It doesn’t seem to want to end the period of layoffs linked to the big companies in the Tech world. Indeed, going beyond the already well-known downsizing of Big Tech, the announcement has now arrived that 500 Dropbox employees will lose their jobs.
In this regard, as stated directly on the official Dropbox blog, in a message from CEO Drew Houston published on April 27, 2023, the difficult decision was made to reduce staff by 16%. Houston explained that it wants to take full responsibility for the situation in which it has arrived, indicating that all involved will have a 1-on-1 meeting with team leaders or a member of the People team to discuss the details of the departure.
In case you’re wondering, reference is made to the “right to sixteen weeks’ paywith an additional week of pay for each year with Dropbox“, as well as health care and the ability to keep company devices for personal use. There are also free job placement and career coaching services in between.
As for the reasons that led to the decision, the CEO explains: “Although our business is profitable, growth is slowing down. Part of this is due to the natural maturation of the business, but more recently the headwinds of the economic downturn have put pressure on our customers and, consequently, on our business. For these reasons, some investments that used to offer positive returns are no longer sustainable“.
However, these are not Houston’s words that have attracted the most attention. Subsequently, in fact, the CEO writes: “the age of artificial intelligence has finally arrived. We have believed for many years that AI would give us new superpowers and completely transform knowledge work. We’ve been building this future for a long time, as this year’s product pipeline will show“.
The message then goes on to better identify the issue: “In an ideal world, we’d just move people from one team to another. And we have done it wherever possible. However, our next phase of growth it requires a different mix of skills, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and early stage product development. We have brought great talent to these areas over the past two years and will need even more people“.