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If 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 op
by sys42590 3y ago
If 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.
- outworlder 3y ago> 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. This. I have seen teams completely devastated in reorgs that did absolutely nothing but strengthen some manager's position. You don't have to fire anyone, just moving key people and reassigning ownership is sufficient.
- SoftTalker 3y agoI don't think it's "corporate culture" as much as "large org power games" as I've seen the very same thing happen in academia and administration at large schools.
- area51org 3y agoAbsolutely. They'll talk about "culture" and how you need to have an office in order to have it, ignoring the fact that most larger companies have multiple offices—so, what, each office has its own culture or something? More to the point, though: what do they mean by corporate culture, and why do they believe that people need to be in the same room in order to maintain it? I'll bet anything there is no real definition of "corporate culture". If there is, it has nothing to do with where the employees are at any given moment. Yes, I'm saying that "corporate culture" is just a meaningless buzzword thrown around by people who hope you don't stop to wonder what it is they actually mean.
- wrs 3y agoIn my experience, each office does have its own culture to a surprising extent. Maintaining a common corporate culture across different offices is a very hard problem. Probably even harder than doing it in a pure remote company. (And I think corporate culture is as meaningful a term as anything-else culture: shared values and expectations, behavioral norms, jargon, inside jokes…)
- innagadadavida 3y agos/human/bis Bis - butts in seat.
- lusus_naturae 3y agoSo how can you tell who is apathetic and underskilled, but management cannot?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoSeems easy to believe that non-management works directly with the affected people on a daily basis, which gives them much greater insight
- 7thaccount 3y agoVery easy if you're one of the rank and file employees. There is usually 10% of the staff that do 90% of the work and everyone knows who those people are until you go up far enough in the management chain to where the VPs have no idea outside of what their directors and managers tell them which is that everyone is awesome and give us more money.
- paulddraper 3y agoExperience
- quacked 3y agoTo put it simply, I work with my coworkers, and management doesn't. I can tell who solves problems faster, is kinder and more sympathetic, works harder, delivers more, and is requested more often by clients because I'm in the trenches with them, on their email chains, and in their network drives. Conversely, other team members deliver subpar work with worse attitudes, and I have to make up for their slack by doing stuff I shouldn't have to do.
- pydry 3y agoI sometimes wonder what kind of state these people leave the code/docs/infra in. Like, do they try to be conscientious about leaving the company in a good state? or do they leave deliberately misleading handover docs and release some subtly broken code before walking out the door...
- dclowd9901 3y agoI’ve never in my 13 or so years in this industry seen even the most disgruntled person leave anything in an intentionally broken state. Broken due to incompetence though? Plenty.
- meepmorp 3y agoYeah, I've seen people get fired and it actually lessened the amount of work those around them had to do. There's people out there in big and small companies, doing negative work every day.
- paradox460 3y agoI got laid off while working to fix a nasty bug that kept crashing our servers. I never finished or checked in that code, and the corpus of discovery leading to the solution was all ephemeral on my machine, so when I wiped said machine, it went up in smoke. I wasn't deliberately sabotaging anything, and had I been given more notice than a morning video meeting with the office manager before my access was cut, I'd have probably checked in at least my WIP with a good commit message. But I wasn't, so I didn't
- re-thc 3y agoThere are often just no docs.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoIf I were in this position, I would absolutely not sabotage anything. Besides being wildly unprofessional, the people it's going to hurt are my former coworkers and the poor suckers who are hired on to replace me & others. It also opens me up to litigation, or even criminal charges down the line! But I'm also not exactly going to be excited to do a full brain data dump. At my current role, I try to document everything as well as I can; if I were in this situation, I certainly wouldn't go back through and make sure I didn't miss anything. You get what you get, and you don't get upset.
- paulcole 3y ago> it's the people with options to work somewhere better who are leaving. As well as the people who aren't pulling their weight and who know that they'll be found out back in the office.
- sys42590 3y agoIs hiding subpar performance that much easier at home than in an open plan office?
- outworlder 3y agoNo it isn't. You should still have deliverables and those don't really change no matter where you are.
- re-thc 3y agoOther way around.
- michaelt 3y agoIf someone is supposed to be spending 8 hours reviewing a proposal in detail, but they instead rubber stamp it after a brief look and head out to the golf course for the rest of the day that's pretty much undetectable. Especially if 99% of proposals are OK. Unless you're the kind of micro-manager who records mouse movements per minute, demands webcams always be on, or duplicates employees work just in case they missed something. Obviously for other sorts of work, the same behaviour can be much more detectable.
- sys42590 3y agohttps://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ could help solving the reviewing a proposal problem.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoShouldn’t there be a second person checking the work, at least every now and then?
- 40yearoldman 3y ago> Having such options is likely correlated with good performance. That is a fairly big assumption without actual data. If we are going to play that game. In general people who want remote work care less about work and often are average or below average workers and are no stranger to looking for new jobs.
- wubrr 3y ago> In general people who want remote work care less about work and often are average or below average workers and are no stranger to looking for new jobs. That is a fairly big assumption without actual data. It's funny how many of the RTO companies (like Amazon) boast their data-driven approach, but when it comes to backing up their RTO mandate with actual data they're completely silent and even shun/mute employees that ask for this data. Contrast this with their 'data-driven' claims of increased productivity due to remote work during covid.
- insanitybit 3y agoThat's their point.
- wubrr 3y agoThere were many studies during covid that concluded remote employees are more effective [1] I don't really put much trust in these studies, nor the studies that claim the opposite, but it's pretty obvious to me that both the WFH and RTO mandates have nothing to do with worker productivity. We've witnessed record levels of hiring at tech companies during the most remote working conditions ever. I've been in calls with higher level leadership where they essentially admit they have no objective data to track worker productivity. And I've witnessed great engineers, who've received nothing but great performance reviews and promotions during their WFH stints being fired for low productivity because their manager wants to have good RTO stats. [1] https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productivity https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...
- 3y ago
- mullingitover 3y agoManagement at Grindr are getting a live demo of the Dead Sea Effect.
- area51org 3y agoTIL about the Dead Sea Effect. I've been talking about the effect for years without realizing it had a name. Thanks!
- dclowd9901 3y agoAs someone who’s been at companies with far less severe exoduses, it was incredibly demoralizing seeing engineers I considered to be “very good” leaving the company. I always looked at it as the canary dying in the coal mine. I can’t imagine seeing fully half the staff departing.