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Two Years Working at Dropbox
- ianai 7y agoSeven managers in two years. I can’t accept that as some great thing which works and makes sense in any combination of letters and numbers.
- willis936 7y agoAn interesting read, for sure. I can’t shake the feeling that it is sanitized. Like every criticism is minor enough and outweighed with positives that I feel like it isn’t 100% honest. I don’t know if it’s a legal thing or a cultural thing or a “tell-all-isn’t-worth-risking-my-future” thing or some other thing. I am very sensitive to these kinds of things though. I have a critical East Coast mentality and I’m not a fan of West Coast yesism.
- capableweb 7y ago> a critical East Coast mentality and I’m not a fan of West Coast yesism As someone who have no idea what this refers to (I'm not from the US [I'm assuming East/West coast here refer to the coast's of USA]), could you expand on what this means in reality?
- sethammons 7y agoI'm from the US and have no clue what this means.
- badfrog 7y ago+1, this is not a thing
- moron4hire 7y agoThere are some fairly large cultural differences between the East and West coasts. Having grown up on the East coast, places like Portland and Seattle feel as different to where I live as Dublin or Glasgow. But certainly not as different as Munich or Quito. But I think a lot of the difference is self-fulfilling. If you grow up in one place and don't like it, you move. I grew up in a rural town, very conservative. I went to a local university. My first jobs were in the area. And I couldn't stand it. I eventually found out that, if you're uncomfortable with casual racism and anti-intellectualism, you just move away. Certainly the same thing happens in other areas, for anyone moving away from their local "culture". For me, that move was only 2 hours away to Northern Virginia, where I can still see my family, make it out to the public nature reserves I grew up with, don't have to sell my collection of guns, everyone has a degree, and people hide their casual racism a little better. Don't get me wrong, there is shit I can't stand about this place either. But that's every place. I can ignore the problems of here a little better than the problems of back home. For whatever reason, I find it easier to ignore elitists who look down on folks for having "only" a Bachelor's degree than I can ignore luddites who feel threatened by folks who went to college at all.
- jefflombardjr 7y agoI'll bite - I'm from the east and the business culture here drives me nuts. I've lived on the west coast as well, there are parts of the culture out there that drive me nuts but I much prefer to work with west coast/mid west companies. East coasters believe themselves to be more realistic and pragmatic than west coasters, I often hear things like "oh yeah that's just a pipe dream that's not how real business is done", or "They're not thinking it through, I have x years of experience, and can tell you it can't be done". The worst part is that it has morphed into a bit of a superiority complex that dismisses innovation. There's just a lack of interest in trying to improve/change procedures because people feel so caught up in putting out fires and being busy in an attempt to look productive. It's absurd. And extends all the way to benign things like dress code. People are afraid to wear jeans at work because it might look "unprofessional" or like they're not working as hard as people who wear 'business' attire. Yes I said dress code... I just left a job because of this exact old school east coast culture. The tipping point for me was that I received an email that was titled "Jeans in Jeopardy". Unless 90% of people or something donated to the cause we were going to loose our month of permission to wear jeans. I found that email patronizing and down right insulting and decided right then and there that I was leaving. If you trust me to write software that is handling business critical procedures... why don't you trust me to dress appropriately in the office? You can have you're dress code, I'm going to spend my time thinking about software instead of dry cleaning my shirt and pants every day.
- badfrog 7y ago> People are afraid to wear jeans at work because it might look "unprofessional" or like they're not working as hard as people who wear 'business' attire. That just sounds like a bad company, not an east coast problem. I've worked at two NYC trading firms, and the typical attire is shorts and sandals.
- rsynnott 7y ago> People are afraid to wear jeans at work because it might look "unprofessional" or like they're not working as hard as people who wear 'business' attire. Is this the case in tech jobs? In ~15 years of working in tech companies I don’t think I’ve ever not worn jeans; I reserve not wearing jeans largely for weddings and funerals.
- Terretta 7y agoNew York business interpersonal style is blunt directness to power its capitalist effectiveness brand. West Coast business interpersonal style is affirmational consensus to protect its “California dreamin’” brand. Of course there are communal collectivist companies in Brooklyn and radical candor competitors in San Diego, but overall the two styles are different enough it can be difficult to integrate as a transplant. // Disclaimer: bi-coastal tech entrepreneur since mid-90’s
- badfrog 7y agoAre you sure that difference is not based more on how old the businesses are than where they're located?
- Terretta 7y agoYes, I’m sure. Same contrasts between 150 year old banks, or between 150 day old startups. // “The walls smell of Slack DMs and conflict avoidance.” — https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview
- willis936 7y agoThe top response is a good reflection of my thoughts after numerous visits to the West Coast. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-major-cultural-differences-between-the-east-coast-and-the-west-coast-of-the-US-with-respect-to-general-behavior-and-lifestyle-business-culture-faux-pas-and-so-forth https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-major-cultural-difference... Edit: these are opinions outside of the context of software development companies.
