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Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force RTO
- Simulacra 3y agoI think a trend is increasing: employers are valuing in-office employees more than wfh. I predict over time a lot of wfh people will be isolated and slowly pushed out.
- commandlinefan 3y agoYeah, it seems like the hope here is that the "good ones" will bail, forcing employers to re-evaluate their RTO plans and conclude that they have to offer WFH if they hope to retain their best and brightest. The fallacy in that line of reasoning is that they've never been able to really figure out who their best and brightest were to begin with (even assuming that those are the ones who are insisting on WFH). The only thing they actually measure is what they can easily count like number of commits, meeting deadlines, and hours physically spent in their line of sight. Eventually the protesters will have to pay rent and buy groceries, so they'll get in line and return to office for another employer - after salaries have dropped significantly. It was a valiant effort, but probably for nought.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> The fallacy in that line of reasoning is that they've never been able to really figure out who their best and brightest were to begin with It would be nice, but they don't have to actually figure out what's going on. They just have to go bankrupt when all the good performers leave. (Edit: Actually they don't have to go bankrupt outright; it suffices for them to have a worse product that results in worse revenue that results in them not being able to pay for as large as share of the labor market.) > Eventually the protesters will have to pay rent and buy groceries, so they'll get in line and return to office for another employer Or, they'll go get a perfectly good job got a company not affected by this madness.
- area51org 3y agoIronically, the in-office employees tend to be the dead weight, just people who pretend to look busy, stand around and bullshit, and otherwise just waste time. Meanwhile, the WFH employees, who prize productivity and accomplishment over office pretense, will simply move on to companies that are more interested in making money than power games.
- superduty 3y ago[flagged]
- turnsout 3y agoLet’s play another round of “was it a shadow layoff or just routine incompetence?”
- bo0tzz 3y agoIt was an union-busting move https://www.advocate.com/business/grindr-union-busting-accusations https://www.advocate.com/business/grindr-union-busting-accus...
- sidewndr46 3y agoI'm sure they will testify in court that the decision was completely coincidental.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoDoesn't matter what they testify, the burden of proof is on them at this point to prove they would have done this anyway, independent of the unionization effort. Which, given that it was suggested to them by the union-busters they hired, is going to be difficult. The test for such a burden shift is 1) effected employees took a protected action 2) the company knew about it 3) the employer didn't approve of the protected activity. 1 and 2 are trivially proven, 3 is proven by the company hiring union busters.
- susanasj 3y agoit is 100% a union busting move. RTO was announced almost immediately after announcement of the union drive
- dclowd9901 3y agoWhat’s funny is that the calculus is still the same: your best people are going to leave and your worst are going to stay. Breathtakingly poor foresight.
- ren_engineer 3y agothis, seems like an easy way to reduce headcount without having to pay severance benefits
- harperlee 3y ago(RTO is Return To Office, for those like me left wondering)
- Insanity 3y agoLarger companies like Meta and Amazon will get away with this because salaries are competitive and there is “brand recognition”. Smaller companies following in a their footsteps will have a harder time doing so (I hope).
- selectodude 3y agoGrindr has astonishingly high salaries.
- Insanity 3y agoDid not know that. I'd say it's not top of mind when people think of "big tech", but that might be my bubble. :)
- alkibiades 3y agoyou’d have to compensate me extra to have that name on my resume
- tuckerman 3y agoI’m curious, are there parts of their tech stack or the execution of the product that would embarrass you?
- rsynnott 3y agoThe execution of the product maybe should embarrass them. It's gotten better, but it's always been a bit on the flakey side (read a message, and it might dismiss the iOS message indicator, it might not, who can say, for instance). Romeo (formerly GayRomeo), with AFAIK a much smaller team, is far more solid, but only used regionally (these apps tend to be virtually local monopolies, for whatever reason; every country has one or at most two non-niche ones in common use). Mind you, there's a bit of a tradition of this. Gaydar, which was popular in the same space in the pre-smartphone era (it never really made the transition to phones well) always felt a bit held together with duct-tape, and had a particularly unique approach to preventing SQL injection; it simply replaced all single-quotes with backticks...
- esafak 3y agoThey could band together and start their own dating site.
- wsgolfer 3y agoSee related discussion from yesterday here [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241
- sys42590 3y agoIf a company enforces RTO or other policies making many employees unhappy, it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving. Having such options is likely correlated with good performance. So Grindr probably took a significant hit in the average performance per employee as well. And attracting new talent with a shitty work from home policy won't be easy either. Of course there might be more to this story than what one can extract from the CNN article, there might be e.g. some cost pressure from going public some months ago...
