Dropbox Lays Off 500 Employees, CEO Says Due To Slowing Growth and 'the Era of AI' (techcrunch.com) 69
Cloud storage giant Dropbox today joined the fray of tech companies announcing layoffs. From a report: The company today announced that it would be laying off 16% of its staff, equivalent to about 500 employees, due to slowing growth, and -- in the words of CEO Drew Houston -- because "the AI era of computing has finally arrived." These appear to be the first layoffs the company has made since January 2021, when it laid off 315 employees in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Not sure what AI has to do with Dropbox? (Score:5, Informative)
What does the rise of AI computing have to do with cloud storage for people out there?
AI doesn't have anything to do with my pictures and other files I store and share in Dropbox.
Re:Not sure what AI has to do with Dropbox? (Score:5, Interesting)
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> Most people, including me, stopped using dropbox because of stupid decisions
Appointing neocon warmongers to their Board sure didn't help anybody who even acknowledges that privacy exists as a concept.
Oh, yeah, AI MADE ME DO IT. We're gonna hear that one a lot.
Maybe they're really pivoting to video (Score:2)
Is that still a thing?
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It doesn't. They like everyone else is seeing that market saturation = slowed growth. I really don't understand how CEOs, investors, economists, financial people, etc seem to have no clue about reality.
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I only use Dropbox because they have the best File Transfer system. It's great to send large files and I get a receipt when the person downloads it.
Other than that their platform isn't really all that useful.
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Sync.com (encrypted, Canadian) does this too. I really like their service, only drawbacks are no Linux client, and no API.
He didn't elaborate (Score:5, Insightful)
Is he talking out his ass? Who knows. But it's a fact that AI is already eating away at jobs. There's several folk right here on
And we already know AI is being used by customer service reps. South Park did an episode where the boys used AI to write text messages to their girl friends and make them swoon, and that's funny and all but it's absolutely being used in call centers right now.
I pointed this out on another thread, but AI lets you use less competent staff and get the same results. Maybe not on every interaction but in aggregate (and that's what matters to multi-nationals). This means a larger labor pool to draw on for knowledge work. More supply means lower prices. And in employment lower prices means lower *pay*. You're going to be competing with much, much less capable individuals for work, and they're going to need less of your time.
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He's telling investors that they can safely slash head count because AI will take up the slack, and that these firings are permanent (because AI replaced those 500 workers) meaning a permanent increase in profits instead of the short term one that comes from adding 20+ hours a week to the workload of the survivors.
I wonder how much of the tech sector layoffs are actually happening because of this optimism in combination with the FED mandating that they won't stop until they get mass layoffs. A perfect synchronicity.
Now, if they're right, and we're going to start using AI to automate more and more, the FED may end up eating its words when the entire economy, not just in the nation, but around the world, collapses in a relative flash. If automated systems start getting better at some astronomical rate, and more and mor
The fed doesn't care if the layoffs stop (Score:1)
He's not trying to tame inflation, he's trying to break Unions. He wants weaker worker bargaining power.
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they made that crystal clear when Powell was interviewed by Senator Warren. He was asked point blank how he plans to stop the layoffs when they start and didn't have an answer, and didn't seem very concerned that he didn't. He's not trying to tame inflation, he's trying to break Unions. He wants weaker worker bargaining power.
Also, water is wet, the sky is generally azure, and grass usually varies between green and brown. Of *COURSE* someone at the federal level wants to break unions and keep workers from having bargaining power. Everyone in the federal government works for big business exclusively. Anybody telling you different has believed the glossy brochure and done a STUPENDOUS job of ignoring reality.
Honestly the Dems aren't all that bad (Score:1)
On the plus side if you can hold out for 2 election cycles the boomers will age out of voting and Gen Z will age in, and we'll end up with a "New New Deal". That's why the modern GOP has gotten so crazy. They're trying to seize power before that h
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they've got some bad apples, but they're overall pro-Union. The issue is they need a super majority to get anything done. They're afraid if they kill the filibuster their bad apples will just turn republican and that independent voters won't punish them for it.
