> What is management exactly doing during the time they went from 1 excess person to 500?
It is usually not the case that these people are standing around and doing nothing. It is more that they are working on initiatives and projects which the company is discontinuing now.
When the company has a lot of money investors expect them to spend some of it in finding new directions and opportunities. It's not all just spent on keeping the lights on, and the servers humming.
If they don't do this people in 3 years will be asking "What has Dropbox been doing all these years?"
If they are doing it right you are just amazed by the steady trickle of new features and services, and improvements which keep the company relevant in the years to come.
Also, factors like quality, maintainability, performance, etc are open ended and hard to measure. So teams tend to just keep improving them. Some amount is critical, some is important, some is nice to have and some is just excess.
Sometimes I think that tech world has been after "growth" for too long. Instead accepting that at some point companies are reasonably mature. After which they can do more incremental development with lot less head count growth.
That’s such a naive take. For the past 5 years at least these layoffs are not about particular projects being discontinued or even improving the bottom line. This is about how people are expendable and their priority is investors.
It is usually not the case that these people are standing around and doing nothing. It is more that they are working on initiatives and projects which the company is discontinuing now.
When the company has a lot of money investors expect them to spend some of it in finding new directions and opportunities. It's not all just spent on keeping the lights on, and the servers humming.
If they don't do this people in 3 years will be asking "What has Dropbox been doing all these years?"
If they are doing it right you are just amazed by the steady trickle of new features and services, and improvements which keep the company relevant in the years to come.