The same forces that enable high tech salaries, also make layoffs more likely.
- The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can
- The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members
- Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done
The end result is that if companies are spending their max, if there's a shock to the market/system etc they have to cut. You'd see this less if there was more padding/ less competitive pressure/lower salaries.
I think that's fine and the system is working as intended. People should be freed up to move to other roles where they can be productive. Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense. There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.
A somewhat sensible take, but the issue isn’t just healthcare. A lot of your life is based off of long-term, fixed cost cash flow. E.g. you can’t pay less on your mortgage just because you got fired. Even with savings, getting laid off is highly disruptive, and, if done as part of a broader downturn in the market, you may never recover the required cash flow to enable your lifestyle.
There are also different types of creep, some that you can easily stop, and others that are more difficult. Specifically, everything that involves a medium to long-term obligation (such as a mortgage or vehicle loan) can cause problems if you cannot sustain it through cashflow interruptions or significant declines. Going out to expensive restaurants and Broadway shows definitely costs a lot of money, but you can immediately stop them if you have money trouble.
the problem with restaurants and broadway is that you've already spent the money on those things when the going is good, and can't claw it back retroactively when the going is bad.
That's why a budget is necessary, and you plan for emergency (of which a layoff is one). Saving up for an emergency fund means you don't spend on luxury until it is saved, which means no broadway or restaurants (unless you're super highly paid, in which case it'd be quite fast).
Transaction costs for selling your house are incredibly high. Also depending on your personal situation, especially if you have kids in school, it can be extremely disruptive.
Car market is crazy these past few years, but the common wisdom is "your car loses worth the moment it leaves the lot". and it is probably still an essential so you can ensure cash flow. It's more expensive making a bad bet with a beater and spending hundreds keeping it running.
And selling your house is a last resort. rent is still more than mortgageso you're losing both asset and liquid wealth with that move just to buy some time. You're better off taking out a second mortgage if needed than selling off entirely.
>And selling your house is a last resort. rent is still more than mortgageso you're losing both asset and liquid wealth with that move just to buy some time. You're better off taking out a second mortgage if needed than selling off entirely.
...not to mention that if you're losing your job and can't find a new one readily, chances are you're in an economic calamity and you'll be selling near the bottom.
Exactly, I feel a lot of my coworkers fell under this trap: if you need cashflow for mortgage on your 4m mansion in (affluent neighborhood), you can't really afford it.
I make a decent salary as a programmer (150k) but my house only cost 250k and my mortgage is about 1400. How I see it, if I have to flip burgers to keep my house, I can pull it off. I can't imagine have a mortgage that's 10gs a month.
Sadly it seems it's unlikely they'll hire you even though they might need the help that bad because they're afraid of paying to train you and then you leaving once something better, and in your line of work, comes along.
I mean I just meant a low paying job. During COVID which even have more oversupply, I was bored and I was drive around doing doordash and other delivery services even though I had my tech job. There is always a surefire way of making one or two thousand a month here in the states if you're properly motivated.
Not sure what you mean. Job growth is continually rising, and unemployment continues to remain at historic lows (where it has been since 2021-ish). [0]
The job market is doing just fine, unless you’re in very specific areas such as the automotive industry or certain types of manufacturing.
These charts use "employment" in a very pedantic way. They don't look much at underemployment nor the shifts in proportions of salary ranges.
I believe they also count gigs. So I could run Doordash for under minimum and be "employed" technically.
The other dangerous thing is "averages". This is one of the special cases where you need to look at the lower quartiles. The average/median can look great, but if we have an entire quartile unable to pay rent we'd be in trouble as a whole.
To be clear, I was only responding to your first statement about “how bad the job market's been.”
You can click through to the BLS survey to read more about their methodology, but the job growth number of +254k jobs in September only includes payroll employees. And reading the report would tell you that they do, in fact, track underemployment (people who worked part time but would have preferred full time employment). And neither job growth nor the unemployment rate has anything to do with “averages.”
Can you provide any data to refute the numbers I shared? Because again, the job market is looking pretty good to me.
> Can you provide any data to refute the numbers I shared? Because again, the job market is looking pretty good to me.
This is why everyone hates economists.
They have zero insight into how lives are for ordinary people.
I applied for a job at grocery stores and fast food restaurants.
I did not get ONE call back from any of these places.
Also another thing -- they keep saying rate of inflation is now under control.
Well guess what, the prices went up and have not come down. Wages did not keep pace with the high rate of inflation so unless you can have negative inflation somehow, there is still constant pain every day, every month. I mean it is so obvious and yet economists chase spherical cows...
> This is why everyone hates economists. They have zero insight into how lives are for ordinary people. I applied for a job at grocery stores and fast food restaurants. I did not get ONE call back from any of these places.
I understand your frustration with your personal situation, but at least regarding unemployment, how else would you propose we measure it? Unless there's some flaw with the methodology or the data that was collected, your situation is very clearly not the norm. Until we identify any possible problems with the measuring process, the number that's released is the best view we have of the employment situation nationwide. Are you saying that "ordinary people" are somehow excluded from the data? Or what?
> Also another thing -- they keep saying rate of inflation is now under control. Well guess what, the prices went up and have not come down. Wages did not keep pace with the high rate of inflation so unless you can have negative inflation somehow, there is still constant pain every day, every month. I mean it is so obvious and yet economists chase spherical cows...
The rate of inflation is under control, and I realize you might know better and are just speaking for "the average person," but comments like this reflect a gross misunderstanding of the concept of inflation. This is a perfect reason why education is so important to an informed and effective electorate.
BTW, you can, in fact, have negative inflation, and it is widely considered to be bad, for a multitude of reasons. [0]
Sorry, yes, I meant somehow have negative inflation without the terrible consequences (iirc Japan had it at slightly above zero for a decade and that was bad enough, can't imagine actually negative numbers enough to reverse the inflation since 2020).
> The rate of inflation is under control
Stop saying that because that message is clearly not resonating with people. They don't understand and they don't want to understand. Don't shoot the messenger here but this is a spherical cow. It doesn't matter that a car that has you pinned against a wall is no longer accelerating but it is merely attempting to crush you at a steady, cruising speed.
Yes, this was a big achievement and clearly we failed to communicate this message because the next question is ok great but how do I stretch my paycheck to meet my expenses.
And that goes back to the original problem -- there are fewer jobs than there were before. I have ZERO data to back this up but just my own personal anecdotes but it feels like at least for web developers that companies are laying off people AND hiring people back at lower wages. If they are not actively laying off, they are taking any excuse they can get to end a contract or "return to office" to force people to quit and come back at a lower salary.
> Stop saying that because that message is clearly not resonating with people
I’m not a politician running for office, so fortunately I don’t have to make it resonate with people. I will continue to say it because it’s true.
> And that goes back to the original problem -- there are fewer jobs than there were before. I have ZERO data to back this up but just my own personal anecdotes but it feels like at least for web developers that companies are laying off people AND hiring people back at lower wages.
I prefer to believe things that are based on data and evidence rather than feelings, even if it goes against whatever preconceived notions I may have.
Here’s an anecdote for you: I’m a developer and found a new job about 2 years ago, after the big tech layoffs started happening, and went from starting my search to offer signed in about 5 weeks, give or take. I still work for this same company and since the whole company is fully remote, there are going to be no RTO mandates, ever. I make more money than I have at any previous job in my prior 20 years in the profession. I have several close friends in similar positions as me. The job market is doing great!
I find it hard to believe you can flip enough burgers to pay that mortgage and still survive. Not many fast food places will pay over 30 hours a week to burger flippers. Managers yes. You would barely survive.
That is nonsense. That's more than enough to afford a studio in New York City.
You can easily afford a luxury studio with a doorman and a pool making half of that!
Is a "luxury studio" a real thing in NYC real estate or was this a joke?
The term itself sounds absurd and oxymoronic to me, but also I know NYC housing is absurd and I can imagine that there are places that do nice interior finishes on studio apartments and call them luxury so maybe it's real?
really depends on CoL and remote work and a half dozen other factors. My house is around the same mortgage but also twice as expensive in a suburb that is arguably the boonies. Even with the $20/hr miniumum wage for flipping burgers It'd be a tight fit after utilities and other payments.
Every house requires cash flow, regardless of mortgage amount. There's something to be said for overspending on a house for sure - but let's not forget mortgage(if any), maintenance, property tax, utilities, insurance, etc. Last year I spent more on maintenance than my mortgage cost.
You get a mortgage because most people cannot just outright buy a hosue with cash. We can discuss the balance of how big a mortgae to your salary, but most people through American history could "not really afford it" by that definition.
But most of history relied on a labor market focusing on retention and training. We're far past that. We're a gig econnomy in all but name with these kinds of evonomic swings.
The only mortgages that don't require cashflow are the paid off mortgages. Even if someone has a year of savings, or two years, or three, after that amount is drained, they need cash flow again. So how does one buy a house without being dependent on cash flow?
Well, you need cashflow on a house in general. Even with a paid-off mortgage, I'm easily $10K/year and probably closer to $20K if I'm not pushing various stuff off.
2025 standard deduction is $30k for MFJ. Ain’t many people passing that mark these days in itemized deductions so the mortgage interest deduction is moot.
Well the most obvious approach would be to pay cash.
The more fiscally conservative option is to only borrow money if you have capital which is earning income at a higher rate than the mortgage. This probably necessitates having more capital than the house costs.
The problem with that is that unless you have an extremely well paying job or rich parents, you have to outsave inflation and rising house prices. You may never own. Getting a loan just locks you into an inflation proof price as a "forced" savings. I don't think it's realistic at all for 85% of Americans to save for a new house.
If you save $2.5k/mo for 15 years, after 14 years (mid-30s), you’d have $800k at 8% interest.
Even in Seattle, $800k would get you a decent starter home.
(I chose $2.5k, bc 15 years ago out of college, that’s how much I saved living in GA on a $70k salary). I saved even more when I move to California in my mid 20s.
That' assuming houses don't go up in price though right?
Also I think it's pretty rare for people to have the mental fortitude to save 2.5k a month for a house on top of living expenses, rent, and trying to build your retirement / savings / emergency fund.
It's definitely possible but I think it's out of reach for the average person.
> That' assuming houses don't go up in price though right?
No, it isn’t. You can invest your savings. If you had put $2,500.00 a month into SPY500 since October 2009 (15 years ago) you’d have $1,388,302.13 today.
> Also I think it's pretty rare for people to have the mental fortitude to save 2.5k a month for a house on top of living expenses, rent, and trying to build your retirement / savings / emergency fund.
How is saving for a house “on top of” literally “saving”? If you can save for retirement, savings, and emergencies then you have the mental fortitude to save for a house. People are bad with money, we know that. One of the best examples is buying a house they can’t afford.
> It's definitely possible but I think it's out of reach for the average person.
Yeah, I just think examples like this need to work for the masses in order to be useful otherwise they're just pie in the sky advice like abstinence to prevent childbirth. It does work and it's 100% effective but humans are horny. Same with saving this amount of money, there's a select few that can pull it off but most are incapable. Those are the people advice is for
>Live within your means and save as much as you can
It's expensive being poor and the job market isn't getting better to compensate this economy. If you rent forever you spend more than someone paying off a mortgage (only amortized by needing to upkeep the house youself). If you're wokrking your back out everyday you're more likely to pay more insurance and medical bills than the cushy white collar job with proggresion options.
Most people don't even have the $1000 rainy day fund. They are 3 steps removed from the thought of a "diversified portfolio".
They can’t afford a rainy day fund so they should buy a house?
I have a “cushy white collar job” and I can’t afford a house. Prices are absurd. I can make mortgage payments but it would destroy any other savings. Buying a house when poor isn’t a smart financial move.
I wish everyone could afford a house but that’s not the world we live in. Nothing will change until people wake up and stop killing themselves to inflate home prices.
Just because you buy something doesn’t mean you can afford it.
If you can’t retire or pay medical expenses or maintain your physical and emotional wellbeing because you spent money on a house then you couldn’t afford it. Owning a house doesn’t mean you can pay the property taxes or maintenance costs.
My point is that people are making financially unsound home buying purchases.
Another way to say this is that Bugatti doesn’t sell Veyrons to people with $1,000,000.00. Bugatti sells Veyrons to people with an extra $1,000,000.00.
Now I’m curious how this happened. This is the portion of homes owned by their residents, not the number of owned homes as a portion of total population. I’m also curious what the income and wealth to home ratios are. Looks like I have a weekend project.
The pre-war/post war duality is easy to understand. The US made it official policy to increase homeownership. The government subsidizes housing for all income levels and there was tons of housing built.
The post-war era has seen only minor changes in homeownership rates. And those tend to be around macro economic events like 2008 and Covid (and the Reagan era mortgage rates woof).
My bet is simple: Boomers are all at retirement age if we use the cap of 1954, they were basically given land during the post-war boom. Many had a lifetime career so there was no need to constantly hustle and move about to get a comfortable life. Home ownership is likely very top heavy for Boomers and older Gen X as a result.
If that's even in the ballpark we're going to see a lot of assets aquired by insurance and hospitals to pay off the final years and this residential ownershio will torpeo.
The census bureau has looked at this. The Reagan years hit boomers hard causing their percentage of homeownership to drop compared to a similar age cohort historically. Then 2008 wrecked the young boomers and gen x similarly.
In general terms the oldest cohort has steadily advanced in home ownership (I’d guess due to our welfare for the aged that isn’t needs based and better old age health, not land gifts but who knows). So there is definitely a trend of the oldest age cohort increasing its homeownership % while the other cohorts decrease.
But for the under 35 crowd today, they own their own home at a higher percentage than boomers or gen x did when they were in that cohort.
There is also the consideration that the US is just older than it’s ever been. I’m not a demographer do I have no idea how that plays out.
No, those are considered. That $2,500/mo is at the bottom of your career. You will be saving more as you age, even accounting for employment gaps.
If we are considering kids, presumably there is another partner (and income) to be added to the equation. While you may have half the amount saved due to the cost of raising children, your partner would have the other half.
8% was chosen to discount 3% inflation (cost of living) from SnP 500’s average 11% growth.
Ah yeah fair. The numbers I quoted are median and I don’t have the source. They are from a quick search of financial news. Your index numbers are probably a more sound comparison of overall house prices.
But even using the index numbers it isn’t hard to see that housing prices do in fact go both up and down.
They are not going down because of lack of inventory. Look at commercial, some properties had an 80% discount. But that requires that supply overwhelms demand. It’s not happening with regular housing.
That's not guaranteed, and not how you save for a fixed goal.
I don't know of any lower-risk and higher-interest alternative to the 30-years-fixed that is currently offered to US consumers, and based of the above answer, neither do you.
Yes, it’s a tragedy of the commons. That doesn’t make taking on a loan you can’t afford less of a bad idea.
House prices are unaffordable because people take on loans they can’t afford. This reinforces the unaffordable prices. If milk was $40.00 a gallon you’d just stop putting it on cereal and eventually farmers get the message. Houses are the same thing.
If you can’t comfortably afford a house then don’t buy it. You’re stuck renting or buying something more modest. This isn’t complicated.
The idea that house prices can only go up is delusional. Nothing about a house is uniquely inflation proof or even inflation resistant. This isn’t the only investment vehicle available to you.
