I mean the other option would have been to keep these staff and leverage them to drive innovative solutions with your product or possibly close open feature requests and bug submissions. I mean, these 500 people could have worked towards new initiatives to grow the business as they are keenly aware of the drop box business already and would be able to execute quickly on new initiatives. There are so many interesting places that drop box could expand into and they are instead choosing to layoff staff that could get them there.
I went through a round of layoffs at my last company. They laid off around 15% and then went hiring, people who just had their teams cut in half and their workload doubled and had to say goodbye to colleagues with years of experience were then told to do 3-4 interviews a week to hire new talent.
It was all just a yank of the choke chain. Management wanted labor to know that they could replace you. Our most senior people burned out and I left after staying longer than I really should have to try to help out my teammates.
Layoffs like this are about obedience and control and showing the investors that you are willing to break people to return them a healthy profit.
As usual, it’s only ever about maximizing shareholder value in the short term.
I dunno, maybe its time for Dropbox to just slowly decline and eventually exit? I don’t see what they could possibly pivot into that isnt already covered by Google, Microsoft, Proton, etc. They had years of first mover advantage they could have pivoted off, but thats long behind them.
That said, if thats their plan, then the C suite needs to have their pay cut to the bone as well. CEOs get the big bucks because they make the big decisions to grow the company. If they arent growing, they should be the first cut.
After paying $720/yr, then $840, then being told it would be over $900 this year, I wasn’t really happy about the cost of using Dropbox. But it’s been rock solid for many years and was heavily integrated into my company’s workflow, so I smiled and bent over.
Until they took away the unlimited storage. I was using 31TB, and they wanted to put me at 15TB with no option to upgrade even if I wanted to.
I already had an on-site NAS, so I bought another for $3k (with drives) and asked a family member in another state to house it. I’m using Resilio to sync everything. It’s been backing up for a couple of months and probably has a couple more to go. So far I’m happy with the decision.
I have to imagine I’m not the only one making this move. Even if they fix the problem, I’m not going back. It’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to win a new one. Hopefully they learn their lesson.
Narrator: They won’t.
It’s funny because the people behind the decision will likely profit from enshitifying the company so that it’s no longer useful or profitable in a few years.
So in a way they’re learning the lesson that they should keep company hopping and soaking customers wherever they go, because everyone (at their pay grade) gets rich, and then they just move on.
The MBA playbook
That is the entire purpose of the decision
See Boeing, intel today, but history is littered with examples
Is this for personal or professional? I have a small server (few TB) and I’m amazed the immense amounts of data some people hoard for fun. I always thought it was mad to keep movies, until I tried to get the original lion king on my native language and decent quality and it took me days to find. Won’t delete that one
It’s both. My company is nearly twenty years old and I have an archive of everything I have ever done. … And a plex library.
That is the opposite of taking accountability though…?
Yes, but only if you don’t speak C-Suite.
But, no, I’m keeping my bonus.
He’s taking full accountability by giving himself a larger raise.
wow even more meaningless than free lunch coupons, way to go
So brave!
“This hurts me more than it hurts you”
CEO Drew Houston will remain in his job.
So not full accountability.
It’s the sentiment that counts.
“full accountability” means moving those 500 workers’ salaries into his paycheck.
How very noble of him.
Don’t forget the bonus for cutting costs!
“I declare accountability!”
I’m sure it’ll be their best quarter/year of all time but the cut would be because they didn’t meet prediction levels, because if you’re not exceptional you’re dead weight these days 🙄
It’s not sustainable. Hooboy we’re in for some interesting times.
I looked out of curiosity, they’re actually not doing well, revenue shrinking quarterly. Seems like other players are eating their lunch. Makes sense really, 10-15 years ago Dropbox was innovative but now? There’s like 25 other cloud drive providers. Dropbox isn’t really offering anything unique now, they’re just a commodity, and they can’t meet the package deal pricing of competitors (like Google drive being included with Google Apps, or iCloud Drive being included with Apple One).
think they mean he took the full accounts
“Full accountability”, as in, they’re still fired, he still have his big paycheck and assorted bonuses, and the more general “fuck them” attitude will remain.
That’s not accountability, that’s shitting on people and smiling about it.
It’s like a YouTuber apology. “Oh I done fucked up, I am so sowwy” while sitting on a cozy couch in a multi-million-dollar home
I wish someone would keep a list of all the companies that have laid employees off in the last few years, so we can keep tabs on who to not give our business to.
Would be easier to keep a list of those that didn’t.
Well, if dropbox can exist without those 500 employees, then it’s logical. You don’t judge success of a business by how many people it employs
The problem is that we judge its success by how much the wealthiest people bet on its success in a glorified casino instead of anything else, like its positive impact on society.
A plane can continue to fly without a pilot. The problem is not “continuing to exist”, but continued success or a spectacular crash.
Also, I’d bet on Dropbox being able to function quite well without its CEO.
Sure, if the CEO is replaced by someone else who can manage the company, sure. But you cannot generally expect people to manage themselves. That’s why communism never worked and never will.
Also, what is according to you a glorified casino?
Your comment does not make sense. In communist countries, companies still have CEOs, they just don’t have private shareholders, they are owned by the state. Not that I care about that.
And what I call a casino is the NYSE, when stocks offering no dividends are pumped to the stratosphere, with purely speculative buys.
Imagine calling stocks a casino xD
Imagine calling stocks your economy.
Not all stocks, though, just the ones with sharp upward trends despite the fundamentals and no dividends or voting rights. How are they different from a big-tech backed shitcoin? You don’t get part of the economic output or even the influence, they are simply a token given to you by a random corpo saying it will be worth more next month.
You can buy a part of company. If you buy 0.00001% of that company, you surely won’t take part in the decisions as your vote does not matter. From the other side, if millions of people owning 0.00001% of the company were making decisions, it would have been very slow to respond to the competition.
It’s all quite simple. If you disagree with company’s management, just sell the stocks. And no one is saying that company’s stock will be worth more next month.
The employees are more important than the boss. So yeah, I do count those jobs and feel it means something significant. Also, what does “logical” even mean to you? If the boss cut his own pay, he could have kept the employees. That’s just as logical, isn’t it? So you’re not talking about logic, are you.
If you want to talk about values, let’s do it. Please explain why multi millionaires (and richer) matter more than everyone else. Please.
Company is not a charity. There is a difference.
Suppose that dropbox employs twice as many people as other cloud providers. Would you be willing to pay them the twice amount for the same product the competition offers just because they employ more people?
You know, we live in the world of competition where you need to be ahead your rivals, otherwise your company fails (and all employees lose their jobs). So cutting costs where it’s possible makes perfect sense, especially if the employees can be replaced by computers or sth.
You could argue that you can judge their success based on the ratio of employees they used to employ versus how many they employ now.
So if I have a small computer repair store and want to make it more successful, I should employ at least million people, so the ratio goes up?
Do you honestly think that’s a comparable analogy?
How about if you have a small computer repair store that employed 20 people last year, but due to the owner’s poor analogy game scaring off the customers, you only need 5 employees to fill all the available work this year? Would you say the employee count is an indicator of the health of the business?
He gotta protect his bonus