I keep hearing this nonsense, but my lifetime worth of watching them has proven otherwise. Even when they have a majority, and the Whitehouse, they tend to "reach across the aisle" and "work with the other side" their way into doing absolutely NOTHING to prove they're pro union. Sometimes you need to actually look at the record, rather than just listen to the wooshing sound of the shit spewing out their mouths.
On the plus side if you can hold out for 2 election cycles the boomers will age out of voting
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In general, in the US at least....when
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Jeezus the word-stuffing into my mouth is amazing. Calling the Democrats shit doesn't mean I want Marxism. I'd just like to see something other than, "WE CAN WIN BY HANDING MORE MIDDLE CLASS MONEY TO THE WEALTHY! It'll totally work this time!"
It's a proven fact the economy does better (Score:2)
I've got family alive today because of the Affordable care act. And there are women who are going to suffer, die and be jailed over abortion. Not to mention the GOP's crusade against trans people, causing higher suicide rates.
Or for something more close to home, do you have a job? Because if the GOP budget goes through you won't. Their budget is so bat shit crazy the Congressional Budget Office says it would be worse for the economy then a
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under democrats. Google it, you can easily find the studies. I've got family alive today because of the Affordable care act. And there are women who are going to suffer, die and be jailed over abortion. Not to mention the GOP's crusade against trans people, causing higher suicide rates. Or for something more close to home, do you have a job? Because if the GOP budget goes through you won't. Their budget is so bat shit crazy the Congressional Budget Office says it would be worse for the economy then a *default*. I can go on and on and on and on and on. Right wing extremist policies don't work, so they compensate with divide and conquer tactics, bigotry and general madness. The Dems aren't prefect, but I'd hardly call them right wing extremists. But I would absolutely call the modern GOP that.
And I didn't call them right wing extremists, nor did I argue that they're "worse than" the GOP. Calling the Democrats bad-faith actors does not, in any way, defend the GOP from being completely batshit.
The Democrats are the slow-slide towards shit. The GOP are the fast slide.
The affordable care act really, REALLY pisses me off, and Democrat defenders bring it up constantly. Yes, it swept away the pre-existing condition clause. However, it did ZERO for reducing healthcare costs, and priced a lot of the midd
Democrats aren't a slow slide towards shit (Score:2)
The ACA did a lot to reduce costs, it put a cap on profits that insurance companies could take against premiums causing them to be less likely to decline care and force out of pocket expenses. There's a whole bunch of other minor things too but that was the big one.
Again though it's a slow progress when we could be do
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Considering the Democrats didn't receive one single Republican vote for ACA, they could of actually given us government healthcare. Instead, they choose to expand health insurance. They based ACA off Romneycare. Remember him, a REPUBLICAN's healthcare plan.
But yeah, sure, the Dems really care about the little guy. So much so they handed insurance a huge handout.
Two parties of the same coin. They both belong to the money party of big business.
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The ACA did a lot to reduce costs
The fuck it did. NOTHING went down in cost as a result of the ACA. It was a giant government handjob for big medical groups and big health insurance companies, who are more profitable now than ever before. And everybody's health care costs did nothing but shoot way way up.
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If you truly believe that, you've swallowed the koolaide. The Democrats move us more slowly towards corporatocracy and despotism, but they are moving the same direction as the GOP. The fact you believe the ACA lowered costs for people in general is all the proof I need you're too stuck in Democrat worship to ever see reality as it exists.
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I doubt it will raise the rate.
I mean, tran folks are kinda fucked either way....stats I see show that their suicide rate remains about the same (High) whether they get sugery or other medical "help" or not....
True dysphoria is a mental disease and it causes suicidal problems in many of them that just does not seem to be able to be fixed, no matter what they do.
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That's because most Democrat politicians (at the national level) are moderates, not progressive; despite what some shrill voices would have you believe. Second Thought presented an interesting video essay on "the problem with moderates" that may be of interest.
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Moderates? Modern Democrats pay lip service to being moderates. Their actual policies are center-right, which may seem moderate up against the bat-shit crazy right-wing that the GOP has become, but they're far from moderate.
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Businesses aren't around to provide jobs... They exist to create products and services. If they can do that with fewer people, they should be.