This idea that houses are an important part of financial security is putting the cart in front of the horse. It leads to the NIMBYism that prevents additional supply from being built because prices must always go up.
We all exist in the same economy and no action happens in a vacuum. When you buy something you have reduced supply and applied upward pressure on price. Individually this effect is so small it is immeasurable. In aggregate it isn’t.
This was a failure of regulation, not just in the US but elsewhere too; banks and mortgage brokers weren't doing their due diligence and were giving out loans and mortgages that people couldn't afford based on their income and other outstanding debts, eventually leading to the 2007/8 financial crisis.
Which should have been a lesson, but five years later, housing prices recovered and ballooned. I don't know why besides increased demand and reduced availability, clearly people can still get mortgages despite the lessons learned from the crisis.
One thing I've come to realize is that the larger your social circle, the more prone you are to comparisons and hence lifestyle creep. You can see this where the careers that involve a lot of socializing (sales, entertainment, law, finance etc) are known for having flashy people. And the careers that you can do as a loner (programming, quant, researcher etc) are known for having miserly folk
I don't know why we treat large stock portfolios as if it's a convinient savings account in these talks.
My financial teachings were always emergency fund -> 3-6 months of savings immediately accessible -> consider stocks (hire a financial planner if you don't know stocks) -> consider asset management. your first foray into saving if you're barely spacing by isn't to rely on the S&P 500.
There seems to be an analogy to servers being capable enough for usual demand(income>spending), but fails due to some downtime for some servers(out of a job) or peak loads(medical emergency). This can be amortized by having data centers serving multiple apps(social security, insurance - but they dont always exist).
One main fault in the analogy is that in an economic crisis, there is a vicious cycle of income loss which leads to lower demand leading to more lost jobs. This coordination failure can be handled by fiscal/monetary policy. Whereas server failure, even when widespread due to a virus doesn't happen recursively like that.
This why we need the tiny home movement combined with progressive property taxes - 0 prop tax bracket for lowest 20% property values If you have mortgage then you don’t really own your house.
Tiny homes like the coffin homes of overpopulated cities, you mean?
Or tiny homes like the luxury single occupant container buildings on a bit of land?
Tiny homes are not the solution, they are hipster semi-cottage-core fashion homes. You're probably thinking of regular apartments, but for some reason they aren't built at the rate needed. Build ten million apartments (for starters) and the cost of living will go down. Satisfy / saturate the market first, then think of gentrifying with fashion homes.
>but for some reason they aren't built at the rate needed.
crabs in a bucket. Those who got in and got theirs don't want their property value falling. Americans treating housing as a stock instead of a necessary resource for living really ruined a lot of the dynamic of city planning.
Seems like this would hurt those laid off here. They are probably in the top 20% of property values.
That said, I think it is a pretty bad idea. Use of public funds dont increase with property value, it just means you have deeper pockets. I would be more in favor of flat taxes on homes independent of value, so people pay their fair share for community resources consumed.
honestly this is one of the reasons I prefer pre-IPO companies, my salary is lower until they do a buyback or an exit, but it ends up basically in the same place over the long term. This is how I was able to put a downpayment on a house without consciously "saving up" for it. Obviously there's some risk but I've had two buybacks, one IPO, and two acquisitions since 2012
Yeah, the stakes for the two sides of that transaction are completely different, so equivocating rational responses on either side makes no sense. OP lost me there.
Eventually we all get fired. It shouldn't come as a shock. This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles should live below their means and keep at least several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments.
I do understand that it can be challenging to save for young people with student debt starting out in a HCOL area. But I see older tech workers who ought to know better buying luxury cars and fancy gaming PCs and taking exotic vacations. Good luck to them when the next recession hits.
Yes, but the problems start in severe economic crises. Specifically, when those several months turn into years.
Many filters during the hiring process, prior to interview will discard those candidates who have gaps since last employment regardless of circumstance. They may use AI as a third-party company to review and obscure the fact that they aren't hiring anyone over 40, female, or otherwise protected classes but that is what is happening regularly, along with other elements such as degrees being weighted higher than experience algorithmically.
> I do understand ...
I can tell you from personal experience, this opinion of yours isn't reflective of the whole. I've been in Tech for a decade, I was unlucky and was laid off before the major lay offs (2022) as I was involved in workforce reduction for a buyout merger. I've been looking ever since, and I've had to find work elsewhere in the interim once my reserves were expended.
I was extremely frugal, cooking everything myself, nothing luxurious. Inflation destroyed my reserves, the lack of jobs forced me to look wider than my given profession since there are no jobs, and I had more saved than most (>50k in liquid reserves at the start).
This isn't some recession like before. This is a great depression, potentially a big debt crises like Germany pre-WW2.
70% of my professional network in IT/Tech right now, across the board, is out of work. I'll let that sink in. 70%.
We are at peak hiring for seasonal hiring and unemployment is 7.0% in August? Hiring freezes guarantee this will be double digits by the annual count. National unemployment is 1.5%. That's a 4.6x national distortion between the national average unemployment and one sector that impacts everything else as a labor multiplier, and that measurement only counts those currently getting unemployment, any long-term displacement outside 18 weeks isn't counted.
Its looking more like we're in the middle of an economic collapse, which makes sense if you know about ponzi's, economics of boom-bust cycles, and how we are entering a bust cycle related to the petrodollar agreement abandonment (by the Saudi's); all those dollars printed for abroad use are now flowing back to compete with the same goods despite high interest rates.
BRICS largely isn't about attacking the US economically, its about sheltering from the global economic fallout of fiat money printing, for more than half a century. The bankers are and have been doing this to us since before we were born, and this happens every time large fractions of global assets get concentrated into few hands. Its cyclical. Large market-share companies are funded by preferential loans made by those same bankers. This is how you sieve wealth and marketshare, then drive prices up, and eventually end in deflation or hyper-inflationary collapse, because unlike normal systems economics is both sticky psychologically, and mathematically chaotic (3-body-problem).
There is no beautiful deleveraging, the bill always comes due. If this worsens, and I don't see how it cannot, this will be known by the survivors as the folly of one big generation.
I'm sorry for your troubles but that unhinged rant is completely disconnected from objective reality.
BRICs isn't even a real thing, it's a total joke. They've been talking about an alternative reserve currency for years but have made zero real progress.
Unemployment calculations from data recorded during that time have since changed. The same unemployment numbers are not the same mathematical objects being compared.
At this point, we can never know the true scope of unemployment to make any comparison definitively, because the measurements no longer accurately collect the necessary information for such a comparison.
You don't see engineers turn sampling data into an average rate of change, and then use it for safety-critical applications that require instantaneous rates of change.
In my previous response, I said unemployment today isn't counted after 18 weeks, so you should be aware that these objects are not the same.
Just because you have no visibility on a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem especially when objective measures indicate there is a problem.
No definitive comparison can be made objectively, claiming its not even close would involve delusion when no external objective comparison can be made, definitionally.
> Unemployment calculations from data recorded during that time have since changed. The same unemployment numbers are not the same mathematical objects being compared
We can look at the number of people on payrolls and the number of people claiming unemployment.
You are in a deep tech bubble if you think we're in a recession let alone depression. (What we are in is a cost of living crisis.)
Recessions typically are pullbacks of the market sector for 1-2 years, but not necessarily slowdowns in growth, though there is no globally accepted definition for a recession.
Depressions typically have stagnant growth, starting in one sector, and expanding; with no prospects and a duration that can last years (plural). You can have a depression where everyone says they are hiring, but no hiring actually occurs.
Cost of living crises naturally occur during the latter crises given the chaotic nature of deflationary and inflationary forces (money-printing). They are not mutually exclusive.
Payroll data collection has problems with accuracy, people claiming unemployment also have data collection problems. Its not uncommon for the government to withhold unemployment benefit approval until some arbitrary bureacratic requirement is met with no means to contact someone to resolve it timely. I know several people who received their 18 month unemployment effectively as a lump sum and they spent days of labor trying to overcome those hurdles.
This causes a delay of action, and bursts in time (temporally) which cannot be compared except as an average. Revisions are subject to problems too.
> Recessions typically are pullbacks of the market sector for 1-2 years, but not necessarily slowdowns in growth, though there is no globally accepted definition for a recession
There absolutely is. A slowdown in growth is not a recession.
I'm not saying there isn't a problem. I am saying that you can't extrapolate from 70% of IT people in your circles being unemployed to the entire economy imploding Great Depression style.
Even in IT circles, it's still better out there than it was during the GFC (2009, 10% US unemployment), and way better than it was after the dot-com bust (2000, <6% overall unemployment, but much, much higher in IT).
Something uncommmon for Gen X and unthinkable for Boomers. But think about how modern America structured all these payment plans...
>This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles
you just said everyone get fired. I think today it's harder to find a job that isn't on bust/boom. Especially a public company that will slash employees simply to make number go up, no even because they are struggling per se.
>several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments.
Low risk invesements are talking 2% on a great day and 4% on an excellent day. There were people above talking about 8% interest rates from S&P to outrun inflation long term.
>But I see older tech workers who ought to know better buying luxury cars and fancy gaming PCs and taking exotic vacations.
odd we compare a 6 figure luxury car to what's at best some $5k gaming setup that can in fact be used for more work in this tech sector. my 2.5K laptop was probably a better investment pre-bust than my new bed (I guess we'll see in 20 years with my back, but the bed isn't making me money).
You've got to be kidding. Boomers were fired or laid off all the time. Unemployment rates have been much higher during some years when Boomers were a major part of the labor force, hitting over 10% in 1982.
There's a difference between "it happens regularly" and "no one is safe". We're arguably structured like a gig economy so unemployment rates won't represent the differece on a chart
You should bring a chart on the average tenure at a single company.
The idea that someone's response to being fired should be the same as a manager's response to one of their reports quitting is hilariously out of touch.
It kind of ignores the core asymmetry of capitalism, that those with the capital are the ones with the power. Nobody can do a background check on a company to see who they laid off or fired before they work there.
You can do a background check. That’s not where the asymmetry is, though. The pandemic checks have showed that the asymmetry can be flipped but then almost everyone working low-tier (flipping burgers) will quit his work. The Fed has then decided to re-enslave these people. Someone gotta take the garbage.
>The Fed has then decided to re-enslave these people. Someone gotta take the garbage.
What are you talking about? real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages have gone up more for the lowest quartile of americans[1]. Is paying people more to get them to work "re-enslavement" now?
> “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” - Anatole France
Too many focus on equal outcome instead of equal opportuniy.
That quote is one that calls attention to the limits of things that seem like they would lead to "equal opportunity." Maybe it's illegal for a rich person to sleep under a bridge, but then again, why would they want or need to?
A rule applying across the board to everyone doesn't really imply that it provides equal opportunity.
What do you mean? Information about previous layoffs is all over the news, social media, and dedicated sites like Glassdoor. Only a fool or someone really desperate would take a job without doing a thorough background check on the company first. And while I sympathize with workers who have to take whatever job they can get, that doesn't apply to most HN users.
Glassdoor itself encourages users not to post anything factual, only opinion-based, because of the legal consequences [1]. Glassdoor is more like a Google business review than a background check anyway.
Also your estimation of HN users is probably out of date with the current state of the employment market.
I worked at startups for 7 years. Interestingly, WARN acts are mostly irrelevant for startups because they are only triggered when a certain number of people are about to be laid off (100 or more, I believe). When an employer accesses your employment record, they can see very detailed information. A WARN act filing is neither comprehensive nor detailed.
Well yes. If you're at a startup you should assume you're always a few months from being laid off. Everyone should assume that. You're fighing to survive; the default is dead.
Dropbox, on the other hand, is not a start-up. It's had to file WARN notices [1]. "Nobody can do a background check on a company to see who they laid off or fired before they work there" is false.
Once again, an employment check is not like a WARN act filing. I want to know for a given startup exactly who was fired and why, when, etc.
It’s one thing to be laid off from a startup in general. Another entirely to be laid off right now.
The number of recent layoffs is everyone’s concern right now because of how hard it will be for you to find a job afterward. Layoffs always were going on, and always will for startups, but the days of turning down job offers due to small uncertainties are mostly paused or gone at this point. The demand crunch is very real.
> at least contain exactly who you worked for and the time period as well as possibly your title. None of that is provided in the WARN act
We're talking about the information asymmetry in hiring and firing. Why does knowing the titles and time periods of those laid off in the past help you estimate your lay-off odds in the future?
I thought the one and only thing HR would confirm when background check is employment dates. it's shakey on if they will delineate between termination, layoffs/RiF, or simply leaving, though.
>Why does knowing the titles and time periods of those laid off in the past help you estimate your lay-off odds in the future?
I don't know. Why does knowing my titles and time period help businesses judge how useful I'll be for this new position? It's the same issue but that's where the asymmetry is. People seem fine with big business being able to do that but not prospective employees who may care about retention rates.
But to answer your question: retentions rates let me know how hard the company will try to keep me during bad/down times. Someone who can't even retain for 2 years probably has smoke.
> bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired
That doesn't seem the least bit weird to me. If I choose to leave a job (or relationship), I could quite sensibly feel differently if that same job (or relationship) chooses to leave me.
Are they really high? They are not that different from UPS driver salaries.
Just the other day I clicked on the website of some random law firm's career page. I wasn't happy with what I saw (in the context of my own career). Some researchers with 1 year of experience with starting salary of 450k+... tech salaries look high as long as you don't check other professions.
This doesn't really make sense. What is a "researcher" at a law firm? Lawyers at top firms are on fixed pay schedules, starting at 180k as a 1st year going up to something like 450k after 8yrs (?).
Tech is high earning. It gets beat out by high finance and partner-level roles in e.g. law though. If someone is earning 450k in their first year it's probably similar to a quant finance role.
I don't work at a law firm, have no idea what they really do. Based on the description, I decyphered some advanced googling, mostly background checks and precendence finding. It was like 2 or 3 weeks ago, I didn't know that it should have saved it for reference lol.
But pick your favorite firm, and check the salaries. Junior roles are starting at $200k+, frequently at $300k+. And senior roles get senior salaries.
This is just one random firm that I picked from google:
[0] - $235k - $365 - with 1 full year of experience, lol
[1] - $310k - $390 - real estate contracts
[2] - $260k - $390 - real estate contracts, with 2 years of experience
Can you get $350k+ in tech? Well, yes, but with including a lot of luck and ifs. Can you get $350k+ in tech with 1 year of experience? Realistically, only if your dad is called Nadella or Musk.
There are definitely jobs that pay much worse than tech, no question about it. And if you are happy with your salary, than good for you. But nowadays people are mostly made to believe that tech salaries are still extraordinary.
Looking at the best paying professions[3], tech makes only the very end of the list (and only manager level, not code-droid level).
You do not understand what you're reading. I told you, lawyers are on fixed pay schedules. The numbers are different from what I thought, but that doesn't really affect anything I said.
The first role is a 2nd-5th year associate. $235k is for a 2nd year associate, $365k is for a 5th year associate. Each year they get a predefined pay bump. Third role is the same kind of thing (3rd-6th year associate), second role it says mid-level so not 1 YOE.
This firm is also a Big Law firm, the equivalent of FAANG, if not harder to get into. Notice how law is not on your list of top paying professions. Most lawyers are not super well paid.
