Considering dropbox is not facing some economic recession outside of its control we can only blame the CEO's incompetence.
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?
Probably the part where they very directly attributed the layoff to mismanagement.
> We’ve heard from many of you that our organizational structure has become overly complex, with excess layers of management slowing us down.
> [We're] designing a flatter, more efficient team structure overall.
If it's "just a bet" and not mismanagement, then we should tell people that, shouldn't we?
The reality is that these bets are only bets for the people getting hired/laid off, and they don't even know they are betting in the first place. Even worse because we're not talking about simply losing money here. Losing a job is many times a life changing event in real people's lives. It's not like someone betting on a stock.
That's why there should be consequences for the ones making those decisions. They get the most rewards, but none of the punishment. How's that fair in any shape or form?
Employees have responsibility to due diligence their employers.
But at the end of the day, employment is at will. It's a risk we all take.
Do you genuinely believe that the record profits are due to the layoffs, and not just because we just lucked out to enter a new bubble?
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.
Lmao what? Outside of being absolutely skint and unable to make payroll, that's pretty much the only reason to fire someone (I mean other than misconduct, which is also a type of incompetence)
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.
It occurs to me that there is no failure of performance a CEO can produce and be held responsible for. Are these CEOs really so irreplaceable that when they bet incorrectly they can't be replaced?
20% of employees have been fired. The CEO directly cited mismanagement as the cause. And yet, its impossible to fire him because "its a learning experience" or "think of the upside!".
A CEO being fired does not mean the company falls into the abyss. The company still exists and can hire a new CEO. I'm certain there are plenty of fools more than willing to risk the livelihoods of 20% of Dropbox's staff in exchange for a mansion in Miami.
That’s the thing though, another comment nailed this perfectly. If they made a +EV decision to hire more people, but the preverbal roulette wheel landed on 00, maybe it’s not a bad bet that they should be fired for.
The explicit reason given was "economic headwinds" and bad organizational structure. If in your role as CEO you have left the company in a poor position to handle normal, cyclical slowdowns then you are a failure. If in your role as CEO you have produced an org chart which burns money and slows progress then you are a failure. You should be replaced. Period.