Dropbox plans on cutting roughly 20 percent of its global workforce.
Like other big tech companies’ layoffs over the past few years, Dropbox’s senior management blamed larger economic factors for the decision, including “softening demand and macro headwinds in our core business,” along with “excess layers of management.”
“As we've shared over the last year, we're in a transitional period as a company,” Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston wrote in a statement. “Our FSS business has matured, and we've been working to build our next phase of growth with products like Dash. However, navigating this transition while maintaining our current structure and investment levels is no longer sustainable.”
Cutting away at management has developed into a full-blown trend among tech CEOs. In February 2023, for example, Meta reportedly asked managers to become “individual contributors” or leave the company. “I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” Zuckerberg said during a company all-hands meeting, according to the Command Line newsletter at the time.
Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shifted his focus to a similar culling. “We’re asking [teams] to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of Q1 2025,” Jassy wrote in a memo posted online. “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.”
In theory, an organization filled with individual contributors and relatively few managers can allow for faster product ideation and building—allowing larger companies to “move like a startup,” as the management cliché goes. As smaller companies follow the leads of Meta and Amazon, and take a critical look at whether they really need so many middle managers, it’s well worth it for managers to take a look at their current skill-sets and potentially consider a shift to tech specialization.