Also, being an associate is not like being fresh into tech. I don't think it's like a tech new grad role. Average TC for an entry level SWE at Google is ~$200k, and you can be making that as a new grad. Average senior comp is ~$400k, and it's possible to reach that level in 5-7yrs.
Another thing to consider is hours. You will work so many more hours as a lawyer in Big Law than a SWE at FAANG.
Tech workers have it very good. Relatively high pay with relatively low hours. Higher comp professions have much higher barriers to entry and work much longer hours.
Revisited this, and while it was tongue-in-cheek, it feels a bit ungrateful.
A lot of tech roles are intellectually stimulating and have a wage in the upper distribution of salaries. I think we have a very nice situation going for us.
They are not high. But most companies have business leadership who sees software developers as annoying and weird nerds. Explains why they are spending all their money on compute so that they can replace them with machines once and for all.
FYI, Dropbox does not merely allow remote work, it's a fully remote-first company. There's a couple of offices for get-togethers and a few people physically staffing data centers, but everybody else works wherever they want to.
> Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.
That's because people have a single employer, while companies have several employees.
That's also why employees are protected, while companies are mostly not. And yeah, the US doubles down on the problem by linking health insurance with the job.
> Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.
Really? You think its weird that someone leaving impacts that person more than their manager, team, or company?
A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while. When someone is layed off or fired they have to go find a new job, their income streams dry up, and are forced to rely on savings. People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.
Are you fucking kidding me? "Which is a bit weird" I'll tell you what's weird: management who doesn't understand that their employees rely on them more than they rely on the employee.
Of course its fine when someone chooses to leave their job, they've made contingencies and planned around it. Whether it's through savings, another job, or the lottery, people have at least some idea of their plan when they leave a job.
> People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.
I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat.
What you say is true about low or even medium income jobs. But most of the cuts are to tech workers and their managers, ie. people best equipped to manage in this kind of event.
You'd be surprised what lifestyle creep does to people. Often people don't pay off their debts and instead scale their debts to their new income - it's stupid I know.
I agree they should be in a better position because of their income, and I'd say more than an average amount are. But there are still a lot of people in that bracket who absolutely would have the floor pulled out from under them.
People are often caught with their pants down assuming the good times will keep rolling. And even when they see the market downturn or have a generous severance, it still can be very difficult to scrape together the 6+ months emergency fund required on short notice.
Depending on the resale value of what the debt is for (homes mainly) maintaining your leverage ratio can work out great for you. Mortgages are the only way most people are able to invest with leverage and the source of a lot of generational wealth.
That's true, but if you over-leverage yourself and the market goes through a downturn it can spell financial ruin. It's not something to lightly do without the cashflow/assets to back up your financial knowledge - which most people don't have.
You should only leverage what you are OK with losing entirely. Most people should not be leveraging their only home as investments. We are heading into some rough times and people will find out about that.
You would think so but it's often the opposite. The poorer you are the more conscious you have to be about money management so getting laid off may just be yet another obstacle life has thrown at you, business as usual.
Meanwhile if you've lived an easy life you may not have learned how to cope when the hard times come.
A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while.
Yeah, I'm curious how someone can have an opinions on workplaces and workers and not seem to have personal experience with the subject, especially in a community like this.
Do they just come from a wealthy family so the stance is "Getting fired isn't a big deal, just ask your dad to cover expenses until your next job."?
It seems the original commenter has never really been a "line-worker". But I could be very wrong too, but then I'd be curious how those opinions were formed.
Nope, you're correct: he runs a startup and apparently has been running startups since his early 20s.
> Please tell us briefly about your background.
> I grew up in the Netherlands, and I was interested in technology from a young age. I started a gaming website when I was 13. Later, I attended Erasmus University Rotterdam before founding Fashiolista, my first startup and an early social network similar to Pinterest. It grew to millions of users...
Don't people have savings? Don't people see what's happening in the industry and make sure to have 6+ months of savings? Don't people think that putting away a small portion of their immense tech salary would be a healthy thing to do?
If you grew up with even the slightest feeling of financial insecurity, dipping in to savings can already feel like the end of the world.
I can't imagine living with only 6 months of savings. There's no guarantee that I could find another job in 6 months, and unexpected expenses (medical, car trouble, housing repairs) can easily wipe out a month of savings anyway. In fact, given that a layoff means likely also an economic downturn, finding a job at the same salary within 6 months seems highly unlikely.
I have probably 3 years of no-risk savings at this point, have managed to reduce my living expenses to the point where I could work a 40-hour minimum wage job and still pay for my expenses, and have multiple back-up careers, and I'm only now starting to feel that taking money out of savings is an acceptable risk. That took years of frugal living on a high tech salary. People in their first few years at a tech job or with families will probably never achieve that.
It's so frustrating reading the comments around here. It's like the conversation is driven by people whose circumstances fall on the upper tail end. No concept of financial insecurity. No long-term financial commitments to worry about. Infinite flexibility. Like jeez, congrats. Now try imagining somebody else that's not you.
It comes down to the concentration of wealth. Companies wouldn't have the capital to bid up salaries if they faced stiffer competition or couldn't access investment from a limited pool of investors (who all think the same), as is the case now. I know that "diversity" is a dirty word these days, but it's key. A large middle class, where each family has a small amount of money to put towards their diverse desires, is going to lead to a more stable economy than all of the money pooled in the hands of a small group with a much smaller set of needs. Dropbox should never have been able to hire so many people; that capital should have been in the hands of the larger public, who could have spent it supporting a more diverse set of hundreds or thousands of jobs (who wouldn't all be competing with each other for a limited number of seats in the "not laid off" lifeboat).
Put simply, these kinds of things are going to keep happening until our wealthiest (individuals/families/companies) are a lot less rich.
> Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done
Do you have any evidence of this? There are unfounded claims of “productivity metrics” but I have never actually seen one.
E: I realize this is a poor choice of words after saying productivity metrics don’t exist. What I mean is my tasks are easier to complete in a WFH environment than they are in an office.
I have been far more productive from home. The constraints around communication necessitate effective documentation which enables asynchronous communication which alleviates scheduling challenges which improves delivery.
Maybe managers need to go in to the office to rub elbows but ICs definitely don’t.
Same. It's been a boon for me, and I genuinely enjoy my work, so it's win win. But anecdotally, I know people who abuse it.
On net, remote work is a plus: less commute, less pollution etc etc. And even the abusers, it's not like those people were highly productive in the office, I'm sure.
>The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense.
No the issue is that I get fired after the prior townhall saying "we are not doing layoffs". Companies will outright lie to get little ounces of productivity and treat you like a criminal the moment they break the news, as if we're all school shooters waiting to happen in anger and rage over betrayal.
The circus of the 2023/2024 job market doesn't help either. Even pre-pandemic the process was padded, but now I'm not even convinced 80% of companies have a human reading my resume.
>There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.
I'd rather not "hit hard times" while shareholders are making a killing and make a conclustion that my entire career needs to shuffle so they can save pennies.
> remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done
If you can't tell remote employees are slacking then you also can't tell if they are slacking in the office, you are just getting fooled by thinking presence implies work.
There's also COBRA, and the exchanges in the US. Frankly, even if you're eligible for Medicare it really isn't any cheaper if you're a current or recent high earner. But, in any case, it's about $7K/year for an individual who doesn't otherwise have coverage for a spouse etc.
A couple months ago interviewing.io posted something bragging about how "we do anonymous mock interviews. If people perform well in those interviews, they get introduced directly to a decision-maker at top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper." ( https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-... )
This annoyed me enough that I sent in an email complaining that their introduction process specifically notes that I am not eligible for anything, despite performance measured by the site as "highest ever achieved: 94th percentile" (so, knock that down a bit for being a high water mark), because of an insufficient number of years of experience.
They responded:
> It really sucks, especially in this market, but this policy is a function of us having tried for years to get companies to take junior intros, and it didn't work. We offered to do it completely for free, too, fwiw, and no dice.
How competitive is the market for talent? Let's stipulate that, because of a lack of prior employment, I'm not qualified to have a job. How exactly would that situation change?
Clarification: Just because companies don't want a 3rd party like us providing them with junior candidates, it doesn't mean they don't want them. Even back in 2017-2019, when the market was booming, we couldn't get employers to take our juniors... because they generally have their own robust pipeline.
So the solution is to go to companies directly, rather than relying on a 3rd party service like ours, which companies tend to use specifically for roles they can't fill on their own.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. My point was that the market for talent is not particularly competitive, with the opinion of interviewing.io given as an illustration of that.
You seem to be confirming that the market for talent isn't competitive - in your view, companies have more applications than they want.
Or maybe you're going for a different point? For the suggestion, my experience is that companies won't consider direct applications either, and in the general case do not ever even list junior positions. (An observation which is not unique to me; see e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/fr... )
If you're worried that I'm implicitly slamming interviewing.io for claiming to do something very different than what they actually do, I don't think you've rebutted that - "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies as long as we think their resume looks good" isn't particularly similar to "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper".
Yes, companies do indeed have more applications than they want (I'd argue that means the market IS competitive).
The point I was making is that even though companies don't want to hire juniors through us, they still DO WANT to hire juniors in the absolute. So junior hiring isn't dead.
>> The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk
Here, saying "the market for talent is competitive" clearly means that hirers are competing with each other over potential employees. Deciding that you already have too many potential employees is the opposite of that. It would mean that the market to sell talent is competitive, which isn't what was claimed.
I disagree with your conclusion, you have several flawed premises.
The market has been slowly shrinking into fewer and fewer hands over time, which is why it has become more competitive over time. This has also led to cooperative behavior among the large marketshare companies in the sectors to disadvantage competitors, and employees.
Companies do not bid up to the max they can, because the executives take their cut first. The companies bids can only ever be the max of what is left after that, and varies by the greed of those people.
Interest rates would be the shock you described, but Tech unemployment as far as I can tell has until now been bulletproof, and uncorrelated with interest rate rises or falls. Its not rational to assume this market shock is a result of interest rates, AI is the only competitive alternative.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. Its that you can no longer get base goods needed for survival arbitrarily and without notice, and without capital reserves which are finite you are living on the street.
When the entire market as an entirety is contracting, there are no new jobs to move to in other fields.
Worse, the concentrated market is naturally incentivized to impose high costs on any job seekers to interfere in labor relations to create barriers to entry for competitors while suppressing wages for prospective workers.
This natural progression occurs when anti-trust fails, and money printing makes it worse potentially leading to either deflation (a collapse to non-market socialism) or hyper-inflation (a collapse to non-market socialism). Debt issued as preferential loans from a money-printer makes a company state-dependent/controlled apparatus even if its claim is that it is held privately.
The economy today is worse than 2008, much worse then the dotcom bust, and if you plot the trend with good data going back and starting around the 1970s, the trend shows progressive ruin as time passes, with seiving and consolidation occurring regularly. That is the force driving this problem, and it doesn't enable tech salaries.
> There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn.
There is a limit to what government can provide, it takes awhile to get to those limits (we're in a super-cycle going back to the 1920s) but we'll be there in the next 5-10 years thanks in large part to deficit spending and the FED picking winners and losers.
The main issues with academia also applies to government. They are structurally the same. Education today is not about learning skills, that is always secondary to instilling the qualities a loyal unthinking worker. That is what the entire prussian-model of schooling is about (which is what we have in this country).
These structures for training follow the same structure as guild socialism, and the same intractable failures (ref Mises for related details).
It inevitably ends up being a cult of qualification, where you are automatically considered unqualified without a piece of paper even if you have the actual skills to do the job. Once a target market size is identified and reached, new candidates are put on an endless escalator of suffering with arbitrary filters/requirements where the claimed outcome is nothing but an unobtainable pipe dream.
Either wrong or a lie. You are not expected to "fully drain all your assets." Your primary residency is completely excluded from means testing unless you don't intend to return to it or it's above an very high threshold - most of the country it's about 2.5-3x the median home price and it is higher in HCOL states.
I'd give you that, but in exchange, you'll have to agree that, if I'm renting, I shouldn't have to sell any financial assets less than, say, the median value of a house where I am.
I feel like "Medicaid could be better" is a statement everyone can agree on, but my point stands that the meme that US healthcare is some Mad Max apocalyptic wasteland where you're completely on your own and left to die in the street is categorically false.
Not a single person in the US is denied healthcare based on inability to pay.
> Not a single person in the US is denied healthcare based on inability to pay.
This is not true. Emergency rooms are required to take you in and stabilize your situation even if you can't pay. Everything else is not available if you can't pay.
Think of something like cancer, which an emergency room can't treat since it develops over time. You will indeed be left to die on the streets if you don't have the money or coverage from somewhere.
> Not a single person in the US is denied healthcare based on inability to pay.
Yes, because that's the law. Then they hand you an exorbitant bill on the way out, which you can't pay. Then you get hounded by collections. Then your credit score tanks. etc. etc. etc.
Not everything is a direct line, the end result is the same.
Very generous severance packages and companies/laders should be commended for this. If it's a one-and-done big cut with generous packages to save the company, then good on them.
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.
> it strikes me that more big companies would rather have a one-stop shop full of 80% solutions than pay for 100 different SaaS.
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.
Case in point - when it came out almost 20 years ago it was ground breaking.
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.
Severence is only so they can dodge regulatory scrutiny. They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts and was a line-item in the burden category for those employees when they were hired.
There's really no pleasing some people. Companies make cuts and don't give generous packages, they're evil. They give a package and it's just so they can dodge scrutiny.
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.
I suppose it's largely a matter of perspective but I would argue that fewer more stable jobs would likely be better for both the companies and employees.
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.
>I suppose it's largely a matter of perspective but I would argue that fewer more stable jobs would likely be better for both the companies and employees.
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.
They can still hire people and compete with each other? I'm just saying they shouldn't hire in mass quantities if there's a high chance that all of those people will be let go later on. It seems unethical to me but again it's a matter of perspective.
>They can still hire people and compete with each other?
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.
"It's no secret that tech companies have not been hiring for sustainability and that sucks."
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.
What regulatory scrutiny do you mean? They don't need to provide severance, as far as California law seems concerned. I'm not a Californian, but an Internet search shows they're an at-will state. So it seems like everything is on the (legal) level.
California has the WARN act which I believe requires notice of 50 days, which people usually use to give severance. In the USA when someone is told they will be fired, usually we do not keep them on staff so severance is the usual middle ground.
It's 60 days, not 50. But 60 days of severance would be significantly less than what they are offering. They're definitely not doing it strictly to avoid regulatory scrutiny, more like to avoid bad press and a bad reputation in the tech market. When things eventually swing back up, companies still want to be able to hire the best talent, they don't want to be grouped with companies like Twitter.
Remember how there used to be a blog (or maybe it was a Tumblr, I forget) that documented every "Our incredible journey" post that inevitably announced the start-up's closure?
I think we need another one for "An update from <company>", as this has seemingly become the standard subject to use when you're announcing layoffs or data breaches. I saw an identical headline earlier today from Sony announcing a studio closure:
When a CEO takes full responsibility for these things it doesn't mean that they submit themselves to the punishment that internet users might want. It's the CEO telling their impacted employees that, no matter how well you did as an employee, you would still have been impacted. It's the CEO showing you empathy for the hurt they cause you for having failed to steer the company in a viable direction.
