Most big tech companies did mass layoffs in the past few years. They are now fully recovered and posting record profits this week all with the same leadership. You are saying they are incompetent and someone else could have navigated this better?

People make mistakes all the time, hopefully it's mistakes they learn from. You can't simply fire someone for being incompetent, unless it's so bad and beyond the pale.

I don't really get why layoffs mean that the company was not managed correctly.

Let's say you believe you have an opportunity that will double the value of the company, with a 30% probability, or cost the company 10% of it's value. This means it has an expected value of +21%. This is pretty good, and exactly the sort of thing shareholders want from their management. So you increase headcount and pursue the opportunity.

In the 70% scenario when that doesn't work, you have to downsize. Failure is not just possible, it's probable. That doesn't mean that the CEO mismanaged...they may have, I don't know the Dropbox details. But in the scenario where they haven't mismanaged, what do you want? Do you want companies to never take these risks in the first place?

What if managing the company correctly requires hundreds of people losing their jobs?

I understand the anger in this scenario as employees, but I don’t think doing layoffs means leadership is clearly incompetent. Running a company is hard.

Doing layoffs definitely says something about the company’s values and current standing, but I don’t think it necessarily means the CEO is bad.

Yes, fired. Just like a head coach of a sports team.

It's always amazed me how much leeway and clemency leadership gets. I worked at a company that was always fairly intentional about their performance review process being a meat grinder, and they also did something that didn't look nearly dissimilar enough to good ole microsoft forced curve / stack ranking.

So if you were an IC and were on a project that failed (or even just didn't succeed enough), God help you. Many folks just quit when they saw a project going sideways, or tried to escape/transfer. Alternatively, people would report green statuses and hope someone else fell over first so they wouldn't be the root-cause.

Obviously this caused many problems. It was very hard to execute projects with lots of people or teams, and/or that took a long (>3mo) time. It came to a head when finally a major initiative missed another deadline "just barely" and it finally tripped circuit breakers and someone went in and did a full Inquisition. Yeah no the project was f'd and they basically just gave up ("pivoted") to an adjacent goal. Their official diagnosis/RCA was "people were too scared to report red, so everyone prettied up their status reports a bit, and that was compounded by each roll-up status report also prettying up the status.

Literally no leadership changes happened as a result of this. Then I got laid off. (Unrelated, just the big layoffs of 22. I was not directly involved in this, I was in big data and this was all happening in the main product infra stuff).

So yeah. Your project fails? Bye. But your f'd up performance grinder culture causes literally hundreds of people to behave so out-of-alignment with the actual company goals? Nah man stick around for 2 more years and leave at your leisure over some other petty squabble.

So head count can only ever go up in a company, never down, regardless of circumstances?

I expect interns to learn and CEOs to lead. If your decisions lead to mass layoffs then you need to lead the way to the unemployment line.