- quacked 3y ago> it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving This happened at the last place I worked. It was so incredible to watch it happen. First the COO took off, and her favorite VP (who hired me) took off as well. Pretty much immediately my line manager, the 3 top-performing engineers in our division, and 4 of the 6 top-performing project managers on my team left as well. I left shortly after. I think the really crazy thing was watching how the remaining management literally lacked the competence to understand what was going on, or to even differentiate between people on our team and in our division in terms of who was good at their job and conscientious about client interactions vs. who was apathetic and under-skilled.
- tmpz22 3y agoMissing component: when competent execs leave they can poach some of the best people for their new org.
- blindhippo 3y agoI've noticed that middle management and up don't really see humans or even differentiate between them except during compensation assessment (and even then, barely). It's all just a numbers/headcount game to them. Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure. In bigger companies, this management layer is more concerned about creating domains of influence or "kingdoms" then they are in actually delivering value for the company. Not sure if this is just normal human organizational behavior, or something has gone off the rails in corporate culture - but it is what it is. It's happening at my company as well, and particularly in my own org. I'm one of the people leaving for better opportunities away from politics and silly RTO mandates lacking any semblance of data grounding.
- sph 3y agoWhat do they do to require 178 people to function? I have never used their app, but I have absolutely no idea what 178 full time, 40h/wk workers do at a niche dating app company. Not picking on them in particular, you can ask the same question to pretty much any tech company. How many time do you need to rewrite your UI, your backend and redesign the logo to keep them busy day in and day out?
- neerajk 3y ago"How many time do you need to rewrite your UI, your backend and redesign the logo" Just one more time.
- whalesalad 3y agofunny thing is the app has not changed in like 100 years. at this point it could probably be maintained by like a team of 5.
- dylan604 3y agoThat's what Musk thought about Twitt...er, X. How's that working out?
- RankingMember 3y agoPeople underestimate how many are holding things together/putting out fires behind the scenes until those people are gone and the seemingly-reliable app is now a smoking wreck.
- whalesalad 3y agotwitter is arguably more complex than grindr lol. hate to sound like a cliche but grindr could be recreated in a weekend with rails or django. pretty sure the app is a webview. it's truly stuck in 2012-2014. the hard part of that app is just the scale... but a handful of servers running elixir/erlang would handle it without breaking a sweat.
- 3y ago
- cosmotic 3y ago[flagged]
- layer8 3y agoDiscussed yesterday (250+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- burkaman 3y agoHeadline undersells it a little bit, as the article explains this wasn't "return to the office you used to work at", this was "move across the country immediately or quit". Grindr leadership hired the most prominent union-busters in the country to design this strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littler_Mendelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littler_Mendelson.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoAnd it wasn't just because the execs wanted butts in seats, or to do layoffs without calling them that. It was direct retaliation for the workers voting to unionize two weeks ago.
- burkaman 3y agoYes, the details of the plan make this clear - they ordered all engineers to Chicago and all of the product and design team to LA or SF. Nobody without ulterior motives would mandate that teams who work incredibly closely together should be in different timezones 2000 miles apart. The only explanation for such an obviously terrible plan is that they looked at where everyone was living and maximized how many potential union members they could force out.
- tootie 3y agoIs this just underhanded layoffs? Like they needed to shrink headcount and didn't want to pay severance?
- burkaman 3y agoThe NLRB will decide for sure, but the timing and the involvement of Littler Mendelson make it incredibly unlikely that this wasn't a direct response to the union. The union drive was announced on July 20th and this relocation policy was instituted less than 3 weeks later, with no warning before that, and no other response to the union. Employees were given two weeks to decide whether to move or quit.
- susanasj 3y agoCEOs will literally waste millions of dollars by losing half their staff rather than recognize a union. Let's not pretend this is some smart stealth merit-based layoff play by the CEO: the people leaving are likely the ones with options, and many of them have been working remote for years now. They are unwilling to relocate their entire lives for Grindr. The RTO announcement came out soon after announcement of the union drive.
- rchaud 3y agoCEOs are responsible for the stock price. There’s no faster way to juice those numbers than by announcing thousands of layoffs at the drop of a hat. Unionization makes that a lot more tricky.
- chaostheory 3y agoBoth sides of the RTO dispute are missing one thing: most people work in a mass surveillance environment. We know who submitted what, when, and from where. Not to mention telemetry will get better and better with improving AI. It doesn’t really matter if you work remotely or in office. (I guess for now chatting with coworkers and playing ping pong in the office isn’t tracked yet.) Both have pros and cons which is why most sane places have hybrid schedules to get the benefit of both and limit the cons of both work styles. I suspect the companies that are forcing RTO are really looking to do a soft layoff. What it tells me is that the company is facing financial difficulties.
- area51org 3y agoIf you don't know who's getting their jobs done and who is not, you don't have an employee problem—you have a management problem.
