I’ve been interested in working at Dropbox for a while now, but I haven’t had any success. I recently found another role at Dropbox that interests me, so I’ve restarted the process of looking for a referral, but I’ve noticed a few things that make me question whether or not I want to apply. Over the past year, I’ve sent over a dozen connection requests to Dropbox employees who went to my school (many of whom I know personally from clubs or through mutual friends). Only two have accepted my requests, and zero have responded to my messages. I’ve also had 3 employees completely ignore my connection request after viewing my profile. This is extremely weird, as I’ve never had this issue with my school’s Alumni at any other company. The same thing happens on Blind. Whenever I see someone asking for a Dropbox referral, I see a bunch of employees giving vague reasons as to why they dislike the company (despite staying for multiple years) and why others shouldn’t apply. What’s going on here? #dropbox #swe
It’s a sinking ship
Syncing and sinking
Maybe not be so desperate? Imagine sending linkedin requests in order to get something out
Omg, that’s such a great idea! I’ll keep cold applying and never hearing back. Thanks so much for your help :)
Yes, LinkedIn actually has a new feature specifically for this.
I don't work at Dropbox, but if someone reaches out to me who I've never met and have no connection with other than we went to the same school, they're getting ignored. Don't be that guy.
That’s a valid opinion, but this is something that my school strongly encourages and is very common within our school culture. That’s how most students at my school (including myself) get jobs and internships. Also, many of them are people who I’ve met from clubs or through mutual friends.
Then what's the point of LinkedIn ?
Can’t answer on people not responding to you, but the reasons are anything but vague on why not to be there these days. Culture went right in the toilet as of layoffs in 2023. Performance measurement is becoming increasingly Amazonian, leadership churn is constant, lay-off and PIP fears are palpable. Majority of value in the past couple of years has been derived from cost cutting and there just isn’t much fat left to trim, so SLT is panicking. I don’t believe in the product direction. Managers and teams are under serious delivery pressure but the strategy just isn’t there. I’ve never seen so much effort go into finger pointing and absolving of responsibility over just fixing shit. If you’re an IC you’ll find that internal tech is over engineered, old, and hasn’t aged well. Many teams are short on headcount but owning multiple critical services-> busy oncall. Management will pressure you to throw code out the door at any cost to show OKR progress, making the debt worse. I was so disappointed, because my impression was that Dropbox had a strong engineering culture. I’d liken it to trying to imitate Facebook: hacks on hacks to move metrics, but without the organizational framework to actually move fast. Seriously, don’t bother. The TC is good and the company will be around for a while, no doubt, but you won’t be learning things here. You’re likely to find the environment either frustrating or stressful. Like any big company there’s probably some good teams/areas left, but not the org I’m in, or the teams in other orgs I’d be interested in transferring to. Edit: wow I sure wrote a rant while on the can. Here’s another recent post with thoughts from others: "Dropbox friends, what’s the reason for such high leadership turnover? They barely make it 1 year…. (Tech)" https://www.teamblind.com/us/s/BTpdccsW
Just so you know, Dropbox did have an extremely strong engineering culture back in the day, it was great across the board. Fun and empathetic culture, top talent, amazing food/perks, great WLB, solid TC. Unfortunately it’s a one-trick pony, and any attempts to create new products/value over the past decade has failed. Dash is doomed to the same fate. And now, with dwindling paying users via the cash cow, it’s almost certainly game over. But it won’t happen fast, it’ll be a slow and painful death. Acquisition or private equity would be a good exit.
There are still pockets of strong engineering culture that I've seen. It really isn't the ICs that are the reason for the decline. It's 100% senior leadership pressuring managers to pressure ICs to prioritize delivery and de-prioritze tech debt and other items. Re-org upon re-org has caused a HUGE ownership problem where teams that are running on fumes due to the RIF are forced to take on ownership of huge systems/services that no one on the team knows anything about, and all the institutional knowledge on it is lost to those that were laid off or left due to the writing on the wall. There are still great teams here, but it's becoming like Amazon where you have to be lucky to land on one.
FWIW my referrals have only gotten interviews if I’ve previously worked with the candidate and I’ve specified this when referring. Otherwise, the candidates haven’t moved on. Could be people not wanting to waste time.
Thanks!
Overall Tech: meh~ Engineering Talent: really good 👍🏻 Middle managers: meh~ Leadership: 💩 TC: really good ($520k IC4 SWE) WLB: great 9-5-5 (specially given the TC) Future: questionable 🤨 - like others pointed, it’ll be here for a long time because we are still profitable, but thats going down slowly. So company will keep finding ways to cut cost to maintain the “profitable” status like layoffs, real estate cuts, benefits cuts and so on. Still a great place to work if you want to have decent work, don’t mind constant management changes and have top-notch pay for good wlb
old tech - just some overengineered wrapper around rsync
One of the worst examples of over-simplification 🤣 Its like saying: amazon is just a website to click on, not sure why they need 500k employees
Honestly, they probably don't feel comfortable bringing people in right now due to the rapid decline in culture, which used to be, IMO, Dropbox's greatest asset. Even 1 year ago before the RIF it was still a pretty enjoyable place to work. Now, it's really team dependent, and God help you if you're on a super high profile product that upper management is trying to to backseat drive.
Can confirm all the above. Dropbox belongs in the toilet 🚽. Terrible terrible leadership
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