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.
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.
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.
As usual, it’s only ever about maximizing shareholder value in the short term.
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.
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.