust, and if you plot the trend with good data going back and starting around the 1970s, the trend shows progressive ruin as time passes, with seiving and consolidation occurring regularly. That is the force driving this problem, and it doesn't enable tech salaries.

There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn.

There is a limit to what government can provide, it takes awhile to get to those limits (we're in a super-cycle going back to the 1920s) but we'll be there in the next 5-10 years thanks in large part to deficit spending and the FED picking winners and losers.

The main issues with academia also applies to government. They are structurally the same. Education today is not about learning skills, that is always secondary to instilling the qualities a loyal unthinking worker. That is what the entire prussian-model of schooling is about (which is what we have in this country).

These structures for training follow the same structure as guild socialism, and the same intractable failures (ref Mises for related details).

It inevitably ends up being a cult of qualification, where you are automatically considered unqualified without a piece of paper even if you have the actual skills to do the job. Once a target market size is identified and reached, new candidates are put on an endless escalator of suffering with arbitrary filters/requirements where the claimed outcome is nothing but an unobtainable pipe dream.

raydev• 2 years ago

weird how people feel so differently when they get fired

It's weird that the average person working these jobs has bills to pay, and perhaps additional family members to care for?

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense.

No the issue is that I get fired after the prior townhall saying "we are not doing layoffs". Companies will outright lie to get little ounces of productivity and treat you like a criminal the moment they break the news, as if we're all school shooters waiting to happen in anger and rage over betrayal.

The circus of the 2023/2024 job market doesn't help either. Even pre-pandemic the process was padded, but now I'm not even convinced 80% of companies have a human reading my resume.

There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.

I'd rather not "hit hard times" while shareholders are making a killing and make a conclustion that my entire career needs to shuffle so they can save pennies.

sidcool• 2 years ago

Sad news. But the message is crafted well. Crisp and no overly emotional.

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

I asked ChatGPT to make it brutal:

    ---
    Listen up: 20% of you—528 people—are out. This isn’t a discussion. I’m pulling the plug on your roles. That’s it.

    Why? Because we’re not making enough money to keep this bloated mess afloat.

    We’ve been weighed down by too many damn layers, too much bureaucracy, and soft sales. We’re not here to carry dead weight. If your department wasn’t delivering, you’re gone. We’re only keeping what’s absolutely necessary to survive.

    What’s next

    This is a brutal market, and we’re not interested in getting left behind while our competitors rake it in. We’re cutting back hard and doubling down on what we think might actually make us cash. This is a no-BS, keep-up-or-get-out game now. You’ll hear more about our plans for 2025 soon.

    What you get if we’re cutting you loose

    Here’s what you can expect, take it or leave it:

        Severance: 16 weeks’ pay, plus an extra week for every year you put in here. If you’re international, you’ll get what’s legally required. No more, no less.
        Equity: We’ll throw you your Q4 vest.
        Bonus payout: If you were on a bonus plan, you’ll get a prorated payout based on what we predict you would’ve gotten.
        Leave payouts: If you had any paid leave left, you’ll get a check for it.
        Visa holders: We’re giving you a bit more time and a consult for your next steps. After that, you’re on your own.

    Healthcare

        US folks: Six more months of COBRA.
        Canada folks: One month of healthcare.
        All of you: You can still use Modern Health for therapy. You might need it.

    Devices

        Keep whatever company devices you’ve got. We’re not taking them back.

    Job placement

        You’ll get some career coaching and placement help, but after that, it’s up to you.

    What’s happening next

    We’ll give the rest of the details later today. If you’ve got questions, there’s a Town Hall later this week.

    For those who got cut: thanks for your work.
    ---

mrthrowaway9997• 2 years ago

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.

staunton• 2 years ago

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

mrthrowaway9997• 2 years ago

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.

ilrwbwrkhv• 2 years ago

I think the real learning here is that the company is still around even though they are sort of not in the popular zeitgeist at all anymore and there are so many other tools that does what they do.

ozim• 2 years ago

It is still around even if as a Linux user I can get ftp server and mount it locally then use CVS or SVN … ;)

hn_throwaway_998• 2 years ago

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 in highly paid industries) is to think that a layoff is the end of the world and the absolute worse possible thing that can happen to someone.

John_Cena2• 2 years ago

Ahem The CEO's breath smelled of genitals

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

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.

insane_dreamer11• 2 years ago

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, it's an appropriate response by workers to the "shareholder-value-at-all-cost" race that the industry finds itself in; an industry that has prided itself, and often built companies on, values that are the opposite.

That, and the fact that CEOs have no accountability for these decisions.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

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.

butz• 2 years ago

Any easy to migrate to alternative to Dropbox? I don't mind paying, but Linux support and light sync client is a must. And I don't need more than 1GB storage.

kyleee• 2 years ago

Nextcloud if you don’t mind a mediocre piece of PHP software. It syncs files well for me, but a lot of the other apps are clunky and perpetually half finished (calendar, photos, etc.) but with some elbow grease I find it usable.

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

Next time someone says “gee I’m glad we aren’t anything like Reddit!” I’ll have the replies in this thread to point them to.

Keep ‘em coming fellas.

latexr• 2 years ago

Comparing HN to Reddit is specifically covered by the guidelines, with several links.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=633099

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=582513

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253657

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=60767

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13852

AlexeyBelov2• 2 years ago

You're replying to a 3 months old troll account anyway. They won't bother to read it and they don't care to participate in good faith.

jedberg3• 2 years ago

Impacted employees will be eligible to keep company devices (phones, tablets, laptops, and peripherals) for personal use.

It's not often you see this. Netflix used to do this if your equipment wasn't brand new, and with any phone[1]. And the very first startup I worked for let me buy my laptop, desktop, monitor, and cell phone for $50. But you don't see it too often.

[1] There was a "joke" at Netflix that if your manager told you that you should upgrade your phone, it meant you were gonna get let go soon, because sometimes people really did get let go just weeks after getting a new phone, and they got to keep the phone.

ghaff6• 2 years ago

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.

johnnyanmac78• 2 years ago

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.

madhacker• 2 years ago

Lack of accountability and personal responsibility is made possible by tolerance for corporate impunity, which thrives in America.

_giorgio_• 2 years ago

Everyone is making fun of them, but can you suggest me something that:

works both in Windows and Ubuntu?

cratermoon• 2 years ago

Best I can say is, at least they didn't throw out a bogus return-to-office mandate to get people to quit.

Dropbox announces 20% global workforce reduction

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