All these bright tech folks should go find new work or start their own businesses with their vast repertoire of skills they have. Should be easy. I'm constantly hearing how awesome tech workers are, so this should ultimately result in more products and services.
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They provide client apps on five different operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS) in addition to the website. If it were just the website and the client apps were all open source, the backend and web frontend could probably be maintained by a couple of software engineers and some site reliability engineers to deal with outages, cloud synchronization issues, and cloud cluster migrations that come up, but one engineer seems ridiculously optimistic for something on that scale even if they didn
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There's also an HTTP API
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The HTTP API is presumably the endpoint used by the desktop and mobile client apps (and maybe even by the web UI), so I was lumping that in under "the website". Either way, whether it is one endpoint or half a dozen separate endpoints that all present slightly different views into the same underlying data store, it isn't likely to be a huge amount of extra maintenance compared with maintaining the site as a whole, unless they designed things wrong.
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I'm also puzzled. Why does a company that sells a glorified rsync variant needs 3000 employees for ?
Because they have other services like alternatives to Google Docs.
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Wait, you haven't heard of AI-enabled file-sharing platforms? They're all the rage these days! The AI in these platforms take your files and move them to secret locations, where only they can find them again.
AI did it (Score:5, Funny)
Dang it A.I. ! You made people not want to share files with each other anymore.
That's not what he's saying (Score:2)
Is he lying? Maybe. But only about the scale. We've already seen people here on
What I don't get is why everyone who works for a living refuses to take their heads out of the sand. I get that it's scary, but pretending it ain't the
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Maybe AI replaced the investors, and the AI realized that DropBox is offering a service that nobody actually needs.
AI? (Score:3)
Curious what AI has to do with people using Dropbox less? I think it's much more that there are a million other cloud service providers out there now. Dropbox lured plenty in years ago with their free offering and the various things you could do in order to get more free storage, but as a business cloud provider they've never been able to really play with the big players.
So AI Decided Your Service Sucks (Score:2)
Guess it makes the fired feel better to tell them it was AI who took der jobs.
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Thank yo for training your replacement.
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jerbs*
The prophecy can true. (Score:4, Funny)
I remember back in college 20 years ago, I had a CS professor who said "Don't just plan for your career to be programming because that will be the very first career path destroyed by AI."
Re:The prophecy can true. (Score:5, Interesting)
The first AI was the compiler. Instead of just understanding assembly, you now had to understand both assembly, and how the compiler would translate your statements into assembly.
As time went on, you no longer had to understand assembly, but instead had to understand the vagaries of high level languages. Instead of understanding clock cycle counts, you now had to contend with segfaults and memory leaks.
As time continued, people began to use interpreted high level languages like Java. You didn't have segfaults any more, but you still had to understand memory leaks, race conditions and thread deadlocks, resource contention, and the like.
With every succeeding generation, both the complexity and the ways in which things go wrong have increased. While writing basic code is easier than ever before, creating large, scalable products is more difficult than ever. When I was in school, about 50% of software projects failed. Now that number is between 50% and 80%. AI will probably stretch it up into the 90s.
Humans are good at simple things. Complex things require highly skilled, highly paid experts. If AI will do anything for the software world, it won't replace programmers, but rather, will reward those programmers with a knowledge of AI with obscene salaries. After a few quarters of negative ROI and a few cancelled projects, companies will go back to simpler systems which are just more easily managed.
At present, the buzz around AI is created by MBA types with a FOMO complex. Once they understand that AI deliberately obscures a deeper, conceptual understanding of the subject, and therefore cannot be cost optimized, they'll go back to the simpler methods of just deriving business rules and creating software that mostly works.
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And yet, there's Microsoft who apparently has only highly paid people.
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At present, the buzz around AI is created by MBA types with a FOMO complex. Once they understand that AI deliberately obscures a deeper, conceptual understanding of the subject, and therefore cannot be cost optimized, they'll go back to the simpler methods of just deriving business rules and creating software that mostly works.
MBA's haven't yet figured out why constant profit growth every quarter forever isn't sustainable, and that shit should be right in their precise area of expertise. What makes you think they'll ever get a concept that's not only a bit more complex, but completely outside their expertise?
