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?
