Nice, round number. I wonder if that was a carefully thought out coincidence, or they fiddled with the numbers a bit until they got the right payroll savings then rounded it to the nearest 100. I suspect the latter - when I see a nice, round number of people being fired it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".
Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.
Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
The idea that some sort of complex algorithm should be used indicates a misunderstanding of what business management actually consists of.
>Counterpoint is that there is nothing wrong with a round number and it is perfectly compatible with setting appropriate resource targets for corporate goals.
Yes, in this case the corporate goal is to fire 500 people as a sacrifice to the finance gods.
If the goal was 'refocus strategy', you'd probably want to actually assess your business and determine who is no longer necessary, and you would doubtfully end up at a nice round number
It isn't a driver of the decision. Who gets fired is a detail that gets worked out after the fact.
Leadership, based on their understanding and information make the decision to cut 500 and create a mandate to make it so. Then management is forced to decide who gets the axe.
It would basically be impossible to drive the decision the other way. You can't asses every individual for necessity. What would the threshold even be? The threshold depends on the number of people you want to fire.
There is no super computer that can calculate the outcome from firing \ 499 workers vs 500
There is a threshold of number of employees let go (maybe at location or total, I dunno) where they have to do certain things, called the WARN act. Companies aren't putting out press releases about layoffs because they want to.
The article says “about 16%”. I don’t think the number in the article should be taken as an exact count.
> it makes me think that they decided "how many people do we need to sacrifice to appease the finance gods" rather than "how many of these roles are really needed to achieve the goals we set ourselves".
Any big layoff involves, or is possibly the result of, shifting goals. Company goals change, especially as changing economics makes them more or less possible.
When one number is given as exact, and the other prefixed with "about", your intuition is that the exact number is not in fact an exact count? That is very odd.
500 is also a businessy-salesy round number, compared to 512 which is what an engineer would have considered a round number. Gives some clues as to where the number came from.
Round number (whichever base is rounded off to) also shows it wasn't some company-wide movement to cut some fat but someone come up with the number beforehand and told underlings to make it happen
Of course you decide on a number first. Do you think the CEO has any idea what the names of all their peons are? Much less which ones would be reasonsble to get rid of.
Exactly this. Unless the sum of payroll cut roughly equals the increase of interest payments in their debt load, I call absolute BS on the "challenging market dynamics".
They're just following the trend, or listening to the ridiculous demands of investors following the trend.
Anyway, good luck to the former Dropboxers, I hope they land on their feet.