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The same arguments being made for AI were made by IBM for COBOL. They really believed that with a human readable language, even secretaries would be able to write code.
They used to think compilers would eliminate the need for programmers. Instead, compilers increased the number of programmers you needed to hire - instead of "take this to the programmer..." it became, "take this to the programming team...", and later, "take this to the IS department..."
As inscrutable as AI is, it's going to drive dema
So don't you have another 20 years (Score:3)
One of the common mistakes people make is that when automation doesn't immediately wipe out all jobs they think automation isn't wiping out jobs.
Dig into it and you'll find that one of the main reasons for declining wages is that decades and decades of productivity increases instead o
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The retirees are the most reliable voting block. Young people are extremely fickle about voting. They're to busy. So you'll continue to see politicians make sure to take care of the old folk so they keep getting their vote.
Gen Z isn't going to magically usher in some utopia. They'll just get older and their priorities will change. They're mad about birth control because they like to fuck without having kids. In ten years, they'll want to fuck to make kids. At that point, they will care more about issues for
Young people aren't fickle (Score:2)
Gen Z is getting desperate. We've got 40% of homeless having full time jobs (and that numbers on the lower end, some studies have it at 60%). They're not going to care for moral panics. They w
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Most Gen Z are not homeless. Most live with their parents. The "average" homeless person is actually a white man in his 50s, typically a vet with disabilities and addiction problems.
And making it harder to vote? You mean like Georgia did and then had record turn out in the very next election? Like that? I did see the college campus voting thing though it hasn't gone through just yet. Your typical gen z isn't a college student either, though gen z does make up large portions of the college enrollment.
Most of
AI explanation (Score:2)
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I don't think he made his point very clear. It's very strange.
I'm a big dropbox user so hopefully we won't see any quality drops in service. I like dropbox as an independent service away from google and microsoft. Been a user since nearly the beginning.
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Since when has big businesses cared about sustainability? There are plenty of rich folk in the world to cater to. They seriously don't care about the proletariat.
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That's an excuse ...not an explanation. He didn't ALREADY achieve productivity via AI that made part of the DropBox workforce obsolete. He's projecting into a supposed future that hasn't happened for the company yet (and may not ever really happen).
Thanks for the reminder! (Score:5, Funny)
I forgot I had DropBox accounts!
I just deleted them so they can have more space for their AI.
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Dropbox seems to charge more for storage than OneDrive does, and (Like iCloud) OneDrive is built into Office and Windows now as a default backup option. They really didn't stand a chance.
new excuses (Score:3, Funny)
The corporate power structure now has new excuse buzz words. if they really are using infinite monkeys the quality is about to go down hill fast. does anyone even use drop box anymore?
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Dumped a zillion pics of my dog on there for an out of state friend who wanted to see but that was 9-10 years ago. All those hundreds of pics n vids still there.
oh. of course, the era of AI (Score:2)
AI is BS .... (Score:3)
What hurt DropBox more than anything else is the rise of OneDrive. Microsoft made it such a "no brainer" to just use OneDrive in corporate America instead of paying (large fees!) to duplicate the same basic functionality you get with your O365 subscription.
Plus, the integration between OneDrive and SharePoint is something DropBox can't really compete with.
I suppose the folks not using Windows still have better reasons to keep using DropBox, but as we all know? That market is still a minority of the total potential customer base out there. (Especially true since even Mac users can make use of all the O365 stuff.)
OK Yet Another AI Diversion (Score:2)
WTF what does AI have to with people needing cloud storage. Yet another bad CEO, who made poor decisions, blaming a computer for his problems.... I guess it's easier to blame "AI" ... than yourself
How to capitalize on chat bots (Score:2)
I don't think most people who aren't able to program logic are going to be able to make good use of them... yet. (or for a while)
How can I use chat bots to have multiple jobs at the same time and be considered over employed?
There are few ways to use chatbots to potentially facilitate being "overemployed" with multiple jobs at once:
1. Set up bots to monitor and respond to messages when you're not available. You
new universal bogeyman (Score:2)
Ok, kids, from now on we don't say it's because of inflation or supply chain. New universal excuse is AI.