This kind of no-win complaining is tiresome.
All you are arguing for is that Dropbox should never have hired these people in the first place. Why is that better? At least these people got some years of high pay, experience, networking relationships, etc. Obviously it's disruptive, and it could be a big net negative for people who maybe jumped ship from more stable jobs only to be quickly laid off, but that's not the broad experience.
Also, you're missing another obvious argument. Most tech companies that are doing layoffs could afford to keep their employees. Dropbox hasn't done 3 rounds of layoffs because they're on the verge of bankruptcy but rather they're just following the trend and pleasing shareholders or whatever.
So I'm not arguing for less jobs but rather less corporate bullshit.
How do you expect this to work? Companies hire because they think the extra man-hours is going to give them a competitive advantage. Companies agreeing not to compete each other seems suspiciously like a cartel.
That's still cartel behavior. If Google and Apple formed a cartel to fix handset prices, they could still theoretically compete with each other on features or whatever, but that'd still be a cartel.
Does it suck? It means that someone got a job where they didn't really have to do that much and got paid anyway.
An alternative is where that job was never offered. And then we're complaining that there's no jobs.
Also, no, the solution is not to "just hire the perfect amount". Sure if we could just do anything perfectly everything is great, but how is that a reasonable demand.
Source?
Claiming that it’s to please regulators when it’s far and away better than the average severance package is an irrational claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.