Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff

techcrunch.com

29 pointsas-j25 comments

Is THE famous HN comment going to turn out to be right all along?!

Can we stop euphemistic language like this:

> In a letter to staff, Houston said that the reduction in headcount would impact 528 people.

He fired 528 people. That's what he did.

Also, he impacted a lot more than the 528 people he fired. Those who didn't get fired have to take on the work that was being done by their fired colleagues without an increase in pay.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I feel there is a difference.

If someone is "fired" I would assume that it's the persons fault (bad performance).

What was said:“As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it..."

And what was unsaid: ...but I shall suffer no consequences, and I'll upend your life instead. So, I'm good, right?

What even means "I take full responsibility" in this case, if there are seemingly no consequences.

The CEO will be forced to spend an entire meeting in a remorseful mood, do you know how hard that is? He will need a raise due to the amount of trauma that will be experienced.

We should all be assured they will learn their lesson and do much better at the helm of the next company

I am assured of this.

So say we all

Obviously he is taking the responsibility and delegates it to 1/5 of his underlings.

Given how efficiently this was executed, I think he deserves a raise.

Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

The consequences are going to be stock value increase.

Edit: it’s already visible.

Kinda, it's up today but DBX has been pretty flat all year after a big drop in March. YTD it's down around 10% while SPY is up over 20%, layoffs seem like a desperation move along with their AI strategy.

full of resp(ectless)pon(zi,a)bilities

I don't completely disagree with your take, but people in this world have it pretty good. Most of the employees being laid off were taking home good paychecks for years. They had good benefits and they paid into retirement. According to the article, the company is going to pay on average around $125,000 in severance per employee.

Contrast this with the staff member at a university making $40,000 a year that gets laid off with little notice and no severance. Or the guy working in manufacturing that gets laid off because a major customer changed distributor so the company has to reorganize. Those are people having their lives upended.

That some people losing their jobs have it better than others has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of a CEO claiming to take full responsibility while suffering zero consequences.

The market love the announcement of 20% cut in staff so the share price is up 2.85%.

The full responsibility personally benefited the CEO by ~$56,000,000

I was responding to this

> I'll upend your life instead

$125,000 of severance for high-salary employees that have large retirement accounts isn't "upending" their lives. Complaints about a severance package like that belong in the same bin as billionaires complaining about paying taxes.

White-collar Dropbox employees have infinitely more in common with minimum wage hourly workers than any billionaire. Not just qualitatively in terms of freedom, but even quantitatively: the relatively extreme 10x difference of a $40k versus $400k salary is dwarfed by someone with a net worth 5000x the high end of that range.

As someone who has worked for less than $40,000 a year, and someone who now makes more than the average pay of someone at DropBox--I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse." Yes, it'd suck to be a laid-off staff member of a university making $40,000. It also sucks to be a laid-off cashier at a grocery store making $16,500.

This talk of money also ignores the negative effects on mental health from being laid-off.

But the most important point here is that a CEO making an obscene amount of money takes "full responsibility" and... still gets paid an obscene amount of money. Easy to take responsibility if you have 0 consequences.

> I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse."

That's wasn't the point of my comment. The point was the $125,000 severance package. You have someone making $40,000 a year getting laid off with little notice and no money to live on. That's bad. Then you have someone getting laid off but the company is giving them another $125,000. To the extent that that's bad, it's something that most folks could never dream of.

> while revenue slid to the low single digits.

That can't be true. Dropbox made less than $5 in the last three months?

Revenue growth slid to low single digits, meaning instead of adding 20% more accounts, they only had less than 5% new accounts or revenue

That makes sense, but it definitely wasn't what the artical said a few hours ago. It looks like it has been expanded quite a bit since I read it.

More discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41994640

> while revenue growth slid to the low single digits.

looks like they edited the article to mke more sense

Reply on news.ycombinator.com