These messages are obviously never going to be well received, but at least people can find comfort in the fact that it's because Dropbox is shifting direction and strategy and not because they were bad employees. Stuff like this happens in business. Maybe you've focused on private sales and want to shift to enterprise sales or fund investments at which point your company no longer needs it's sales and marketing departments because the company mission will be radically different. Changing course is a CEO taking responsibility for the company.
I think a lot of people misunderstand the statement 'I take responsibility.' They are not actually taking responsibility for the company's situation. They are owning the decision to make these layoffs.
In what other realm of life does "taking full responsibility" absolve you from any consequences? It "shows empathy," what? Suspect: "I murdered someone and take full responsibility, and I empathize with the victim's next of kin," Judge: "Thank you for your candor all is forgiven, you're off scot free"
If a CEO did not take full responsibility, what would be different?
> In what other realm of life does "taking full responsibility" absolve you from any consequences?
Very early in my career I accidentally deleted every IP phone in the municipality where I was working. It was because they didn't have a test setup and the documentation didn't the SysAdmin gave me weren't updated. It was still my fault though and the first thing I did was to tell the IT manager thinking I'd get in trouble. I didn't. He told me he wasn't happy that I had deleted all the phones, but that it was good that I had come to him directly and taken responsibility.
Because when you take responsibility in the adult world, it means that you can work from there. As such it's both ridiculous and disingenuous when you compare a perfectly normal consequences of doing business with committing a crime. It's also a little weird to do so on HN considering this is a VC site.
>It's the CEO showing you empathy for the hurt they cause you for having failed to steer the company in a viable direction.
Nah, screw that. So may CEOs get told by workers this is a horrible route, drive straight into a wall, then show "empathy" for their bloody nose as they throw the passengers off a cliff?
That's not empathy, that saving face.
>Stuff like this happens in business
Stupid stuff always happens. Doesn't mean we shouldn't call out stupid stuff every-time it comes up. I won't accept "it is what it is" when livliehoods are at stake.
I always think it's a bit weird how people put so much effort and angst into (over)analyzing the language that execs use in layoff announcements in the first place.
It's a layoff. Yeah, it sucks, and no matter what the CEO says people will be pissed. Better to just take the same good advice as when starting a new relationship: "Just ignore everything they say, and only consider what they do." I.e. is the severance package good? Are folks given some assistance/recommendations finding new jobs? If so, I couldn't care less about what the preamble in the layoff announcement looks like.
>t's a bit weird how people put so much effort and angst into (over)analyzing the language that execs use in layoff announcements in the first place.
It's professional passive-aggression. That's more angering than just saying "we need more money, we are laying off people". That "language" is what you're expected to do in the office half your life and it's a tiring waste of time keeping up false pleasantries.
If you don't know, look up the Umbridge effect. Sometimes the petty evils that pretend to be civil stings harder than the pure evils. Not many of us have a Voldamort in our lives. We all have an Umbridge.
I'm always a bit confused by profitable companies with (presumably) large reserves laying off lots of people. I get that they want to remain profitable. But sure 500ish people could be put to some use? A new product, a new market, a spinoff. Whatever? Are you telling me that no one in such a big, wealthy company of clever engineers has any use for a bunch of talented people?
It always seemed common sense to me that once a piece of software became stable and profitable you would need a much smaller engineering staff than when it was being built. The opposite seems to happens and orgs 10X their engineer headcount once they start making money.
It makes sense to keep some high performers and a few redundancies to stabilize/modernize it and make small improvements, but it feels like tech got really bloated with these massive corps who were trying to burn as much as they could to keep all the VC money flowing. Take like Uber having a team that built and maintained a chat app just for internal use, and every single big org having a bunch of teams responsible for various "some_dumb_name" that is the "custom X for 'Y'" where smaller teams just use the OS solutions to those problems.
> once a piece of software became stable and profitable you would need a much smaller engineering staff than when it was being built
This is not generally the case, except in monopoly situations.
Your software product generally has a competitor, and they're busy trying to make theirs better than yours -- whether with more features, better integrations, whatever it is.
So your staff size generally stays about the same in order to build more features desired by customers to prevent customers from switching to your competitor and you go out of business. And certain features, by themselves, can be more complex than the entire v1 of a product. And/or involve massive refactoring, etc.
The companies that get to reduce their team size are often because they're in a monopoly position, and then customers suffer because the software gets stagnant and the features they need don't get built. That's capitalism failing.
Also, something like an internal chat app isn't always a bad decision. If your company is above a certain size headcount, it can literally be cheaper to build small tools than to license them. Especially when you can more deeply customize and integrate them, which you often simply can't with off-the-shelf software.
>There is a good case to be made that what Dropbox sells is a commodity.
Is there? I argue Drive and OneDrive surpassed Dropbox a while ago. Box is dirt cheap if you came in early as well (I still have some 50 GB forever deal from like, 2012). And there's a dozen others if you look into it. It's not very hard to drop any one cloud storage solution (or all of them if you invest in a NAS setup).
The present value of your org is your old products, all futures gains are from new products. The tech industry is littered with tombstones of companies that sat coasted on the success of an older product. Conversely there's a fascinating habit of really smart people in the right environment (Google, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC etc) to create things of enormous value. Things that were just a side project include AWS, Slack, the transistor and transformer architecture. All these companies are really trying to be incubators for the next 100x thing.
What you are talking of is only possible in companies where the founder didn't take VC investment. Once you take VC money, you get on the treadmill of infinite growth to satisfy investors. That makes companies do strange things in pursuit of this impossible goal. Like hiring for the sake of showing growth in headcount, hiring people to branch into unrelated verticals, hiring people with big resumes just to say you have them on the team etc
Interestingly enough, I once worked at a company that saw how huge amounts of money could be made taking the exact opposite approach.
This all came about because this company had built a couple of hugely successful, and profitable, enterprise software products. So this company then decided to plow a ton of money into building out other products. The company was also pretty famous for having a high employee bar, and their college recruiting process was kind of legendary for attracting top CS and other tech grads.
However, this company discovered that building follow on successful products, even with lots of really smart people, is extremely difficult. As a not-perfect analogy, think of all the "one hit wonders" out there in the music industry. Beyond those one hit wonders, the vast majority of the rest are basically two hit wonders. Point being, once you've built a really successful product, even if you have tons of smart people, there is no guarantee that plowing money into another product will give you a positive ROI.
So this company realized this, and then saw there were a lot of other small-to-midsize software companies who were similar: they had one or two really successful products, but then were trying to use money from that to expand and grow into other areas, usually with little or no success. So this original company pivoted their business model: they went out to buy these "one hit wonder" software companies, immediately stopped any investment into other products, laid off as many people as possible and outsourced the operations and maintenance of the few successful products to low-cost locales (at the time, India and China) and then essentially just milked the subscription revenue until the product slowly petered out. That is, they weren't really investing in big new features in the product, but the product had a lot of existing customers who didn't (or couldn't) move off of it right away, so often they had at least a couple years of milking the existing revenue dry. I called it "the world's most successful and depressing business model".
My overall point in telling this story is that when you ask "Are you telling me that no one in such a big, wealthy company of clever engineers has any use for a bunch of talented people?", that often times the answer is "Correct!" People tend to underestimate how difficult it is to build successful products, even if you've already knocked one out of the park.
Google has killed products that could be entire companies if they weren't attached to the Search Ads firehose.
A $100 dinner could be an annual splurge if you're making minimum wage, and an arbitrary Tuesday if you have a quarter million dollar salary.
Executives think the same way about revenue streams. When they have one product that makes $$$$$ in revenue, they think "not worth my time" to consider another that makes $$. Really frustrating for the people making and using the lower revenue product, but it's why Google feels like a "billion users or bust" company.
> So this original company pivoted their business model: they went out to buy these "one hit wonder" software companies, immediately stopped any investment into other products, laid off as many people as possible and outsourced the operations and maintenance of the few successful products to low-cost locales (at the time, India and China) and then essentially just milked the subscription revenue until the product slowly petered out.
well that's just a dreadful experience. Couldn't innovate so they instead became a very alluring anglerfish with no intent to help stimulate the American economy at all. Successful and depressing business model indeed.
Such a shame how little respect tech gets unless we're spamming buzzwords to rich people. really ruined the reputation of "tech will make everyone's lives easier!"
It’s better for cash cow companies to acquire startups with PMF and real revenues. Let the market experiment and then pay for the successes. Investors and founders win, the company doesn’t waste it pretending to be a startup. Any other cash should be returned in dividends or buy backs.
Was this Insight Software? I usually wouldn't ask since you didn't volunteer the name, but seeing as throwaway is in your username I'd figured I'd ask.
> I'm always a bit confused by profitable companies with (presumably) large reserves laying off lots of people.
According to their financial statement, Dropbox has more liabilities than assets. So yes, they have a large cash reserve, but with an even larger debt offsetting it its hard to argue they are in a good overall financial position.
I had a product manager at Salesforce tell me he went around trying to build support for a new reporting product. He was eventually taken aside by some coworker and told they don't build new products at Salesforce, and bought companies instead.
And they did indeed later buy multiple companies, including Tableau, in that space.
Which can make business sense if you take into account both the probability of the project failing to deliver a competitive product (always high no matter how slick the pitch deck is) and the probability that it gets no traction in the marketplace even if it is as good as the competition. Buying an existing successful product and its customer base can be much lower risk even if it is the more expensive route.
> But sure 500ish people could be put to some use? A new product, a new market, a spinoff. Whatever? Are you telling me that no one in such a big, wealthy company of clever engineers has any use for a bunch of talented people?
I think a lot of the low hanging fruit in tech has been eaten up, bought up and consolidated, or actually was recognized as much more difficult and expensive than they actually thought. The leadership talent and vision in a lot of these companies is also painfully lacking. In short, to answer your last question: probably not. And I think they're terrified that Wall Street is going to notice.
I agree with both comments. ~500 can surely build some amazing tech, smaller teams have done more. I personally do think there's still a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit left, especially with the boom of possibilities due to AI, or simply what one can do with modern CPU/GPU performance, new browser APIs, modern tech factors, etc.
I also do agree and think leadership talent and vision in a lot tech companies is painfully lacking. This are the companies that could burn some money and use their wedge in the market to build some really cool things, but they wont. I guess to some degree, ironically, the money they're making might be part of the problem.
I mean, you don't hire 500 people to build something from scratch. You get at best 10 core leaders/founders for a tech, establish an MVP, then hire the other 490 to expand and scale.
Tho in honesty, 500 if overkill unless you really are tapping into some multi-disciplinary project that needs experts in a dozen backgrounds.
The "exhausted low hanging fruit" model IMO has been wrong since the industrial revolution. The fundamental problem is it's based on the heuristic of fixed demand + technology saturating the demand. It's really the opposite - technology is an ever expanding fractal, and the larger the surface area, the more things are needed. For example compilers are having a huge boom now because hardware is increasingly performance demanding and heterogeneous.
It's easy to find new uses for technology. The hard part is turning the new idea into a commercially viable product. And it's even harder to find a business model that doesn't destroy the product in the long term.
The whole is often more than the sum of its parts. A company is not just a bunch of people, but it's also the company culture and the established ways of doing things. It's common that a company can't make something work, but the same people in another company could, because they can organize their labor in a different way.
Software development is often an investment. Hiring a developer is often an investment. Most companies eventually reach the point, where the rate of investment slows down and the company chooses to return the profits to the shareholders. When the company no longer believes that it can invest the money more profitably than the shareholders could, it's rational to lay off people working in R&D and use the profits for dividends or buybacks.
Dividend buybacks aka stock manipulation. You are saying that it is logic that companies turn from making things to stock manipulation. That is a system that just doesn't work long term. I guess you are saying companies have a life cycle, and once it reaches the stock buyback phase they are basically dieing.
Why not? Some companies do try this. It rarely succeeds though. The reason is that re-education en-masse, restructuring of the chain of command, re-allocation of resources are hard. Most businesses at some point enter the phase where the inertia is the strongest driving force: they only need to apply a tiny fraction of initial force to keep the lights on. At this point, trying to restructure is bound to be very hard.
Maybe, if the company can foresee and realistically assess the problems it's about to face, it may gradually prepare for the transition. I've seen this happen at my friend's job at Dell storage division: some storage product failed, they tried to reshuffle the teams to start working on something else, with some code reuse from the previous one. It still didn't go well, and a lot of people were still let go (because the initial effort of developing a new product cannot really accommodate an army of various kinds of extra personal that's necessary for mature product). They sort-of survived, but with a huge loss.
Remember Better, the mortgage company? They were briefly notable for laying off 900 people on a Zoom call. However, no-one asked why a re-envisioned mortgage application/process was failing in the best possible market. My opinion is Dropbox most valuable commodity is the millions of Windows PCs with a system level scheduled task that is vulnerable to "hijacking"... basically they are a data stream.
It was not failing in the best possible market. Better was a successful lender for mortgage refinancing. Better struggled to establish itself within the purchase market which has far more complex relationships.
And once 30-year mortgage rates got to 5% or higher, the refinancing market basically dried up. Without much of a purchase mortgage business they basically had no business, regardless of how much better their technology was.
It may well be that there is no alternative. Maybe Dropbox did try everything, maybe tried to let those 500 people work on producing different products or on finding other sources of income, I don't know. And I get that it's important for a business to keep itself afloat. But it's a recurring phenomenon in larger tech companies that I find puzzling.
Many of the answers in this thread have been perfectly reasonable. And I'm probably kidding myself when I think that "if I were that CEO, I'd do things differently".
Five or 10 years ago, they were doing a lot of this. Dropbox Paper ("a collaborative online workspace that allows you to create, share, and edit documents and notes with your team") for one. It's still active but it never took off. I was just notified that there is some sort of migration taking place which is probably related to the RIF.
Dropbox was barely cash-flow positive (basically meaning profitable excluding equity compensation) when it had its IPO. It's been having trouble expanding from the consumer space into the business space, and I wouldn't be surprised if its profits are slim.
Also, they've repeatedly tried to create new products. Carousel, Mailbox, and others. Dropbox has had little to no success outside of its core business. While it does that core business very well, it has stiff competition, and the market seems to be already tapped out.
Those employees were costing more than the value they were creating.
If the marginal product of labor is lower than the marginal cost of labor, the company should reduce headcount. If higher, the company should increase headcount.
Whether in the long term this is net-beneficial for a given actor in the typical case, is at best unclear. This marginal-labor-cost/benefit-in-a-given-moment accounting misses a large proportion of the harmful effects of a layoff.
When a bunch of companies in one sector do it, it does lower wages and reduce labor power to e.g. demand better working conditions. That part, is a benefit for companies. But it's not the result of one company doing what's best for their particular situation—it's a result of coordination, even if only by the understanding that "this is what you do, when there's an excuse to, and especially when you see others doing it". It's merely best practice then, not... collusion.
Arguably the value they were creating was influenced by the direction and application that labor was directed at. Redirecting that available labor at something more valuable would fix that as well wouldn't it?
Yes, if there is something more valuable to redirect the labor to and my intuition is that there is not, I mean not in the Dropbox business.
2640 employees seems like a ridiculous number for a company like Dropbox. I work at a company that's about half of that and you wouldn't believe how many different services this company runs and I still think there's a lot of inefficiency.
If companies wanted efficiency, they coould probably spend $400k to 10 engineers and get the best of all worlds. That's going to be cheaper than hiring a team of 50 @100k of varying quality.
