Dropbox is Laying Off 20% of Its Staff (techcrunch.com) 50
Dropbox is letting go 20% of its workforce as the cloud company undergoes what CEO Drew Houston calls a "transitional period." From a report: In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people. The goal, he added, was to make cuts in areas where Dropbox has "over-invested" while designing a "flatter, more efficient" team structure.
"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," he wrote. "This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we've been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action." According to a filing with the SEC, Dropbox estimates it'll lay out total cash expenditures of $63 million to $68 million on the layoffs, primarily in the form of severance and benefits, and recognize $47 million to $52 million of incremental expense.
"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," he wrote. "This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we've been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action." According to a filing with the SEC, Dropbox estimates it'll lay out total cash expenditures of $63 million to $68 million on the layoffs, primarily in the form of severance and benefits, and recognize $47 million to $52 million of incremental expense.
Turns out (Score:5, Funny)
We are just a phishing file host these days and that just doesn't take as much staff!
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+20 insightful
Re:Turns [your file system inside] out (Score:2)
Only one Funny mod point so far, but I think it was a rather thin joke and I don't understand where you see insight?
However, my joke is about why I stopped using Dropbox some years ago.
I sure hope the firing included the guy that implemented the thing that turned my file system inside out. Everything was suddenly restructured in a new hierarchy. Even worse, uninstalling Dropbox did NOT fix the mess they had just created.
Or maybe it's funnier how badly they botched the good idea? Actually there are several g
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Let's not forget the absence of a family plan - instead they had the "Pay for 100TB but don't share it with your family" plan.
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where you see insight? :)
unable to edit after post, sorry
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Takes responsibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did he resign? Did he give back stock or options or RSU?
In what way did he take responsibility?
I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.
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Did he resign? Did he give back stock or options or RSU?
In what way did he take responsibility?
I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.
When CEOs say they've taken responsibility, what they mean is they managed to make themselves look very sad while making the announcement. The giddiness as they leave the podium/mic should be ignored. They feel real bad about it.
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You will note, when compaines fire people for cost savings, you never hear those at the top saying they are having their pay and benefits cut as part of the cost savings.
Re:Takes responsibility? (Score:4, Funny)
Every time a CEO says "I'm sorry" I can't help but think of those South Park clips:
* Cable company clip [youtube.com], and
* BP Sorry [youtube.com]
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You're mathing wrong if you think you can calculate $65M / 528 to get an average $123,000 per severance. You're forgetting that $50M of that $63M-$65M figure is the CEO's bonus for reducing payroll!
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This is ALWAYS my question in these situations.
Sometimes there's less responsibility but... Drew is the founder, he's the one who has been fucking it up since the beginning.
He's the one who just wanted to create a company that was like when he was in college but couldn't manage to actually realize why that wouldn't work. He should have been chief scientist or possibly CTO. He should never have been CEO. He's more interested in people liking him than he is in doing the hard work of being a leader. That's why
Interesting times (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of major IT layoffs in the news, which means those companies foolishly over-expanded when flush with cash and they have failed to make those additional bodies generate anything that justified keeping them on the payroll. Or they're contracting because their businesses are dying.
Either way, it seems like the market doesn't want as many techies as it used to.
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Yes, yes it is. From July [factcheck.org]. Since then, job creation has continued to climb.
Like climate change, one data point at one location doesn't mean squat.
BTW, this [washingtonpost.com] is what Bezos' Washington Post had to say about job creation under Biden back in 2020.
Re: Interesting times (Score:2)
"There comes a time in every project when it becomes necessary to behead the architects and begin construction."
- Project manager, Great Pyramid
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Lots of major IT layoffs in the news, which means those companies foolishly over-expanded when flush with cash and they have failed to make those additional bodies generate anything that justified keeping them on the payroll. Or they're contracting because their businesses are dying.
Either way, it seems like the market doesn't want as many techies as it used to.
Or they've decided that AI will save them, like many CSuites have in the last few months.
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That too. It was disappointing growing up and realizing that adults in positions of responsibility often do not really know what the fuck they're doing, get paid to do it anyway, and often don't suffer any consequences for incompetence. Hell, they are frequently rewarded.
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That too. It was disappointing growing up and realizing that adults in positions of responsibility often do not really know what the fuck they're doing, get paid to do it anyway, and often don't suffer any consequences for incompetence. Hell, they are frequently rewarded.
Despite the crap name, The Peter Principal should still be required reading for all people interested in a "career" within our country. People truly do rise to the level of their incompetence, in way too many cases.
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"the market doesn't want as many techies as it used to."
The market doesn't want as many big companies getting bigger for no reason as it used to.
One company laying off 500 people is news. 100 companies hiring 5 people each isn't.
Johnny Demonic (Score:2)
"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. This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we've been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action.
