Dropbox

Remote-First. High Pay. Good Benefits (but slowly being eroded).

Ineffective Upper Management Upper management believes in "grassroots" management, where no plans are made, no expectations are given, and no mandates are issued.

ICs are expected to correctly guess what management wants and will play a guessing game for any/all initiatives. Teams are largely insular and hardly ever collaborate on company-wide solutions. No effort is made to orchestrate Dropbox at all. Until 2023, there were no company-wide yearly plans or goals beyond a couple of sentences. This is a rudderless ship.

Lack of Ownership Upper management never holds any manager, org, or team responsible. Teams are able to shrug off responsibility and are protected by upper management. Undue burden is placed on other teams to make up this slack, but no effort is placed on improving the org structure to solve these issues.

No Care for Customers Customers and problems affecting customers are largely ignored by Dropbox. Large amounts of effort are placed in making the employee experience better at the expense of the customer. Large-scale issues are swept under the rug until working hours, even if Dropbox customers are experiencing an outage or degraded performance. Due to the above lack of ownership, these problems are never addressed, and the owning teams are never made to fix them. I get paid by Dropbox for free and refuse to use the service as a customer.

Upper management needs to take a direct hand in managing the future of the company. Hold ineffective teams responsible. Care about the people who give you money.