Except when the engineer leaves for a $500k postion. Companies basically moved towards this churn market in a way not as far off from an assembly line as you'd expect. They prefer some inefficiency if the cogs are easier to replace every 1-2 years.
Yes, but not in a way that blames the workers. If a product improves but margins don't (because say, interest rates), you have employees who all perfomed above expectations that can still get taken off because the current environment can't make money on anything through consumers (who are getting less buying power and cutting non-essential services).
I'd hope tech workers on a community like this could empathize with other tech workers in such an environment.
I feel like leadership and vision are lacking at DropBox, so they don't have any good ideas of what to do with the staff they've got.
They should be exploring new opportunities which leverage the skillset of their existing employees, this would diversify them from the effects of OneDrive and GDrive.
For example with AI alone we've seen an incredible number of new file services dedicated to just serving models, and DropBox has totally ignored that need.
Instead they regularly add bitsy, poorly implemented, "us too" features to DropBox which adds friction to common workflows - then provide no way to customise these features away for people who do not want them.
Perhaps to them they see this as evolving the product and keeping it relevant, but their approach doesn't address why Google and Microsoft are eating their lunch, nor does it take their eggs out of one basket.
But which people: the sales/marketing, the developers that actually make the product, across the board? At some point, development gets to a stable and solid product, so revenue increases come from staffing up sales/marketing. So does that mean you can reduce the devs to try and increase new users or that you've overstaffed the sales/marketing? Maybe there's just too damn many middle managers? Will the cutting be a surgical blade or a broad axe?
The company could put them to some use, or they could get capital and launch their own ventures. It's equivalent from a market perspective, except the one you suggest requires unnecessary coercion (forcing the employees to work on something they may not have signed up for).
At the end of the day, the american market place is distinguished in that venture capital, especially in tech, is very accessible. Being laid off seems to be a bonus in the hunt for VC money.
It's the same reason companies return dividends. Sure, they could use the money for R&D and launching a new product, or they could send the money to investors so that they can scour the marketplace for a new technology of their own choosing for investment. The first one unnecessarily takes investor money for a project they may not have signed up for, whereas the former maximizes their freedom to invest in what they find interesting
Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff. Of course they rarely succeed in doing that, but the idea is that these people should have been let go anyway but weren’t for various reasons.
> Often they target the lowest performers for such layoff.
In my experience, this is often an after-the-fact rationalization by people who "survive" layoffs to explain them, and a convenient justification by leadership for layoffs. If you've ever been in the room when layoffs are planned or discussed, the actual process is way more focused on blunt cost, personality of the people involved or on the chopping block, and is often practically a tossup considering "performance" is not really a clear or meaningful metric (actually, more often it's arbitrary for most companies --- they will find the metric they need to justify laying off someone). This phenomenon is greater the bigger the company and the more abstracted managers and leadership are from their lower level employees.
In many cases it can actually be inversely proportional to performance, since the one factor they can count in black and white is how much the person costs. Laying off someone making a TC of $500K probably feels like you're saving the company a lot of money, but its also possible the reason they were making that much is because they were more than twice as productive/valuable as the person making $250K. But salary and benefits are easy to quantify, and performance is not.
I've heard secondhand that a few layoffs of star players was as messed up as "well Suzy is pregnant, but we need to axe someone else to justifty it as being coincidental". It shouldn't be surprising at this point, but companies can and do go that far sometimes just to cover their tracks. slicing their nose off to spite the pimple.
Many times the marching orders were to fire the high earners, assuming that the remaining, less well compensated workers, could together do the same work for less.
Every new product or market usually also needs additional investments, maybe even new workers with relevant domain knowledge. And Dropbox did try new products and markets, but what if it's not working out? Should they continue until money runs out?
And some interesting part of this announcement is the mentioning of the grown overcomplex management. This kinda smells of some shrinking for health-benefits. For some reason or another, they grew into a wrong direction, and maybe now remove the unhealthy parts to be able to operate better.
I'm a libertarian in most things but I still don't like layoffs from profitable companies.
Like it's probably not good for our society that people have to up end their life every few years and probably move to find a new job.
Both my parents stayed in the same
job for their careers and it meant they could stay in the same place, have kids, build ties to the community, etc. Seems important if you want to not die out as a society.
> Like it's probably not good for our society that people have to up end their life every few years and probably move to find a new job.
The thing is, Dropbox is done (as in feature complete). Like when the construction of a building completes, many people are "laid off" because they aren’t needed anymore. Yeah, you need to keep some people around for things like maintaining the building, but not to the scale of the original workforce required to build it.
It is "good" that the excess labour is freed up to go work on the next "building". What may not be good is that the workers didn't think to associate with each other like construction workers do. Construction, being a much more mature industry, typically keeps a clear separation between the workers and the building so that then construction is done the entire excess group of people can be lifted on to the next project instead of all going their separate ways.
Software will undoubtedly go that way eventually. But it is, in the grand scheme of things, still early days for it as an industry. We haven't yet learned the lessons that older industries have.
Interesting insight about construction. I think you're right.
We see this ad hoc in software now. When there is a mass layoff, someone will go get a new job, and then try to bring on all of their previous coworkers. Or a group will go off and start a startup which (if they're lucky) will get acquired and they get to keep working together.
Which now makes me think, if you're a big company, maybe it behooves you to offer a highly functioning team a seed round instead of individual severances...
Software engineering, as profession, offers a very different kind of capacity compared to professions found in the construction industry, though. The physical resources for buildings are expensive and rare (land, material etc), whereas compute and storage are literally getting cheaper by the minute. The Silicon Valley dream of getting from garage to unicorn within months might be far from realistic, but still way more probable that in any other industry. Quick prototypes can be built in days and it isn't uncommon for graduates to finish their research with a viable business idea. I never seen that in my circle of architecture friends.
>he thing is, Dropbox is done (as in feature complete)
Dropbox is "done" but Dropbox didn't employe 2700 people just to work on dropbox.
They toyed around with other services, weren't as gamebreaking as dropbox, and in hard times (not necessarily for their business) they deided to just abandon those other experients or products. This isn't some "the job is done" scenario, it's "we're hunkering down for the storm that we pretend isn't happening out loud" scenario and people are still falling for the idea that "the economy is soaring". It's disgusting.
>It is "good" that the excess labour is freed up to go work on the next "building".
sadly there is no "next building" in these times. When everyone is "feature complete", you just have a purge, not a new opportunity.
>Software will undoubtedly go that way eventually.
given the 3rd wave of attempting to outsourcce large software out, and the AI bubble, I don't think companies are ever going to truly appreciate proper mature software. Just the bare minimum to pretend the machine is running until the next CEO deals with the fire.
> Both my parents stayed in the same job for their careers
My father was the same, BUT.. this is an INCREDIBLY risky thing to do career-wise in the modern era. Given how much tech advances and that we actually face international competition that a lot of our boomer parents didn't during their career, I don't see really any going back either.
Some of the worst layoff situations I've seen were guys who worked in the same company for 25 years.. long enough that their knowledge & skills was too company-specific, but not long enough to retire. Just because someone seems indispensable doesn't mean they are safe.
Having to drain savings for 1-2 years jobless after a layoff in the last 10 years of your career and reset at a probably lower salary can set back your retirement 10 years.
Fully agreed - yet, we as a society consistently and systematically trade (or let "others" trade) much more critical aspects of life, such as quality of air, water, food etc. for short-term profits, even though that very often has no clear/direct positive impact on any other comparably valuable aspects of our lives.
So it's no wonder that "some people losing their jobs and needing to move for a new one" is irrelevant, when the only goal is profit maximisation, even though we don't even understand what for.
Why do people still think like this? Have we not had enough layoffs these years from nearly all companies in tech with so many configurations to realize that this isn't just targeting new or incompetent people?
Dropbox my one critique is can you please make it affordable again. I just can't justify the cost as there are cheaper services out there. I don't care about PDF signing etc. I fear OneDrive/Google Drive are eating you lunch because it's a hard sell to be competitive against them price wise.
I left Dropbox when they added (and preemptively enabled) a checkbox that shared your data with them for AI training. I refuse to do business with a company that will just unilaterally invade my privacy like that. They can make it as cheap as they want, I'll never go back.
Selling data is always the last play for all businesses that have data.
Either you never give it to them in a way that can be sold (e.g. fully encrypted), or you expect them to sell it when the leaders need to increase cash flow.
The article Lammy linked is indeed the correct one. When that bit of news came out I checked my account, and it turned out that Dropbox had added and enabled the toggle without my consent. I was a paying customer mind you, I paid like $120/yr for my storage. After they pulled that crap I started working on setting up Nextcloud hosted in a VPS. It's more expensive, but Dropbox permanently burned my trust when they did what they did.
> “For eligible accounts, […] The Third-party AI toggle is turned on”
I just logged in and checked and don't have the "Third-Party AI features" tab, but I only have an old free account and am probably not at the tier where this appears.
That feature doesn't train the model on customer's data though, unless I'm missing something.
I agree it's annoying it was enabled by default in places, but I'm trying to either correct the incorrect "for AI training" part, or find a citation that shows they are actually doing AI training with it.
Exactly!!!
I stopped being a customer when they lost touch with their customer base. They decided to become something else, adjust plans however they thought, introduced useless featured and all these while riding the money train.
I feel sorry for those being laid off, it’s not immediately/directly their fault. It’s the management and the product responsible that should take the blame.
A feature of what? Surely Jobs didn't expect a feature of Windows, OSX, Android, Linux, and ChromeOS to all seamlessly interact with one another.
I don't doubt that Jobs might have seen Dropbox as a feature that Apple could have implemented across the Apple ecosystem, but that's a pretty limited view of where the value of Dropbox lies.
Why is iCloud different? For the Apple ecosystem, interaction with Mac/iPhone/AppleTV is all that matters. Which is why I don't subscribe to the garden. But it's a reasonable perspective of Jobs that doesn't conflict with this statement.
But it's a reasonable perspective of Jobs that doesn't conflict with this statement.
That's what I'm saying. From Jobs' perspective it was a feature for Apple, because Jobs believed only Apple devices matter. For everyone else that's a pretty limited view of the world that doesn't really apply, and measuring Dropbox (as a company) by that standard is nonsensical. It should be obvious that there's value in sharing files more widely than just within one ecosystem.
It's a product that I was willing to pay for (until I required native E2E encryption). _iCloud Drive_ is a feature, mostly — aside from the fact that you still have to pay for it to be useful, so kind of still a product.
Steve Jobs was wrong about many things, and this was one of them.
I'm responding to the person who quoted Steve Jobs by saying Dropbox isn't a product, it's a feature. 17 years is a really long time on the web, and Dropbox has not only been a product, but a successful publicly traded company for most of that time, during which so many other "real" products have risen and fallen. The fact that you subscribe to Google One doesn't tell me anything, except that Google created a product to compete with Dropbox, which is also a product.
Funny how Hacker News spent the past 15 years laughing at anyone questioning the viability of Dropbox as a business, but then after two years in a down market half the site is begging them to be cheap again.
What's the matter? You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?
>You like the sound of that crusty, slow Linux NAS that this site has derided for years?
Honestly, it's a lot more enjoyable than I expected. Internet enabled, easily expandable (my setup is 5TB), can quickly setup a plex server for media, and can easily up/download any files needed from anywhere I have connection. And I feel I only scrathed the surface of potential. One of the more useful investments I made this decade.
> Impacted employees will be eligible to keep company devices (phones, tablets, laptops, and peripherals) for personal use.
It's not often you see this. Netflix used to do this if your equipment wasn't brand new, and with any phone[1]. And the very first startup I worked for let me buy my laptop, desktop, monitor, and cell phone for $50. But you don't see it too often.
[1] There was a "joke" at Netflix that if your manager told you that you should upgrade your phone, it meant you were gonna get let go soon, because sometimes people really did get let go just weeks after getting a new phone, and they got to keep the phone.
At a former employer I (voluntarily) left. I ended up spending a good couple hours driving my 7-year old laptop which I rarely used to a FedEx dropoff and I'm sure it was promptly recycles. But I wanted make sure all the loose ends were tied up.
on the opposite side, I had some nearby management literally come to my house 30 minutes after my layoff to collect my equipement. I didn't even have time to process the layoff; I had to disconnect my entire setup, lug it downstairs, and have it ready to lug into someone's truck faster than I could order a pizza.
That's just petty and one would think nearby management would have better things to do. Whether or not people "should" a lot of folks have their personal and work stuff pretty intermixed and need time to disentangle and may not even have a personal laptop. I guess there could be an element of not wanting to give ex-employees time to copy off work info but still (and, if they're that worried, they should be able to just do a remote wipe)... I've always tried to make a point of keeping an off-work copy of anything I want to keep and isn't confidential.
The "core" demographic of HN probably sees this as standard, if they were ever laid off to begin with. The commenters at the very least seem to be (or claim to be) on a very high end of tech that doesn't realize that not all US layoffs give you 3 months severace standard.
The linked article is specific to executives and kind of confirms what most are complaining about here.
> a 10-year study of over 2,600 leaders showed almost half (45%) suffered at least one major career blow-up — like getting fired, messing up a major deal, or blowing an acquisition. Despite that, 78% of these executives eventually made it to the CEO role.
An executive can make a series of awful decisions and still advance in their career.
Seeing the article dating 2018 told me all I needed to know about how out of touch it is with the current market.
I wouldn't wish for you to get laid off to understand thee current circus, but I'd urge you to at least spend maybe an hour in some of the "Who wants to be hired" threads to understand the scale of the impact, and how even HN workers can be struggling.
If that holds true (and not sure that it does), then it also holds true for when you decide to get another job, on your own terms, rather than being forced into it.
>Industry standard is to offer 18 months of COBRA, not 6. Job searches frequently take way longer than that.
job searches taking 6+ months is exactly why this whole process is broken. I I could get quick rejections and considerations, being laid off wouldn't even be that bad.
TBH it feels like Dropbox has a pretty fair earnings multiple at the moment (~4X). Have we reached a point where tech companies have been around long enough that they can / should enter a sort of maintenance mode? It feels like there is a company version of the Peter Principle. Why do they (Dropbox specifically) need to continue to "innovate"? Wouldn't it be better for all parties if they just focused on maintaining the best possible version of their core offering at the lowest cost? Maybe Dash (or whatever) will work but most likely it won't, and investing in that initiative puts their whole business at risk.
There exists such a mode: it's called dividend distribution. But currently DBX and many other tech companies aren't paying any dividends to stock holders. So if it's not growing and not paying dividends, what is the company doing?
Alternately we have entered a phase where layoffs have metastasized as a thing to do so much that executives are being asked about it. "We've noticed you haven't done any layoffs yet, can you explain that?"
"Wouldn't it be better for all parties if they just focused on maintaining the best possible version of their core offering at the lowest cost?"
Yes, absolutely.
There is value in new features and functionality but there can be so much more value in a predictable, stable tool that can be depended on and returned to.
There are people who cancelled their first account with us before dropbox existed and have returned, post-covid, to find a familiar tool to be picked right back up again.
This has been immensely valuable to a great many people and we wouldn't dream of ever changing it.
Would the CEO resigning or getting laid off, make your situation any better if you were one of those laid off?