They're a cloud-storage company. What are they 'investing' in, if not developers? Is it just hard drives
Plus 500 laid off a year ago... (Score:2)
Dropbox has tried many new products that all failed. Ive been surprised theyve lasted so long as they offer nothing unique. I'm convinced their entire business is users too lazy to move from them. They offer nothing unique compared to more complete services from MS, Google, or even Apple.
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Google and Apple have an advantage because they have hardware tied ecosystems, so having a drive product is easy for them.
What Dropbox needs to do is go along a similar vein like Egnyte -- focus on permissions, auditing, and thorough AAA systems, with audits done by third parties to be up to HIPAA, MPA, and other specs, with national-only cloud centers so countries can ensure no data leaves the nation, similar to AWS GovCloud. This, adding E2EE, and APIs that work for every platform, even things like S3 se
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The ironic thing is that a cloud storage company has a ton of options to sell stuff. A ton:
* Sell a cache appliance, and now local places can have CAD files being shared at LAN speeds, as well as WAN for offsite shops.
* Sell backup appliances with object locking, similar to Datto, and be a one stop shop for ransomware protection of data.
* Offer S3 for object locking so Veeam and other places can use it.
* Permanent archive services, where part of the cost is if/when the client stops paying, they will re
Dropbox was a wasted opportunity (15 year user) (Score:5, Informative)
Number 1. They corrupt files and have syncing issues. I have almost a terabit of family photos up there and a handful got corrupted and couldn't be recovered. OK, mistakes happen...but why not offer versioning system?...why not git for files? It's really obvious, especially JPEGs. You could detect if an image was corrupted and notify me...what a good idea for a service to distinguish yourself from MS, Apple, Google, and others who practically give this feature away.
Oh yeah, they also have bugs in their syncing algorithm. I had an old computer that didn't fully sync for literally 3 months. It was stuck and I couldn't do anything to get my changes to their cloud. I had to manually backup everything and sort out several gigabytes of changes by hand...Rsync was written in 1996 and works perfectly....why can't Dropbox's software do the same? I even contacted support and they just point you to worthless help docs. Their software provides no feedback or error codes or diagnostics to help you figure out why it's corrupted your files or not syncing.
Number 2. When Google is giving away free cloud storage, why did you drop Linux support? Everyone has cloud storage at the same price as DropBox. I chose you for desktop Linux support when Google otherwise made more sense.
Number 3. Your client software SUUUUCKS on mac. Every time I login, it churns and sends all cores on the CPU to 100%. My family won't let me open my laptop if they're watching TV it's so loud. I even reformatted my machine and installed NOTHING BUT DROPBOX...yup...it's you..it's not other software or my MacBook...it's DropBox spiking the CPU for about an hour on login. Do better.
Number 4. What have you done for me lately? You were the cloud pioneer. There are many customer-facing cloud opportunities, but you failed to provide a single useful service beyond file sharing and cloud storage. How about photo management?...I'd happily pay for a good photo manager that's independent of my phone. How about customer backups?
I've been using DropBox for 15 years, most of them as a paid customer. They have offered no new services (of any use...DropBox paper went nowhere) since 15 years ago and haven't taken any service seriously other than storage and very basic file versioning. And their client software got worse and worse each year, at least on the Mac, and their backup services are extremely overpriced and generally shitty....all while they raised prices and their competitors just kept improving and offering more and more with each version.
So f**k DropBox. They're a cautionary tale and a shitty company and will go down in History in the same category as BlackBerry...promising lead, great innovation at first, but if you're going to treat your customers like shit and do nothing to improve your service...be sure you don't have more well-known competitors offering competing services at a lower cost!!!!
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The fact that Linux support is practically nonexistent (where I wind up using a QNAP NAS appliance with a sync utility to have my Dropbox drive be a Samba share) is disheartening. Google Drive, iCloud, and a Pikapods based Nextcloud drive for sharing stuff works as decent replacements, and with Apple and Google, one winds up paying for the drive account anyway, just for a good place for device backups.
I keep Dropbox around because of just momentum, but eventually, I should move off from it, as there isn't
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Rsync was written in 1996 and works perfectly
No it doesn't. Rsync can't handle many problems on filesystems on the fly, can't sit around monitoring for change, can't access files in parallel to other processes, locks the file while syncing is in progress etc.
Comparing any of the cloud syncing utilities to rsync shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how cloud syncing works. I can't have my computer shit itself every time I rename a file mid sync, or hit the save button while something is being uploaded.
Price point are way off (Score:1)
They were in front at the beginning of the cloud storage wars and had a lot of great features/integrations. The problem I had with Dropbox was their switch to their new pricing structure some years back. Went from $20/yr to $100/yr for something I didn't need. I didn't need/want the 1TB drive, 100GB would have been fine. Don't want the 1TB plan? No other option. I switched to OneDrive for cheaper and included the Office apps. Haven't looked back since.
