> 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.
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.
More like the cloud sync functions out of the box on Google, Microsoft and Apple products caught up in features and already got good enough for the customer base of these to not bother paying extra for Dropbox no matter how much better they would have been. See Evernote.
It's difficult to go against Apple, Google and Microsoft when they're vertically integrated and can squeeze you on all sides offering an OS, email, browser, cloud sync, document editing, etc with seamless integration between them, while you're just a cloud sync service on their OS. You don't have any moat, while they do. There's no way you can compete with them from that position unless the government were to break up their vertical integration for anti-competitive practices.
I think that is why Dropbox has been trying to diversify their offerings. They know as well as the rest of us do that cloud storage that's only cloud storage and not much else will have serious trouble competing with cloud storage that you also need to have to work conveniently with Google Docs, or Office 365, or whatever.
But, as parent poster pointed out, taking on that new work requires hiring people to do it. But that's expensive, and those new products need to start generating revenue quickly in order to cover the increased payroll costs.
>For me, Dropbox's moat and USP is that they make all of their money from file storage, giving me some confidence that they'll ensure it keeps working.
To me that's now become a red flag with these companies. Not speaking of Dropbox in particular but all these start-ups from the past that offered a free new innovative product/service for Android/iOS went to shit soon after Appel and Google copied and integrate similar functionality into the OS out of the box, leading to investor money drying up and the company suddenly paywalling and gouging existing users to make money to survive. Look at Evernote, LastPasss, Cerberus, etc. but also Amazon, Netflix, etc, enshitification galore.
Google and Apple are less likely to do that since they already make more money than God and tend not to want to fuck up their reputation just to squeeze a few more bucks from their users.
That's why I don't trust these small app companies anymore, since they'll get squeezed out by Apple, Microsoft and Google, and enshitification will ensure. The app is good in the beginning for a few years when VC money is abundant and their goal is user growth at any cost, but after that suddenly once you're locked in, you get paywalled, as the company tries to squeeze more money from you so VCs can get their money back. Rinse and repeat. So no thanks, I got burned a few times already.
The problem is that it’s unclear consumers actually ever wanted Dropbox to become any more than a sync and share company, or to deal with the resultant complexity that that will bring to what has been a beautifully simple product. But they had to do that to justify Sky-high valuations.
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.
> The truth is that businesses need the employees that they need at a point in time, and that number is constantly changing.
Another truth is that we've collectivly decided that all people must be working in order to "earn" their right to exist. So anytime there is a large layoff like this, there are a lot of new stories about people relocating, making major changes to their lives, some for the better, some for the worse, and some for the absolutely devastaing.
One must not forget that these 'human resources' are more than just a number.
I'm all for better protections for workers, and I think that the US should make companies give employees more notice, or alternatively make unemployment benefits a program that is more automatic, a full 100% of salary instead of being capped, and biased more toward the employee. I.e., I think a company should have to prove to a judge that an employee was fired with cause or quit voluntarily before the employee loses their benefits.
I totally agree with the idea that the benefits of at-will no-notice termination employment are lopsided in favor of the company, but the flip side of that arrangement is that it's very easy to get a new job in the US compared to many other places. It's easy to be hired on a short conversation and a handshake in an at-will environment.
Depends. If those employees truly are excess and they haven't been doing much for the past couple years, they might be just producing tech debt. Cancelled projects and migrations have negative value. I doubt this entire 20% was made redundant overnight, which means they haven't been valuable for some time.
> 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.
> What bet was dropbox taking by overexpanding their workforce by 20%?
When asking this question, I think it's good to remind ourselves how much we don't know. We don't know if they overstaffed in a push to expand their business that didn't work out, we don't know if the had an older operating model that went from "efficient" to "inefficient" as scale and market dynamics changed. We don't know if advances in productivity to tools, or changes to major client accounts, impacted their staffing needs. Determining whether one is "overstaffed" is a multi-factorial determination that can be false one month and true the next.
Set aside whether it's uncharitable to just assume management oversight or idiocy - it's hubristic. Having said that, it doesn't mean the assumption is wrong, it could be exactly right! But it might not be.
The OP made strong statements with weak backing. Their statements were also placing blame. Your profile says you're an SRE--can you imagine a post mortem with that kind of attitude?
> 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.
Open the "More" menu in your Dropbox interface and I think you may be surprised at how many different products they have.
I am sure they're not trying to be a Microsoft of Google, but they're trying to make a niche in document handling, file sending, password management, a lot of those little things that are something of a pain for many businesses.
I think if you compare what Dropbox is offering at $15/user/month to Microsoft 365, there are a bunch of things that Microsoft isn't really covering or isn't covering as well (and vice versa, to be fair). For example, the ability to take e-signatures, document watermarking, facilitating out-of-organization file transfers, etc.
I also think they compete quite well with Amazon Drive, considering that Amazon Drive was discontinued.
My point is that this is probably the case for most users; the "more" doesn't mean anything because it's some functionality created by underemployed product managers rather than things that customers actually need/want to pay for. If you have to point out "hey, look here under this 'more' menu", then it's not part of the primary value proposition for the product and not why someone would pick that product. Sure, it might be that it is useful for some subset of users, but that you need to wave people down to show them that value means that it's probably not that valuable.
The amount of businesses whose target audience is “most users” is very small. You might get lucky and be a Microsoft or Apple but almost every other business has a very specific type of customer that they want.
The other thing is that the most popular features aren’t necessarily the most profitable ones.
Dropbox doesn’t make money on the millions of people with free accounts, and they are selling commodity storage for their paid users at thin margins. But a product that can solve business pain in a unique way can command better margins, which is why they are getting into other businesses like document signing rather than just sticking to selling bulk cloud storage.
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.