Feels like a weird hill to die on, and more like a crabs in the bucket mentality that doesn't change anything in the grand scheme of things. In the end I'm still unemployed and whatever happens to my ex-CEO doesn't change my situation one bit.
As I grew older and experienced my share of layoffs, I stopped caring about what happens to those responsible for me getting laid off, as my energy is better spent on improving my situation and my life instead of ruminating how Krama vengeance would make me feel better.
> Would the CEO resigning or getting laid off, make your situation any better if you were one of those laid off?
No, of course not. But he is the leader, and he guided the company to a point where certain areas became "over-invested or under-performing." In other words, he didn’t do a good job. So, it should be him stepping down. Nobody ever said being a CEO would be easy.
>and he guided the company to a point where certain areas became "over-invested or under-performing."
And now he's fixing it by cutting those under-performing areas.
>So, it should be him stepping down.
Why? How would that help the company get better? Do you think competent CEOs are like cogs that you can pick a new one from the stack of LinkedIn applications whenever the old one makes a mistake, and then slot him in the existing machine and everything will magically work better?
>Nobody ever said being a CEO would be easy.
Exactly. That's why you don't rush to replace the devil you know with the devil you don't.
Why don't you start your own company so you can be a model angelic CEO then? Why bother working for these "evil" guys? Or work for a local mom and pop shop instead of a publicly traded company?
I ran a business which is why I know how hard it is and why I prefer working for someone else and accepting the trade-offs. You're the delusional one here wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
That's a really positive attitude, to not fixate on retribution -- kudos to you!
I'd like to point out that there are other possible outcomes, like (say) the CEO and entire C-suite cutting their salary to $1 for a year (it's not like this will render any of them homeless).
IMHO, that would actually constitute "taking full responsibility", as opposed to parroting words that don't connect to the reality of the situation.
I don't know. As you said, it's a waste of energy to wonder about other people and their endeavors. Better to focus on me.
And I need the money. CEOs don't. Feels odd to go from "don't spend your energy thinking about other rich people" and then go "but rich people 'want' money" when someone makes a suggestion.
>Have the stress of running a company while working for free? Who would ever want to do that?
Again, don't know. But I suspect that most people at a CEO level are not just in it for money. There's easier, less stressful ways for millionaire to accrue money.
>I don't know. [...] And I need the money. CEOs don't.
That's some silly delulu shit right there. Imma end this conversation with you right here since you're not arguing in good faith as you've already made up your mind, so it's a waste of my energy and time to continue this any further.
What did you expect productive about this whole conversation?
Did you expect to see the magic formula/solution to people getting laid off from well paying tech companies and somehow I got in the way of that?
We're all just chatting here speaking our minds which has the real world practival equivalent of shouting into the void. There's no real value to be had here.
It wouldn't, but it'd reassure me I wasn't some expendable pawn and they are preteding to be responsible. A company trying to cut back on the highest paid workers who will still survive shows a captain willing to drown with their boat.
but it doesn't work like that in the western world.
>As I grew older and experienced my share of layoffs, I stopped caring about what happens to those responsible for me getting laid off, as my energy is better spent on improving my situation and my life instead of ruminating how Krama vengeance would make me feel better.
The tree remembers. If I have nothing else it's my pride for my craft. I'll probably never have some revenge arc, but I sure will take it personally the next time that company tries to make deals with me later in my career.
Call it cultural; I don't like being treated as a slave. Respect your fellow man, regardless of background or walk of life.
>but I sure will take it personally the next time that company tries to make deals with me later in my career.
You don't do deals with companies who fire people? You wouldn't be working for any company in the world then. IIRC in communism they never fired people, maybe that system will serve you better. Oh wait...
>I don't like being treated as a slave.
"Sent from my iPhone sipping my latte in California"
I wish you all spoiled rich western workers would stop using the slave word so easily whenever an employer does something to you, as it dilutes the meaning and the severity of the word. Similar with the over misuse of the words woke and nazi.
Please read up on what slavery actually meant and the lives of actual slaves. Working in tech in the richest country in the world, and being fired by Dropbox isn't even remotely in the same ball-planet as slavery.
As CEO, it's his responsibility to make/approve the decision to do the layoffs, or not. The buck stops with him. That's all that it means. It doesn't mean he's liable for any hardships.
If "responsibility" only constitutes "I pull the trigger, and I don't care what happens as a result", then that is a fairly weak kind of leadership -- ostensibly not very different from a child doing whatever they want in a consequence-free manner.
I want to believe that "responsibility" not only constitutes "I can make things happen", but that "I am willing to Make Things Right if my actions cause things to go sideways".
If I'm wrong, then we live in a world where "taking responsibility" means "using power", and "I take full responsibility" means "yes, I used my power to do that" and that's Not Good Enough to call such people "Leaders".
Layoffs are a fact of life with businesses. It sucks. I'm sure these CEOs do not enjoy doing it, but someone has it in their job description (i.e. the responsibility) to make those kinds of decisions.
You may have it in your job description the responsibility to do performance reviews on your reports. Those reviews can make or break a career. If you do them honestly and with the consideration they deserve, you should not be expected to personally bear the consequences of giving someone a deserved poor review.
It's too bad we don't live in a perfect world where everyone has a job and is never at risk of losing it. But if wishes where horses.....
If that was what responsibility meant, then by definition any CEO is fulfilling their responsibility.
The moral meaning of responsibility here means that the CEO takes responsibility for the lives and livelihoods of those affected -- which does feel a bit hollow when the CEO presumably is not only not affected negatively, but probably will be rewarded for increasing shareholder value.
My insurance companies and government definitely share that opinion of responsibility. So, yes. But my answer remains "take responibility and mean it".
I'd love to hear you explain how I can get out of paying my car insurance of alimony though with this line of reasoning, though. Could be useful one day.
CEOs are responsible to the board of directors and shareholders. The BoD and shareholders are who choose and remove CEOs and you can bet both are considerably displeased when the company isn't as profitable as they expect.
That's the best part of modern tech markets in a not-recession recession. They are still profitable but will layoff because it's fashionbble or to make more money.
> but acting like petulant child and lashing out at CEO won't do much.
I don't think anyone is attacking the CEO with the expectation that he's got his iPad in-hand, reading every comment through his tears. What we are saying is that corporate doublespeak is unbelievably fucking grating when it doesn't correlate whatsoever with tangible change at the company. This kind of repeat behavior is what makes people (justifiably) laugh when CEOs walk out onstage.
Like when Tim Cook steps out on and insults us all perennially with his "best iPhone yet" comment. Like, duh, of-fucking-course it is! Why don't you tell me something I don't know, show me some form of change in your posture or the way you provide your products and services to me. Don't just advertise to me - convince me that you're not steering the company in a direction that sucks for everyone but the CEO.
> Tim Cook steps out on and insults us all perennially with his "best iPhone yet" comment
I loved this sentence and the sentiment behind it. Nowadays whenever I get the urge to upgrade my old iPhone 13, I go and rewatch old recordings from 2021 of Tim Cook gushing about how the phone I already have is such a huge leap forward for humanity and why everything that came before it is garbage.
Applying this to CEOs and layoffs, every time you join a new job and start to drink the company kool-aid about how you're part of this wonderful family, go and reread that CEO talking about how he took personal responsibility for throwing hundreds of his "family" out on the street right before the holidays.
These words mean nothing really. I expect the next CEO to not use meaningless phrases. How does "taking responsibility" works in his case? What does it even mean other than PR fluff?
why would you expect the next CEO to not use weasel words? it's like they all go to the same "mom school". they all go to the same tailor to make teflon suits so nothing sticks to them, and they all learn the same "rain in spain falls on the plain" dreck.
No, responsibility is not a word. Responsibility is an action.
If I'm on-call, I'm responsible to carry my laptop with me and be available immediately to fix critical issues. I don't just say "I take responsibility of being on-call", and the leave my laptop at home, get drunk and fall asleep in a bar for the weekend. That's called being irresponsible.
I see. But that's still like doing your job. I do my job for being on-call by having my laptop with me and phone on, etc. If do my job badly I get fired.
So this CEO is saying, "if I do my job poorly I understand I could get fired."
But, did he/she do their job poorly? That's the thing I can't figure out quite yet. It seems it was bad for the laid off people, but maybe not for Dropbox?
>"if I do my job poorly I understand I could get fired."
If I got a million dollar parachute when I do my job badly, I would love to "take responsibility" as well. Fuck the people, I get paid either way here.
> But, did he/she do their job poorly?
in a fiduciary sence short term, no. So shareholders are happy since that's all their care about.
Long term, who knows? I don't see them closing the gap with Google nor Microsoft so this could just accelerate that downfall.
in a spirit of, as some politician say, "creating jobs and stimulating the economy", absolutely awfully. We have 500 more workers out on an awful job market and it's not because DBX wasn't profitable. They simply dropped workers to prepare for a bad time that the US economy doesn't want to admit out loud.
A 20% layoff means either the market changed very very quickly or something went terribly wrong in the company strategy. Here it's the second scenario and I'd expect the CEO to be on shaky grounds after such bad results.
There needs to be more explanation on where the CEO screwed up that badly and the consequences for the management.
At the very very least, they should be explaining how Dropbox is suddenly a 20% smaller company, because either that means the market has contracted by 20%, or Dropbox has shit the bed as a competitive entity in said market.
Both options should directly imply that the CEO should earn less. Either you're running a smaller, simpler company, or you sucked at your job.
Actually they don't. Well run companies have cash reserves and expect to have periods of ups and downs. They don't pray to the alter of the next quarterly report.
They do it to suppress wages, not only because of economic instability. It’s worked - wages are down across industry. Wage suppression is one of the responsibilities of a well run business (the CEO together with HR hires consultant help for this or they hire a benefits and wages role, and it’s referred to as market positioning)
It's pretty cynical to say that wage suppression is one of the responsibilities of a CEO. But perhaps not off the mark.
If only we had the equivalent on the other side to balance the equation. Some kind of a group of individual employees, who work together to counter wage suppression efforts.
historically in tech, that group is some new competitor that "disrupts the industry" and either becomes a new power respecting talent for a while, or gets bought out by a megacorp and given that huge salary once again.
That's really the main saving grace for this industry; the scalability that a few employees can still provide a solution that makes corporations with hundreds of thousands of workers sweat. That's why they surged salaries so aggressively in the 00's and half the '10's
That's also the reason why unionization will be a hard argument among tech workers. Slowly starting to happen in the games industry, so that at least confirms there IS a breaking point somewhere for that to happen.
not saying I should go work for McKinsey, just noticing that unnecessary payments are likely happening. companies don't exist to employ people. employees exist to help companies. just make everyone a decent shareholder with decent liquidity and move on when the employee isn't necessary.
>companies don't exist to employ people. employees exist to help companies.
Companies in society exist to serve the customer, provide labor opportunities, and overall stimulate the economy (all of which is needed to make money).
This mentality above is exactly why the latter half of Millensials and Gen Z were demystified by the labor market and simply don't take the kind of "loyalty" narrative of the older generations. You can't talk family, layoff "family" every 2 years regardless of talent and pretend that "hard workers get rewarded". So you'll get the bare minimum, you will get no overtime when you request it (especially if you aren't paying 1.5x), and you probably won't even get the long dead 2 weeks notice when I move on.
You can't expect much more "help" when you can't give the basic modicrum of respect to your help.
> just make everyone a decent shareholder with decent liquidity and move on when the employee isn't necessary.
They should make whole those affected, as best as possible. The CEO, who is the responsible party by their own declaration, should distribute their personal wealth to those affected until all parties have approximately the same amount of wealth.
How about describing what exactly taking full responsibility means for them in that particular situation?
Saying e.g. what is the impact on the situation for those responsible might be nice - no bonuses for next year? A plan in place so that this doesn't happen again? Stepping down as a CEO?
I mean, if I take responsibility for e.g. wrong tax filing, I pay the fine penalty, and/or go to jail.
Saying "I take responsibility" some kind of failure while having no consequences for said failure is not taking responsibility.
I dunno. It may take 1-2 months to prepare for Leetcode style interviews, and this can be pretty mentally exhausting. Every time you fail to solve a leetcode question, it feeds your imposter syndrome, which is probably even worse due to getting fired.
If companies just accepted good programmers and were frank with themselves that they are not going to find rockstar 100x programmers for half the market rate, Leetcode would be acceptable.
With all due respect, that sounds like a personal shortcoming to me. One can (and should) not take interviews personally. One also can (and should) be able to acquit oneself well at an interview even without prep time.
> One also can (and should) be able to acquit oneself well at an interview even without prep time.
I don't agree. If you don't prepare at all for an interview, it shows. Aside from leetcode, it's also important to research the company.
My point is mainly that I might be upset if I were in that group that's laid off today. I don't want to prep leetcode for several weeks. It feels like a waste of time.
I've never prepared for an interview in my life, and I've never had any difficulty. Anecdotal of course, but I think prep for interviews is vastly overrated.
You're telling me you maintain the ability to pass the various interviews that the modern FAANG SWE gauntlet requires year-round? Good for you if so, but this doesn't match the experience of any of the folks that I've worked with across my career.
Who said anything about FAANG? I don't work in that world and in fact you literally could not pay me to do so. It seems miserable as hell. But Dropbox isn't in that world either. And in any case, I've never ever had to prepare for a job interview at all, let alone for multiple months. They aren't that hard in most cases.
Wow, that's horrible. And you might even have to stay at a 4 star instead of a 5 star resort in Bali when you take a vacation during your severance, job market is tough.
Even worse, you might have to miss one contribution to your FATfire investment account to deal with the extra risk. Compounded, that missed contribution might mean you'll have to retire at 46 instead of 45.
How dare these companies treat these people this way. They took the massive risk of working for an already-successful company at $250K/yr with a $200K stock package, and now fat cat Drew Houston dares to leave them with just an abnormally large severance after they are no longer needed.
I don't think your tone aligns with the community guidelines[1]. Please consider not being snarky and sarcastic but actually responding to the merit of what people say here.
>I realized though that I was probably going to be okay
I thought so too... that was 13 months ago.
I still am okay, but only by pure blind luck. And okay in a "rice and beans diet" way. The actual interview gauntlets are worse than my first job search.
And yes, luck = preparation x opportunity. But I was literally cold called by a founder. My experience spoke for itself, but it only helped me tread water instead of sink into the abyss. Sure didn't work the other hundreds of times I kept searching.
>Sometimes the contrast of "sarcasm" is the only way to shake you out of your bubble and give you that perspective.
Again, the guidelines
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Assumptions are horrible on the internet because it only enrages those who do not fit your strawman. I did everything "right" and I end up laid off twice, draining all my savings and a bit of my stock, and being gaslighted for over a year when I could grab multiple offers in 3-4 months the last few job hunts.
I work in games, I'm not making 500k salaries and was well prepared for layoffs. but I was doing very well for myself. So it's tiring hearing people deride my decade of experience with "well maybe you weren't actually a good worker". I'm definitely not a 10x-er, never have been. But it's backwards hat I have more experience now and am desired less for my experience.
It's just bad times. The sooner we can accept that, the easier it'll be to come together and weather the storm. But with layoffs it seems like all the elitism comes out instead.
This is a bullshit package because of the healthcare.