- jononomo 3y agoSheesh, I've heard of Grindr but I'd be surprised to learn that the company was larger than about two dozen people.
- Aurornis 3y agoThe R in RTO is for "return". Unless I'm missing something, these employees were hired remote from the start and Grindr later decided that they needed to move across the country to newly-assigned offices. This isn't a normal RTO story. This is a company that hired remote-first and then demanded that all of those employees relocate, often across the country. Even if they wanted to continue working at the company, perhaps even in a local office, moving across the country is always going to have a high attrition rate. This isn't really "RTO". It's "relocate or your fired"
- paulddraper 3y ago"Relocate to office"
- burkaman 3y agoSome employees also already lived in a city with one of the "hub" offices, but were told that their particular team would be in a different hub, so they'd have to move anyway. They sent engineering to Chicago and product and design to LA/SF - a deliberately terrible organizational decision that was probably calculated to force the highest possible number of potential union members to quit.
- ymck 3y agoIf there is anything that can actually get a tech worker unionization effort going, it's going to be the back and forth on these RTO policies. Folks have tried in the past around non-competes, or equity tomfoolery, but this is people's lives, family, kids schooling, etc. We know WFH works, if you spend the time to make it work, and upsetting folks lives doesn't make for positive employee relations.
- area51org 3y ago> If there is anything that can actually get a tech worker unionization effort going, it's going to be the back and forth on these RTO policies. I have nothing to add, but I wanted to say this is a really good point. If nothing else could persuade me to join or help create a union, it would be these brain-damaged RTO initiatives.
- lsmeducation 3y agoYou can literally solve the housing cost issue if every company guaranteed remote. Live and work anywhere, housing solved.
- FredPret 3y agoLayoff-by-RTO. The dumbest move a CEO could make. Now all the smartest people have quit, and the most desperate half of your staff stuck around. A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and apparently D players fire A + B players.
- CommanderData 3y agoCompanies never see all of their workforce quit. It's a very very rare occurrence, he's taking a safe bet.
- area51org 3y agoYou're right. Usually the better people leave, and the people who remain are largely dead weight. Really good strategery there.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoIt's only "dumb" from the perspective that you and I think that the work we and others do requires some special magic and that companies like this really need the A/B players. I think Musk "showed" that it's "possible" (in the short term) to just purge and get by with C or D players -- plus the occasional True Believer -- and still survive. Let's be honest that most companies... what they're doing... is not magic. And their CEOs are likely aware that following a Google-like "hiring the smartest people" strategy along with the $$ that goes with that may not be what they need. And during economic contractions, short-termist thinking takes often over. So here we are. But I do think in the long run, yes, it's poisonous. But out of the ashes of that come the next A-player companies.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoMusk showed that if you fire a lot of your engineers, you very quickly start accumulating tech problems. In his case, it led to the absurd "tweet throttling" policy which opened the door for strategic competitors like Threads.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoThis article has more details on what's happening: https://www.wired.com/story/grindrs-return-to-office-ultimatum-gutted-a-uniquely-queer-space-in-tech/ https://www.wired.com/story/grindrs-return-to-office-ultimat... The key thing here is Grindr leaderships changed its policy right after employees tried to unionize. There's an active unfair labor practice case.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoInteresting related story of a friend at Amazon. He has relocated to his home town during covid to care for his ailing mother. He was informed recently he needed to return to seattle or be let go. He left his mother, moved his family, and returned to seattle. Two days after he relocated, they laid him and his whole team off.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoInfuriating. Just another reason why in the US, in the absence of any real labor laws with teeth, you must be absolutely mercenary with your views towards work.
- amanj41 3y agothat's absolutely brutal
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI agree. I gave him the name of a good employment law attorney.
- no_wizard 3y agoWorkers should push congress for legal protections around hired work status. Additionally: we all talk about climate change and helping the world yet government policy is ambivalent or an impediment on WFH. How much pollution are we allowing in society with these RTO mandates? We are fools for not capitalizing on laws that protect WFH
- orochimaaru 3y agoDon't expect anything from the government. I'm pretty sure the government is heavily pushing RTO to rescue the CRE market. Think about it. Until about February of 2023 everything was fine, remote hiring was still moving ahead. Suddenly, everyone decides remote isn't productive and the most productive you're going to be is 3 days in office. Every company, everywhere suddenly has the same realization.
- no_wizard 3y agoCan’t depend on a government you don’t interact with. We as a sufficiently large enough voting block could with sufficient pressure get something passed. We should’ve been working on this in 2021/2022 though
- Nifty3929 3y agoInterestingly, unions lobby against more government protections, because it lowers the value of what the union is offering to its members.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion yesterday over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241
- superduty 3y ago[flagged]
- carbine 3y agoit's laughable that engineers and product teams wanted to unionize. get real, people.