- woah 7y agoAccording to the answers on Quora, the main difference between the east coast and west coast is that east coasters like to write long diatribes on the superiority of their region.
- willis936 7y agoWhile trying to set up a Kafka trap you have fallen into one yourself. That quora answer was a little uncivil, but not directed at any individuals. Similarly I don’t intend my sharing of it to be an attack on peers. If I’m being told I’m somehow at fault for sharing my thoughts when asked, isn’t that kind of validating my point of view?
- chadaustin 7y agoHi, author here. Sometimes it's just like that. I loved my coworkers. I am (was?) bullish on the company. I thought they were doing a lot of great things. But there was plenty to improve at. It was a confusing experience for myself and ultimately I quit of my own accord and found a job I was happier at.
- ggambetta 7y ago> Dropbox only onboarded new employees every other Tuesday. This left me without health insurance coverage for a week between jobs. Fortunately, none of the kids got hurt that week. This is just insane. I suppose people in the US are so used to this being "the way it is" they're desensitized, but from the outside perspective of the civilized, developed world, this is insane.
- djohnston 7y agoIt's fundamentally flawed, no questions there. But usually you are covered under something called cobra I think.
- souterrain 7y agoYou may optionally purchase coverage under COBRA, typically at the full price, which your employer is required to sell you (assuming the employer meets certain criteria).
- larrywright 7y agoImportantly, you can purchase COBRA after the fact. When I left my last job I inquired about purchasing it because I’d have a gap of a few weeks. I was told by HR that the best thing to do was to hold off on purchasing it. If an event occurred during the gap, such as an ER visit or something similarly expensive, I could purchase COBRA and would have the expense covered.
- sct202 7y agoThere are also options to purchase backdated cobra if there is an emergency and you didn't purchase it initially.
- souterrain 7y agoI made this mistake last year, choosing a start date of the 1st. Normally, this would not have been an issue, but it took my employer several weeks to have their benefit management company activate my benefits. Fortunately, my act of loudly demanding they make the benefits retroactive to the 1st got things sorted very quickly. But, this is because I knew how things worked. I would also recommend to US-persons to not switch jobs around a month boundary. The employer-linked healthcare system is burdensome to both employers and employees. It’s not going to change without a dramatic change to the group insurance model.
- jl6 7y agoI’ve been a happy Dropbox customer for years and I was happy to pay the recent price increase in return for more space... but I can’t help feel that the company has been burning a lot of investment doing random stuff that I don’t care about, while core features go neglected. My pet peeve example being: why does Camera Uploads not upload Live Photos from my iPhone? Google Photos manages to do it.
- rb808 7y ago> Including paternity leave, I took months of paid time off. And when my father passed, my manager gave me all the time I needed to help my mother get her estate in order, and then gradually ease back into a work mindset. Wow a month time off. Isn't that just normal?
- fyp 7y agoI wonder if the IPO related issues mentioned are common. Specifically having half the senior engineers quit because they are now rich while some others become "underleveled" due to stock price falling 50%.
- jiveturkey 7y agoit's a sign of a poorly run company, not a symptom of the IPO per se.
- gravitas 7y ago> So I was shocked to find that running an empty Python unit test at Dropbox took tens of seconds. Worse, when you fixed a bug and landed it, depending on how the daily push went, it might make it to production within a day? Two? Maybe more? Is it just me, or does this seem like an extremely aggressive release mentality and set of expectations? Most places I'm aware of might do 2 or less a week, sometimes once a month. This engineer is complaining it took a day to release some sort of bugfix? Are most engineers and companies in 2019 operating like this, where is their time for a dev and QA cycle first? A unit test is only as good as what you wrote it to catch, real life bugs slip through unit tests all the time.
- idunno246 7y agoEvery Bay Area company I’ve worked for(except 1) does not have QA. It’s expected by the time the dev merges it it’s been appropriately tested and can go straight to prod, so no need to wait. Fewer, smaller releases is generally better when something does go wrong as well, it’s more obvious which change is the problem. The one that did have qa, the devs were incredibly lazy about testing, relying entirely on someone else to make sure it worked. I’d say the overall product was better with qa but the point at which a developer called it done was way worse.
- lawn 7y agoIts quite interesting how different software companies treat their releases. At my job we have major releases twice a year, and patches a couple of times between those.
- sethammons 7y agoWe can have a bug discovered, patched, tested, validated, and deployed same day. If it is small. Usually a bug may or may not make it in this sprint depending on criticality. Then we will fix it in some number of days, qa the next day and deploy that same day. Multiple deploys per week or even day happen on my team.