I was laid off from a different company with access to 18 months of COBRA. Dropbox is offering a third of that. Lots of job searches take longer than 6 months, so the employees are going to be left high and dry right when they need it the most.
For the non-Americans, my COBRA expenses are about USD$2,000/month for me and my partner. I’m paying as much for healthcare as I am for rent. Even so, it’s still financially better to take COBRA than pay out of pocket for my prescriptions.
I wonder if they meant paid COBRA of 6 months, bc 18 months is like the minimum to offer continuing coverage. COBRA coverage is a Federal Law for large employers.
"Q11: How long does COBRA coverage last?
COBRA requires that continuation coverage extend from the date of the qualifying event for a limited period of 18 or 36 months. The length of time depends on the type of qualifying event that gave rise to the COBRA rights. A plan, however, may provide longer periods of coverage beyond the maximum period required by law."
All West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.
There's pretty much no way they'd qualify for Medicaid if they were a dev at Dropbox. The income limit for Medi-Cal is $20,783 for a single adult, $28,208 for a household of two adults. Chances are they were past that income limit the first few months of the year. You don't just immediately qualify after making $140k annualized for the first 10 months and then hit $0 one day.
Plus, they're getting 16 weeks of salary. At $140k/yr, that's $2,692/wk. Lets say their severance starts next week. There's 8 weeks left in the year. So they'll get 8 weeks of pay in 2025. $2,692 * 8 = $21,538. So no, they won't qualify for Medicaid at all in 2025 if they make that much as a single person.
True but even making $140k/year does qualify you for tax credits on ACA marketplace health insurance plans. COBRA is kind of obsolete, honestly. You should be switching over to a insurance plan purchased through your state's health insurance marketplace.
Totally agree there. Chances are they'll be better served with a marketplace plan unless they've got a complicated health situation/very specific care that might be questionablly covered without thoroughly shopping around.
I'm just pushing back at the idea someone can go from making six figures and turn around and hop on Medicaid. It's not that simple. It should be IMO, but it isn't.
Even if one does qualify for those programs, the sign-up time is on the order of almost a year here in California. Applications are Supposed To Be™ reviewed within 45 days, which is already a long wait, but they are using the new normal “due to higher than usual volume, fuck you” approach just like every other modern bureaucracy.
Expenses incurred during the coverage gap need additional approval for retroactive repayment, meaning you have to have the funds to pay upfront for however many months/years the sign-up process takes, then once your coverage starts you have to apply/wait/hope to be paid back for everything paid out-of-pocket which might just get denied: https://www.dhcs.ca.gov/formsandpubs/forms/Forms/mc210a0907....
Really? 16 weeks of salary, or 4 months of pay. In my country, you get 3 months of pay as standard when you're fired from your job. Doesn't seem that great to me to be honest.
I think perhaps that's why poster used "for this situation" -- if a company doesn't want to have to provide advance notice, their only option with WARN is to do it with this kind of severance payment. Not sure if it was intended but that's a pretty cool outcome of the law.
US salaries are quite a lot more; lifestyle creep is a thing but at least for developers they get paid a lot more than the average worker in the US than say in the Europe. Factoring that, 4 months is amazing.
In big tech in the US, 4 months is usually enough to find another similar job in the industry. Also in the US for mass layoffs at big firms, the minimum is effectively 2 months because you are required by law to give 2 months notice to workers about such layoffs, 2 months severance is a way to not have to give such notice.
> But are you not expected to work those 3 months?
When you are leaving on your own term yes.
When you are laid off you are technically still an employee for those 3 months but nowadays many companies will just tell you to not show up for security reason.
Personally, I'd consider this nothing to write home about. It's OK. Not great, not terrible.
If we're laying off 20% of the company, I'd expect the package to be somewhere in the 6-12 months range. To me, that would seem more fair, considering they are completely restructuring the whole company.
I'd rather take having a tech industry at all and the 2-4X bigger US salaries (and 30% lower average taxes) than having my fellow citizens shoulder the burden of giving me 6-12 months of daycare.
In the US luckily the job market is still quite dynamic (and extremely tight by historical standards) so only in an extreme scenario would someone with Dropbox on their resume need 12 months to find another job.
They might have to take a pay cut from a 99th percentile salary to a 96th percentile salary though. Rough, I know.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta prevent panic in stockholders is the main priority of a CEO in publicly traded companies. They only concern themselves with the well being of their employees as much as how it affects the stock price.
Because they risk getting punished by angry shareholders and risk lawsuits and risk losing customers if they deviate from the corporate speak to say anything substantial.
Something weird I noticed about Dropbox:
I cancelled my paid account two years ago. I had 5 terabytes of storage being used (mostly shitty concert vids and food pics).
Everyday they email me telling me I’m over my limit. They always “threaten” to delete the data but it’s been two years since I cancelled.
My Qs are: why are they hoarding my data for so long? Why would they want to do this? How cheap is storage for them to want to do this? How likely is it that they have sold my data to train various LLMs with?
If they delete your stuff, you almost certainly won’t resume your subscription. The cost of storage may be lower than the benefit from re-subscriptions, and possibly the cost of actually implementing and maintaining an automated deletion process in compliance with all jurisdictions.
You can just delete your data dude. No one is forcing you to keep it there. They’re generally not going to do something destructive because of unpaid bills. It’s nice of them
But why do I have to log into Dropbox to do this? I haven't logged into the site in 2 years and don't plan on it. I just find it odd that they keep threatening to delete my data but from where I'm standing it looks like they will keep my data indefinitely.
I'm not forcing them to do anything. I terminated my service and they're still keeping my data. Seems like shitty consumer rights that they'll just keep the data regardless of what I do.
That's what I'm trying to figure out, if others have similar stories.
>Seems like shitty consumer rights that they'll just keep the data regardless of what I do.
But they aren't keeping it regardless of what you do. You can ask them to delete it and they will. The power is in your hands and you are refusing to use it.
They are absolutely keeping it regardless of what I do, I cancelled two years ago (next month it'll be three years) and they send me daily emails about how they will threaten to delete the data when they have no intention of doing so.
You don't find that misleading and poor for consumers? Companies shouldn't have carte blanche to do whatever they want. Especially when I terminated a service years ago.
Once again you think it's a good policy to indefinitely retain data after nearly three years since canceling and you can't imagine why consumers would be upset about this policy?
Hopefully something breaks through your mind, maybe you're understand why the majority of the public don't trust or like big tech.
I understand some people want their data deleted, but think more customers would want the data saved in case they renew.
The part I dont understand is feeling helpless, complaining, and dealing with daily emails when it would take 60 seconds to log in and delete the files.
It is like someone who cant be bothered to wipe their butt complaining about the smell.
Sure the license agreement would not legally permit that.
I wonder what kind of legal recourse you would have. There's obviously copyright infringement, but I think state laws like CCPA include remedies for violations.
Company isn’t doing so great and future doesn’t look so great and people cost a lot of money so they are letting folks go who aren’t as valuable. This makes sense.
It wasnt needless, they didnt want to miss out. They are not sure what they didnt want to miss out on, but they knew for sure that they didnt want to be the only one not doing it.
If you look at its earnings they have appeared to plateau and there isn’t a major offering planned that will change this.
I am reminded of Slack which has a similar history of rapid growth followed by a very competitive market and then significant slowing. Maybe Salesforce could acquire Dropbox and bundle it into their offerings or some other similar company?
Slack shot their own selves in the foot iirc. They were miles ahead of any competitor, employees loved it, and then they just started gouging all their whale customers in contract negotiations, to the point that they started looking elsewhere...
If this isn't the full picture, let me know. I was at multiple companies trying to move away from Slack as the cost was not justifiable
MS Teams was a large contributor as well to the downfall of Slack. It automates decently with the stuff most companies already have (AD, O365, and most importantly all that compliance bullshit), and nowadays it can even do landline telephony, providing enterprises with a way to reduce their exposure to Cisco crap on top of it.
In the end, Microsoft is IMHO once again abusing its stronghold on the market. Just the enterprise-compliance-integration stuff is more than enough to cause any medium or large company to move off of Slack or its competitors (e.g. Mattermost).
Teams and Google Chat. They're both incredibly bad compared to Slack. But if your org is on 365 or Workspace, you're already paying for them. Big orgs don't love double-paying, quality be damned.
We’ve heard from many of you that our organizational structure has become overly complex, with excess layers of management slowing us down.
So we're making more significant cuts in areas where we're over-invested or underperforming while designing a flatter, more efficient team structure overall.
So a lot of middle management getting let go then?
> "As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I’m truly sorry to those impacted by this change."
As with other CEOs who say such things in similar situations - does this "responsibility" amount to anything? Like loss of salary or options or seniority. Or is this just empty words?
I appreciate that this action is probably necessary to safeguard the business but, as someone who has been at the sharp end of a number of redundancies, I wish leaders would be honest:
"We tried stuff but it didn't work. I was and am in charge, and I'm staying. We're making you redundant because we need the money more than we need you."
Obviously no leader would say such a thing. But the people affected (and thas not just those being made redundant) deserve honesty, not platitudes.
"I earn the big money because I make decisions and I take risks (with others lives, but let's not talk about that). My decisions haven't worked; my risks haven't paid off. I'm however letting you take the hit, because I'm too important for that kind of shit. I've more decisions to make, and risks to take. My family is fine; my pay is fine. It's just you who are affected.". -- Your CEO, who still makes more money that you do (or don't), no matter what.
(Your comment was dead but I vouched for it because I want to explain why youve failed to appreciate an important distinction.)
tldr: the redundancy is not the announcement
I think people (and I include myself) do understand that companies need to adjust their workforce. I think that decision is not wholly moral in nature. But it does have a moral component - and Dropbox seems to appreciate that somewhat in the assistance they're providing the people who are leaving.
But what isn't moral is an individual announcing publicly that they take responsibility for acts that cause trauma to others (however constrained that decision was) while in reality that responsibility-taking involves no consequences at all the individual. None.
In the large train station in the city where I live, the automated voice announcements "apologise" for train cancellations. I'd argue that this is as empty and insulting as this CEO's email - because no responsibility has in fact been taken. The CEOs words and the announcement software are as morally empty as eachother.
For context, Drew Houston's total compensation for the year in 2023 was $1.5M:
> According to our data, Dropbox, Inc. ... paid its CEO total annual compensation worth US$1.5m over the year to December 2023. That's a notable increase of 34% on last year
Even if Drew took minimum wage, that would save ~15 jobs assuming $100K all-in comp (which seems low to me for a tech salary). 500 employees is more like $50M/year, and probably more.
Of course, Drew Houston's net worth is ~$2B and he could technically loan Dropbox Inc money personally to save the jobs, my guess is a lot of his net worth is actually Dropbox stock that he would have to liquidate and would affect the stock price materially. He would also need to follow insider trading laws too and can't just up and sell vast amounts of stock on a whim. Most executives are on pre-approved schedules to sell any stock to avoid triggering insider trading.
The severance package Dropbox is offering is pretty good - 16 weeks of pay + an additional week for each year of tenure, impacted employees get their Q4 equity vest & prorated bonuses, everyone keeps company devices, an offer for extra time + help for people on visas, and job placement help for everyone.
Dropbox is a public company that is profitable, but not really growing through their flagship product. No growth is more or less bad on Wall Street. They also haven't really had a major hit since their initial file-sharing product and missed some shots they probably should have hit (mainly vs. Notion with Dropbox Paper, Mailbox acquisition, etc). With many systems moving away from "files" and to "cloud objects" like Figma, Notion, etc, their workhorse product might be going away over time too. They need the time and focus to find that next S-growth curve.
Layoffs suck and no one wants to do it, but sometimes it's needed to save the ship.
> Layoffs suck and no one wants to do it, but sometimes it's needed to save the ship.
Layoffs are the trolley problem but you get to pick how many people are lying down on each side of the track and if you want yourself to be one of them.
That said, if one reaches the conclusion that under their leadership they were forced to downsize by 20% (either due to over hiring, failure to reach revenue/growth targets, whatever) that should make that person one of the people on proverbial tracks. Compensation has little to do with it.
>that should make that person one of the people on proverbial track
That's a satisfying thing to say, but as practical advice it's absolutely terrible.
Often that person's leadership wasn't the problem, but even when it was, that doesn't necessarily mean that the company will be better-off without them. And that's the question -- what will make the company most likely to be the most successful going forward? Even if the current trouble is because of some of that leader's mistakes, the answer is often to keep that leader. Sometimes it isn't.
> Often that person's leadership wasn't the problem
Then what is the problem? Ultimately you’re paid the big bucks for being held responsible. Why isn’t it never something like the CEO doesn’t get any stocks that year. I’m not saying he needs to leave the company but maybe he should take a substantial hit to his pay. He has enough money to put food on the table for many years, unlike the people who are let go where it’s mostly a mixed bag.
No, I dont think there should be a penalty by default.
The objective of a company isnt and shouldn't be to run a charity. Some amount of layoffs are desirable just as a matter of housekeeping. Layoffs can be a hard part of doing a good job.
I think there are extreme examples and tactics where layoffs cross a moral line but not a legal line. for example, I think the humane thing to do is freeze hiring before layoffs so you dont relocate someone only to let them go.
That said, there are already a lot of business incentives to avoid turbulence in headcount. It is slow and expensive to hire people and let them go.
>I dont think there should be a penalty by default.
I do.
>The objective of a company isnt and shouldn't be to run a charity.
Charities pay employees too. 501ks don't mean you run on all volunteers and that it's okay to remove them at your whim. Horrible metaphor.
Anyways, a company has 3 goals
1. serve the customer
2. support your labor to enable efficient production
3. overall stimulate the economy and society
These all help the bottom line of "make profit". Shareholders have little stake here so it's annoying that that is all they prioritize lately. because you then break all 3 rules just for them, who will leave on a whim for some other speculation. And then they wonder why they lose money as workers burnout and leave, as customers get frustrated and move, and the economy gets worse as money is pocketed to the rich instead of the public.
It'a all a horrid death spiral. It needs to stop. It will stop forcefully if not voluntarily.
>It is slow and expensive to hire people and let them go.
And who's fault is that? I don't remember shouting in glee whenever I hear 5 rounds of interviews, including 2 rounds dedicated to trivia.
>Its actually incredibly hard to to figure out which people to cut in an efficient manner.
it is. That's why Hanlon's razor simply tells me they aren't trying very hard. They need to cut numbers, maxiize money and care about next quarter next quarter. efficiency wasn' prioritized before the layoffs, why would it be now?
I dont think we agree on enough fundamental facts about the world to have a productive conversation. It seems like you are in denial about the possibility that some workers can be detrimental to bottom line profit and efficiency.
By the way, the charity comment wasnt about volunteers. Companies are not run as a non-profit charity with workers as the beneficiaries.
Yes we are. You're in denial that most of these layoffs are performance based, and not because of factors beyond their control.
If you're cynical about your peers to think that the default of them in the field is unprofitable and unproductive, we have nothing to say to each other. Learn some empathy.
/s aside
Its actually incredibly hard to to figure out which people to cut in an efficient manner. It is one of the reasons companies suck so bad at doing it, and many avoid layoffs and firing when they should be doing more of it.
to play devils advocate, there are different levels one can look at that. From the level of the companies and owners, the goal is to make money.
From the perspective of society there are tons of answers. A common answer is that companies provide goods and services that give consumers more value than they cost, thereby enriching the lives of consumers.
