Dropbox Reviews

3.9

68% would recommend to a friend

(1,618 total reviews)
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Drew Houston

52% approve of CEO

36% positive business outlook

Dropbox has an employee rating of 3.9 out of 5 stars, based on 1,618 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Dropbox employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

2K reviews
2.0
10 Feb 2015

Problematic company culture

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

More than generous compensation and perks.

Cons

Everyone at Dropbox spends a lot of time telling themselves and each other how great it is to work there, and not enough time making it a great place to work. - Whenever Dropbox makes a public announcement, employees are encouraged to the point of cajoled into leaving positive comments and favorable reviews on public forums with personal accounts ("Don't forget to upvote the announcement on Hackernews! But don't do it on the office wifi because that can trigger a spam alert...", etc). - Troubling company value: We not I. This means that you should put Dropbox before your own personal wellbeing. Employees that make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the company are deified at the all hands meeting. - Cross-functional communication or collaboration is effectively impossible without the involvement of a manager or three, as everyone is worried only about completing their own sprint goals. The "start-up mindset" is useless for a 1000+ person corporate entity. - Interviews and hire decisions are conducted in a very haphazard and non-transparent way, with more than a few interviewees mysteriously turned away after a consensus "hire" decision. - If you're not a 22 year old, male, Stanford/MIT/Carnegie Mellon grad or a Facebook/Google alumn, prepare to feel very out of place and marginalized. - Good work goes unacknowledged unless you are a relentless self-promoter or part of the in-crowd. With respect to code, quantity counts more than quality. - Working hours regularly extend late into the night. I once tried to hold a 10:30 am meeting, and was told by a manager that this was "ridiculously early". Another time, I came into the office around 11 PM to pick up something that I had forgotten, and it was half full with people working and playing video games. - Consequently, important business decisions get made during non-standard business hours, so when you come into work at 9 AM, you'll be greeted with an inbox full of new decisions, priorities and tasks. - Heavy drinking is commonplace at most official and non-official company functions, and opting-out is seen as being "not part of the team". When many of your coworkers/managers end up at a bachelor party in Vegas, you will definitely hear about it at your next sprint planning meeting. - Gossip-y. Again, if you're not in the in-crowed, you will be at its mercy. -- This extends to HR. Do not share anything with HR that you don't want your manager and coworkers to also know. - Rampant entitlement among employees. At dinner, one can frequently overhear such gems as "I'm too good for MUNI" and "Well it's easier for women to get hired, so that's probably why she was hired and not X (male person)". Summarily, I felt that my career prospects would be limited as I was not part of the in-crowd, and unwilling to put in 60 hour weeks among less-than-desirable company. Ultimately though, Dropbox will continue to make buckets of money despite its troubling culture.

3.0
7 Aug 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Benefits and pay are truly excellent. There are generous stipends for transit, wellness, learning and development (books and conferences), and others. Dental, vision, and health are all covered. There is donation matching up to a $1000 per year, unlimited volunteer and paid time off (which, if you're daring enough to request, truly seems unlimited—I have yet to hear of someone's PTO request being declined), and if you're in an office with a Tuck Shop, world-class food served every day. You can gift Dropbox space to friends and family. The culture values kindness and open-mindedness to a fault, and teams are given massive autonomy to work and ship as they see fit. This means you can have very different experiences depending on your team and manager. This also means if you see something broken, you're generally given the OK to go and fix it if you have the will. There are company events throughout the year, including team offsites (I've been hiking, on a cruise, to an escape room, and to countless dinners and happy hours), guest speakers, parties, etc. Dropbox seems to spare no expense on events and travel, although I've heard it was even more extravagant in the past.

Cons

Dropbox lies squarely in the "ruinous empathy" quadrant of business culture. Promotions are measured by the number of friends you make, not the results you achieve, which results in decision making by committee and projects that lag on for months at a time because nobody is willing to take ownership or say "no." At the same time, projects spanning 6+ months of research, design, and engineering can be derailed by the opinion of a single manager in the pursuit of "perfect" rather than "better". Staff lack a clear vision for Dropbox. Milquetoast strategy updates and new opportunities receive endless bravado but when it comes to actual execution there's little follow-through. Meanwhile, the core Dropbox product continues to suffer from longstanding problems like convoluted sharing and horrendously slow performance. We use Dropbox Paper, our own docs offering, for absolutely everything—from project management to calendaring to to-do lists to meeting notes. What results is total chaos. There is no sane way to organize docs, which get produced at an astounding rate: product managers regularly compose dozens of new Paper docs in any given week. There is no way we would organize ourselves this way if we weren't so committed to using and abusing our own tool. Simple bugfixes languish in backlogs for months or years without resolution. Abysmal developer tools and nonexistent analytics slow the company to a crawl. We talk a big talk about "designing a more enlightened way of working" (corporate thinkpieces go up on the blog every few weeks) but how can we hope to improve work for others when our own house is a mess? All these issues aren't new, and they're well-known to anyone who has been in the organization for longer than a year. We will talk about them and collectively agree they need to be addressed, but for whatever reason, nothing ever seems to happen.

avatar
Dropbox Response
7y
We appreciate you taking the time to write a review and share your suggestions for improvement. You’re absolutely right about needing to start with ourselves when it comes to making work better and more efficient. We do recognize that more needs to be done and that we are no longer a start up, but we still have a lot of growing to do. Understandably it can be frustrating that we haven’t already figured everything out, but we’re up for the challenge, and glad to have talent like you, passionate about coming up with solutions to propel us forward. We know the company appreciates your feedback, so if you’re open to it, feel free to reach out to talent-feedback@dropbox.com.
2.0
2 Jun 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free meals are excellent. Most individual contributors that joined the company during the last year are technically talented and pleasant to work with.

Cons

Due to the "Peter principle" in action - the workload is heavy in most departments due to high employee attrition. There is a juvenile (unprofessional) social culture (7th grade) that feels more like Sesame Street and less like a business. It was hard to take this place (and some leaders) seriously. One example: Unrestricted access to free alcohol at work combined with the 7th grade social culture is a bad combination.

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Glassdoor has 1,835 Dropbox reviews submitted anonymously by Dropbox employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Dropbox is right for you.