Working as intended (Score:1)
Step 1: Concoct a myriad of features that absolutely no one is asking for in the name of (constant) growth
Step 1a: CEO makes money
Step 2: Hire a ton of talent to implement Step 1
Step 2a: CEO makes money
Step 3: Realize that people are not paying for the features they didn't ask for
Step 3a: CEO makes money
Step 4: Venture and investment capital dries up
Step 4a: CEO makes money
Step 5: Lay off the talent from Step 2
Step 5a: CEO makes mon
I've seen worse (Score:2)
A friend of mine worked for a company that had a big layoff -- like maybe 50% of staff, and he showed me the company wide email (wish I took a picture of it, but it was many years ago). Basically the CEO said how it was really painful to him to have to do it, and then he proceeded to list all the luxury-level things he was going to do such as taking some time off on his yacht, go to his son's wedding in Ibiza, and do a yoga retreat after which he would "come back stronger" and that people shouldn't worry ab
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This is the reality of employment - do a bunch of stuff for minimum-wage-for-the-skillset (or lower) so I can live the dream on the back of your effort. Surely you didn't buy into the 'be part of a family (until we let you go)' stuff?
I'm tired of CEO-speak (Score:3)
But, I'm tired of it. I've got skills. I'm employable. And I've been around the block a few times. If you're gonna fire me because I'm redundant, just give it to me straight, please. "Our business has shrunk a bit, we don't need as many employees as we did last year, so we need to fire 20% of our workforce in order to maintain profitability. If our business bleeds money for too long, we go belly-up, and then EVERYBODY gets fired. It sucks, but 20% layoffs are better than 100% layoffs". I can respect that message. Fine. No hard feelings. I'll move somewhere else. Somewhere that I'm needed.
Whizz-Bang (Score:3)
People seemed to think that dropbox was something really special.
Because technology! Internet!
Yawn. Nothing to see here.
Let's take a walk down memory lane... (Score:5, Informative)
Dropbox Tries To Kill Off Open Source Project With DMCA Takedown | Techdirt [techdirt.com]
Dropbox spooks users with new AI features that send data to OpenAI when used | Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]
Dropbox asks file sharing add-on to drop dead - Boing Boing [boingboing.net]
Dropbox Lack of Security - Miguel de Icaza [tirania.org]
Dropbox Kept Files Around for Years Due to Delete Bug [bleepingcomputer.com]
Dropbox Discloses Breach of Digital Signature Service Affecting All Users [thehackernews.com]
slight paranoia: How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings [dubfire.net]
Was It Ethical for Dropbox to Share Customer Data with Scientists? | WIRED [wired.com]
Dropbox Authentication: Insecure By Design - Slashdot [slashdot.org]
I look forward to more of the same from the new, leaner Dropbox.
Can't wait... (Score:2)
for all the cloud storage solutions to die a slow painful excruciating death.
It's all good though, I don't have to use it, but the os-offenders are the worst, I'm looking at you one-drive.
2012 Hackathon (Score:2)
A pair of DropBox staffers produced one project that always haunts my memory as being an on-the-nose conceptual art piece critique of the company's purpose. The two hackathon participants got one of those pedal boats and mounted a big box painted with the DropBox logo over the top. They then bobbed around San Francisco Bay outside the
The usual question: what do people DO there? (Score:1)
As usual, I'm amazed by how many employees they have, even after the layoffs. What do the remaining couple thousand dropbox employees do all day? What do they work on? What is there to be done? I don't get what this company could possibly be working on which needs so much labor.
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They're in sales. Well...they might have more tech employees than they need just because they can report on that and say how capable they are. If they had the skeleton staff they needed, some people would lose confidence. But that only affects the bigger sales where less technical people are making the decisions.
\o/ (Score:1)
Why so many personnel? (Score:2)
I am always amazed at the head counts of tech companies. Dropbox has a product that shouldn't take more than a couple dozen IT people to maintain. Add in another few dozen IT support staff for customers. Then you need another few dozen for marketing, accounting, HR, management, etc..
What do the other 80% of the employees contribute?
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Permanent? (Score:1)
Are the employees permanently deleted or just removed from device and still in the cloud?
OneDrive is slowly killing them.... (Score:2)
I know quite a few companies who canceled former DropBox for Business/Teams subscriptions because they saw the cost-savings behind storing content on Microsoft OneDrive as part of an Office 365 subscription they were buying anyway. (These days, most businesses pay for it just for the company email - since you get Exchange cloud-hosted Outlook with it, plus the popularity of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.)
Especially with SharePoint's integration w/OneDrive, it's the obvious choice for many places.
Personally, I