It seems like some people, especially those who take issue with layoffs, tend to think the social purpose of companies is to give jobs/money to workers. This leads to a lot of frustration for those people because the entire economic system is set up such that jobs are an optional byproduct of making goods, not the other way around.
We live in a society where there are more metrics than money. The entire notion of corporate amorality is a thin veil that people use to hide their own unethical and immoral behavior.
That's why I made the comment that layoffs are the trolley problem. It's an ethical question and companies don't always make the ethical choice, for example choosing profit over jobs in a downturn.
That presupposes an ethical obligation to provide jobs, which is of course at the center of this.
If you think companies have a ethical obligation to provide jobs and do so continuously, of course you will find issue with the rest of it. All objections stem from this, and it is controversial.
I disagree, and think you're missing the forest for the trees. I think that people have an obligation to keep their promises to other people - that's a virtue called honesty or integrity. When a promise needs to be broken, that presents an ethical dilemma.
One example of people making a promise is hiring. A layoff is fundamentally breaking the promise you made to a group of people to keep them employed - whether that's the most ethical choice or not circles back to the trolley problem. If 20% need to be laid off to save the 80% then it's not an unethical choice. If 20% need to be laid off to make up for the mistake of a small group of leaders in order to benefit the small group of shareholders, then it's unethical.
> All objections stem from this, and it is controversial.
It's only controversial when you pretend that you can absolve an unethical choice by placing it behind the corporate veil. It's not controversial outside of Milton Friedman disciples.
Huh? A promise to keep people employed? If it's not in the contract, it hasn't been promised. You're fan-fictioning a promise that was never made to manufacture an ethical issue that's not actually real.
If the contract says you'll get 60 days notice and you don't, that is a broken promise (and an actionable breach of contract). Firing someone you hired is not a broken promise. You don't have to be a Milton Friedman disciple to refrain from gaslighting about employment being a promise to keep people employed forever.
It's called the "social contract". You do good work and make me money, I keep you around and let you keep doing good work. It's equally a cynical and fair interpretation of a company.
This was broken long ago, so I understand it being a foreign concept, but it's something my grandparents told me about when giving me my bootstraps to pick myself up with. Now it doesn't matter how much you make them because you can't outpay their ability to save on tax breaks or make funny monopoly number go up. So we're all doomed.
>Firing someone you hired is not a broken promise.
depends on the contract and laws around it. This is far from universal unlike the social contract described above.
> It's called the "social contract". You do good work and make me money, I keep you around and let you keep doing good work. It's equally a cynical and fair interpretation of a company.
If it's more profitable not to fire someone, because they're making the company money on net — given a big picture perspective — then they don't get laid off. There's no profit in laying off workers who are making the company more than they cost.
Where workers often miss perspective on this is in looking only at the smaller picture. Things can be making money in the small picture while not being profitable in the big picture, e.g. Kodak's film production operations before the rise of digital photography. If the business needs to be building digital cameras and the capital needed to do that is currently tied up in traditional film, the fact that employees working on film production may be profitable on net given the current capital allocation doesn't mean they're profitable in the big picture. And it's often a very, very good thing for society when a company in that position lays off a bunch of people and reallocates that capital, as it would have been with Kodak had they fully committed to digital earlier.
>There's no profit in laying off workers who are making the company more than they cost.
Yeah there are. If a worker is paid $100k, makes 1M for the company, but you have a 20M dollar tax incentive to bring people back to office: it doesn't matter if that worker is a 10x-er. It is more profitable to tank your productivity so you get a cushy tax break if that worker can't/doesn't want to RTO.
That was my core point on this "social contract" being broken. Companies are more interested in finding loopholes to save money than ways to make their products more attractive and grow other revenue sectors. There are a dozen more examples of this. It's not that they aren't productive, it's that the company found non-labor ways to make or save money.
>Where workers often miss perspective on this is in looking only at the smaller picture. Things can be making money in the small picture while not being profitable in the big picture,
And it's where companies miss when they look at next quarters earnings call instead of years later. Boieng is reaping it's rewards from over a decade of doing this. You can't screw over your employees and degrade quality to a point of costing lives and then suddenly wonder where it all went wrong.
why do you think these people are making the company money? The CEO and stockholders all seem to think the company will make more money without them then with them?
Do you think hiring is a promise?
What do you think the promise consists of? I think you are projecting a promise where you want one to be, but nobody is actually under the impression it exists.
Neither employers and employees are under the impression jobs are for life. If you're concern is primarily honesty and promise, would this piece satisfied by a written declaration and acknowledgment that the duration of employment is not indefinite and can change based on the arbitrary whims of the employer?
If you remove the corporate veil, what do you think the promise is for one human hiring another, and the ethical requirements. If I hire a housekeeper or babysitter, what am I committing to?
I dont see how corporations are held to anything but a higher expectation than individuals, not lower. Can you expand on this?
No, but that specific sentence you're quoting is targeting a very specific bit of business ethics teaching that I find great issue with. IME no one making decisions like layoffs really believes in the amorality of corporate decisions, except the morally bankrupt. You don't find solace in the idea that a company only exists to make money when you're telling a father whose kids are about to start college that he needs to look for a new job.
> Performance based compensation is absolutely standard for CEOs- Both in terms of options and stock grants.
Yes but you’re still making $1.5M after a 34% haircut. That seems like a reward, and not any real sense of taking responsibility when you have to let go 1 in 5. Wouldn’t it be better if he just got a base salary of 200K or something and no stocks for that year? He already has a bunch of equity and if he does well at the end of the year, that equity will be worth more anyway.
In what sense do you think it would be better? Would it advance CEO performance or the company? Would it bring the world more into alignment with some sense of moral justice?
It certainly would be some real accountability. They didn’t perform well and they’re mostly compensated in equity, so they get less of it. When they perform better, they’ll get more equity. Why wouldn’t this encourages the CEO perform better? The sword cuts both ways.
You are describing how the world already works. The only difference is base pay. Why do you think lower base pay is better accountability and performance? They already have millions on the line. I imagine better base pay means better candidates.
>Why do you think lower base pay is better accountability and performance?
it really doesn't matter. Because you don't just apply on linkedin and get interviewed for a CEO position like this. You're already a millionaire if you're being considered for a million dollar position. It can be charity work and I wouldn't care because you probably accrue money passively anyway.
>They already have millions on the line.
and if they fail they have millions left. oh no!
the outcome can be equal but the opportunity never was. And it's a real shame people with these safety nets actively work to erode the pittance of safety nets he government gives to people who make less than them in their careers than they do in a few months.
And who sets the standards? Their CEO-buddies on the boards. None of them would dare rock the boat.
One of the failure modes of 401ks and investment funds are large investment pools that don't vote at AGMs, leaving boards largely dominated by CxOs, to their own devices.
Either you dont understand my point, or I dont understand yours.
Im saying CEOs have financial skin in the game tied to company performance. They get less, often much less when the company shits the bed. This was in response to a parent post that seems to think CEO comp is entirely isolated from performance.
You probably didn't understand my point. You said CEOs are paid that way because it's the standard. In your opinion, who sets the standards for CEO compensation, and what are their day-jobs? The majority of boardmembers happen to be C-suite executives themselves.
My thesis is that the boards of public companies have been captured by the executives, and the diffuse shareholding has been ineffective in providing oversight to the boards at AGMs. If SWE (or teacher) remuneration were determined by a (nominally independent) subcommittee dominated by other SWEs (or teachers), I posit that incomes for that role would outstrip other roles at the same organization over multiple decades, due to biases and knowing who butters their bread. It would become standard practice, naturally.
Okay, I think we are both misunderstanding then. My original point was a fairly mundane one. Pixel was asking why CEOs don't suffer substantial financial cost for bad performance. My point was simply that they do! Poor performance often incurs millions of dollars of opportunity costs to CEOs. I suspect that the deeper question was why don't CEO suffer more than just opportunity cost, in harsher way that would be more emotionally satisfying.
You raise good questions about how prevailing compensation is set and the relative power of corporate governance. I tend to agree that executives have a lot of leverage and it seems like boards are relatively weak. They don't have a lot of incentive to pinch pennies push back on CEO compensation. There's a pretty huge cost to shareholders if they want to fire or even replace a CEO, and uncertain upside.
There might be some class/roll solidarity going on as you propose. However, I think the bigger factor is that minimizing CEO comp simply is not a priority for boards and shareholders, despite the attention it gets from outside critics.
Held responsible for what? The what part is written in contract for execs, movie stars, sport persons. I have not seen in any category people not getting paid per their contract for poor performance.
The ones out of job can join a different company, america’s unemployment rate especially in the tech sector tends to be low.
Them doing layoffs doesnt mean the people become destitute.
It is better to layoff people who are not adding value to a company, so that those newly unemployed folks can join a different company and build great products and add more value to the economy.
Ofcourse this only applies to US tech sector where hiring is tight. Especially when coming out of top tier companies like dropbox on your resume.
I don’t think its that dramatic, folks who tend to hold similar ideologies like you state, tend to not even bat a single eye, when average americans who lack the privilege of a tech worker lose their job to automation (with tech) or outsourcing or due to overburdened climate regulations and redtape leading to fewer factory jobs in America.
This is not the titanic, those people will move on to places where they’ll have a chance for promotion.
Whenever people are laid off where you work, I suppose you always volunteer to take their place? Since according to you it's only such a minor inconvenience I think it would be hypocritical of you to not to offer to take their place.
Grandparent is not even saying that it should be avoided, just that the CEO should face some accountability from it. In many cases they have none at all, whereas the impact on the employees can range from actually quite low (as in your example) to very high. In fact there is no upper ceiling to impact to the worker which is the real problem. From the horror stories I've heard about the US they could even lose health insurance and end up with someone in the family dying because they can't afford treatment. Accountability is good precisely when there are such asymmetrical power imbalances, where one person makes the decision and someone else bears all the consequences. Either you add some feedback loops or the imbalance grows unchecked until it becomes unsustainable, and eventually you end up with a war of independence, or a French revolution and things like that.
With just a bit of empathy it should be easy to understand why accountability is needed in such situations to keep a good social dynamic long term. Someone with the empathy of a river boulder might think it's just people behaving irrationally, but I suggest you look into game theory and you'll see how some seemingly irrational behaviours like tit-for-tat are not as irrational as they seem.
>The ones out of job can join a different company, america’s unemployment rate especially in the tech sector tends to be low.
>Ofcourse this only applies to US tech sector where hiring is tight.
So, which is it? Will we move on or wont we?
>tend to not even bat a single eye, when average americans who lack the privilege of a tech worker lose their job to automation (with tech) or outsourcing
They keep trying to re-outsource tech every decade and we're in another wave. Why would I not be batting all my eyes at outsourcing?
> its emotional folks like you who end up getting taken advantage of by communist / socialist / comrade like ideologies
Oh, so anyone who disagrees with you is a communist / socialist? Hate to break it to you, but I'm a red blooded American capitalist that has a few criticisms to make the system better and freer. You cannot have liberty in today's world without a job - you will be homeless, on the street, and freezing, and society has decided that applying resources to that problem is a waste of time. That doesn't mean anybody "owes" you a job, but not even remotely considering the consequences of layoffs is bloodless and heartless and ultimately a detriment both personally to the person laid off (though no fault of their own, after all, just wanting to juice those stock numbers!) and to the US economy as a whole. And god forbid you're here on an H1B visa - better pack your shit and get out if some corporate overlord decrees so.
Have a good day as well - not everyone that disagrees with you is a communist. Get therapy for your problems.
> Often that person's leadership wasn't the problem, but even when it was, that doesn't necessarily mean that the company will be better-off without them
How convenient (for them)! When the company is doing well, they get millions in bonuses because their irreplaceable leadership skills - which make them 2000x more valuable than the least paid worker - were instrumental to the organization's success.
When the chips are down, it wasn't their fault per se, and the company still would be allegedly worse off without them, so laying-off waves of those who don't have decision-making power is the correct remedy, until the good times roll again, and senior leadership is ready to claim responsibility.
It must be nice to claim "macro-economic headwinds" as justification for poor performance and poor planning, but still get paid bonuses for the never-mentioned "macro-economic tailwinds"
> must be nice to claim "macro-economic headwinds" as justification for poor performance and poor planning, but still get paid bonuses for the never-mentioned "macro-economic tailwinds"
What would you do if you owned a business? Fire leadership every time they make a wrong call? Or ban them from admitting they made a wrong call?
- Find the issues, the ACTUAL issues. not "the stockholders are unhappy" issues. Not the "we overhired" issues. tangible issues hurting my bottom line. Economic head/tailwins is not a tangible issue for anything (let alone performance related) so much as a means to adjust projected earnings.
- Make an action plan, give tangible, reasonable goals. Not speculation on what appeals to monopoly money. We're a software company; if we can't collect internal data, how are we handling client data with any integrity.
- If anyone in leadership acted maliciously, they are gone. Full stop. Others are corrected. I can correct ignorance or incompetency. I won't stand deception and trickery among what should all be an aligned company with aligned goals.
(note, I won't codify a need to "fire someone" everytime a mistake is made either. a mistake is a managerial failing at best and a company failing at worst. Operate in a “a rising tide lifts all boats” mentality, not blame culture)
- if action plans and projected revenues look dire and we absolutely need to, introduce cuts. Try to cut my (assuming I'm earning anything) salaries first, then other execs. If absolutely necessary after they, we do layoff rounds. Ideally this should not happen because I have a proper savings chest for the worst times, but I'm not 100% opposed to layoffs as a last resort.
now of course, all this is unnecessary because dropbox is in fact not at the point where any of this is needed. Except maybe for Monopoly money. But yes, I have thought quite a bit about this scenario. And I still know this is still a shallow exercise since I'm missing tons of looholes and other scenarios.
If I owned a controlling stake in a business, I'd fire the leadership every time there's evidence of short-term thinking. The problem with public companies is systemic: a large fraction of shareholders want short term appreciation, and so they support and reward short-term mindsets in leaders at the cost of long-term value.
> I'd fire the leadership every time there's evidence of short-term thinking
Have you owned a business? Worked for a manager who thought like this? You’re describing the sort of mercurial boss who fires people for disagreeing with them.
There's nothing mercurial about firing someone over poor strategic planning. Before you hire someone, you communicate the expectations of the job, amd if an executive prioritizes quick ones over long term big wins, that is a fundamental misalignment in values - not a spur-of-the-moment dismissal.
> Before you hire someone, you communicate the expectations of the job, amd if an executive prioritizes quick ones over long term big wins, that is a fundamental misalignment in values
Right, this is micromanaging leadership. You're looking for a manager to execute your vision. Not a leader. Short termism is a problem. But layoffs aren't proof of short-term thinking. If anything, they're a sign of past exuberant optimism.
If the leadership mistakes lead to the loss of livelihood and healthcare of thousands of employees because of their mistakes, yes, they should be included in the firings, or strongly considered for them - more so than any of the people getting laid off who made no mistakes, except working for a bad leader.
- The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done
The end result is that if companies are spending their max, if there's a shock to the market/system etc they have to cut. You'd see this less if there was more padding/ less competitive pressure/lower salaries.
I think that's fine and the system is working as intended. People should be freed up to move to other roles where they can be productive. Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense. There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.
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