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Comment by mrthrowaway999 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sad to see so much venom in these comments. HN of old would have tried to delve into the details and find something to learn from this.

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This literally happens every single time there is a big layoff announcement on HN; at this point it's completely predictable. People love these stories as a place to vent (not that I necessarily blame them), but I do find that these kind of stories always attract the lowest quality comments. E.g. "Why hasn't the CEO committed harakiri!" Which is always a bit sad to me because I think the biggest mistake (especially in highly paid industries) is to think that a layoff is the end of the world and the absolute worse possible thing that can happen to someone.

Ahem The CEO's breath smelled of genitals

we've seen so many of these stories, the same narratives (which are just that. words, not actions nor plans), and no further insight on their real reasons.

What is there to say or inquire about? The human element is way more important.

>to think that a layoff is the end of the world and the absolute worse possible thing that can happen to someone.

Short of sickness or death of a loved one, I struggle to think of anything worse than losing my livelihood out of nowhere.

I guess if I owned a house and it burned down? I can insure that at least. Job insurance seems to be dead these days.

Car accident? if no one was hurt that's much less worse. I can rent a car until insurance figures itself out.

What kind of dismissal is this? Have you ever been laid off? I'm genuinely wondering what your mindset here is when you made this comment.

We've learned it because we've seen this movie many times over the past couple of years (the catalyst perhaps being Musk's decimation of Twitter): it's become acceptable -- and perhaps not only acceptable but expected -- to suddenly cut a significant percentage of your workforce in order to "drive growth", with some BS platitude (the details of which vary a bit but they all read pretty much the same).

It's not venom, it's an appropriate response by workers to the "shareholder-value-at-all-cost" race that the industry finds itself in; an industry that has prided itself, and often built companies on, values that are the opposite.

That, and the fact that CEOs have no accountability for these decisions.

I saw the venom the other way. People are losing their livlihoods and I see such dismissals as

- "You shoud have saved more money"

- "oh well you'll get a better job soon" (have not seen the job market the last 2 years)

- "They were probably low performing workers anyway, they deserve it"

- "It is what it is. Business is going to business"

- "The CEO's are just doing their job"

I hate it. We can't even come together as a community, which consists of many tech workers, to empathize with our peers. No wonder we can't rise up and bring about change from grassroots.

Let's keep trying. What learning opportunities do you see in the details here?

Just off the top of my head: every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy.

If I had more time, I would love to understand the fss market better and also what impact ai is having there. I don't see a Q3 earnings report from Dropbox, but as others have pointed out in other comments, Dropbox seems to have been doing fine financially.

> Dropbox seems to have been doing fine financially

Not really.

The issue is Dropbox's core product is heavily commodified (Cloud File Store for Enterprise and Consumers).

Dropbox's EBIDTA is much lower than peers in the Software industry making it a much less attractive investment - even public companies need to attract investment.

Furthermore, Dropbox has missed out on multiple trends that it had the right ingredients to execute on, such as DLP, DSPM, AI Search, AI-leveraged Business Tooling, etc.

It's not that Dropbox didn't try building these teams - they did and I know plenty of people who were hired to work or lead these initiatives - but tech is competitive and they got outcompeted.

At some point they have to initiate layoffs in order to retool internally and concentrate on the BUs that actually generate outsized revenue along with strategic bets that can help make Dropbox more enticing.

> every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy

Pretty much. Layoffs have always a thing in the tech industry.

And compared to previous cycles (early 2000s, 2008-2013), the current job market is fairly standard for mid-career.

I think this tech downturn is just the first one that a lot of 2011-22 grads went through and it makes them feel like it's the end of the world.

Keep saving, keep upskilling, and keep networking - these are what save you when we all (inevitably) get laid off.

"every engineer should have 6+ months of savings. "

I did. Even stretched it out to 9 months (getting a freelance gig out of nowhere helped). But it's been 13 months with no full time work.

>Market isn't great but our salaries can help build those savings easy.

It did not. Not everyone's making 300k at Google.

>If I had more time, I would love to understand the fss market better and also what impact ai is having there.

nothing short term, but the usual suspects come about as usual. Trendsetting from Twitter, ZIRP, tax code changes affecting how to amortize tech salaries, an anticipation of a downturn in the evonomy, and AI speculation (not really affecting tech, but other areas).

Those are each worth their own post, but this is againa topic talked about a lot . Since this has happened a lot.

And yes, this wasn't a layoff of necessity. That's the "venomous" part about it. Why Wouldn't I be mad at blatant greed?

I think the real learning here is that the company is still around even though they are sort of not in the popular zeitgeist at all anymore and there are so many other tools that does what they do.

It is still around even if as a Linux user I can get ftp server and mount it locally then use CVS or SVN … ;)

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