Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force RTO

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/08/business/grindr-return-to-office-union/index.html

by LinuxBender • 3 years ago

130 161 3 years ago

cnn.com

turnsout• 3 years ago

Let’s play another round of “was it a shadow layoff or just routine incompetence?”

bo0tzz• 3 years ago

It was an union-busting move https://www.advocate.com/business/grindr-union-busting-accus...

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

I'm sure they will testify in court that the decision was completely coincidental.

susanasj2• 3 years ago

it is 100% a union busting move. RTO was announced almost immediately after announcement of the union drive

dclowd99014• 3 years ago

What’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• 3 years ago

this, seems like an easy way to reduce headcount without having to pay severance benefits

mannykannot• 3 years ago

The options are either return to the office or leave with severance benefits. The company probably wants to limit the grounds on which the National Labor Relations Board might get involved - especially if, as is widely suspected, this is covertly a union-busting move.

dclowd99014• 3 years ago

Doesn’t really work like that. An employee can’t be forced to move for work, so at some point the company will have to fire them. That said, companies are _never_ under any obligation to pay severance, just unemployment insurance.

xkcd-sucks• 3 years ago

It is a little surprising that in-office mandates aren't considered constructive dismissal

harperlee• 3 years ago

(RTO is Return To Office, for those like me left wondering)

Insanity2• 3 years ago

Larger 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• 3 years ago

Grindr has astonishingly high salaries.

Insanity2• 3 years ago

Did not know that. I'd say it's not top of mind when people think of "big tech", but that might be my bubble. :)

esafak• 3 years ago

They could band together and start their own dating site.

wsgolfer• 3 years ago

See related discussion from yesterday here [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241

sys425904• 3 years 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...

quacked2• 3 years 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.

blindhippo• 3 years ago

I'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.

lusus_naturae• 3 years ago

So how can you tell who is apathetic and underskilled, but management cannot?

pydry3• 3 years ago

I 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...

tmpz22• 3 years ago

Missing component: when competent execs leave they can poach some of the best people for their new org.

paulcole2• 3 years 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.

sys425904• 3 years ago

Is hiding subpar performance that much easier at home than in an open plan office?

40yearoldman5• 3 years ago

Bingo.

In my experience, anti RTO folks are stacked to 1 actually good employe to about 5 slackers.

I work with a few remote folks today. They are always out of to loop, late to deliver and somehow always have a reason to not be at meetings.

The worst of them before the pandemic were the ones that showed up at 11:30 ate free lunch and was out by 1:30.

While there are genuinely good employees who don’t want RTO, it’s the ones who yell about it the most who are poor performers.

d3ckard• 3 years ago

From my experience, most people who leave do so after finding another position. Those who leave without it, usually feel confident enough they can find another job.

Those that lack that confidence, wait. No point in skipping paychecks and giving up on possible severance when you feel you’re bad.

But believe what you want of course.

insanitybit3• 3 years ago

I've just found that to be the opposite. When someone is out of office their work is really easy to see. You can just look at their contributions. In fact, it's kind of on them to go out of their way to show the work because a lot of the natural "ah yeah I just got that done, that was tough" conversations won't happen.

The people in the office have a farrrr easier time relying on non-work to look good. They can have conversations, build relationships, etc very naturally. They look like they're working so it's just easier for them not to. I can sit at my desk all day reading HN and I look like I'm working, people will assume I must be. If I'm sitting at home all day reading HN, not so much, I'd better have something to show that I got something done.

outworlder5• 3 years ago

As well as the people who aren't pulling their weight and who know that they'll be found out back in the office.

... and just how is this supposed to happen? Don't those people have deadlines? Deliverables? Or did we invent a sensor that requires one's butt to be sitting at the office?

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

Imo It’s easier to pretend to work at the office. Just walk around and chat with coworkers or play ping pong. Unlike remote workers, these workers tend to not be on call all the time.

Both sides of the argument are simultaneously flawed though because we don’t account for one thing: most people work in a mass surveillance environment since everything is connected to the cloud. We know who submitted what, when, and from where. Not to mention telemetry will get better and better. It doesn’t really matter if you work remotely or in office.

Also most sane places have hybrid schedules. I suspect the companies that are forcing RTO are really looking to do a soft layoff.

40yearoldman5• 3 years 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.

wubrr3• 3 years 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.

sys425904• 3 years ago

Let me make another assumption, having options to work somewhere else is likely correlated with having made a good impression on a significant number of other people in your past professional career.

toomuchtodo• 3 years 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.

There is over $120B of enterprise value in remote first or remote only companies. People who want remote want agency and control over their work arrangement, not the ability to slack off. Perhaps reconsider your mental model, assumptions, and the data.

(I own private equity in full remote enterprises, and am a supporter of the operating model based on the results, both financial and worker quality of life)

NoMoreNicksLeft• 3 years ago

What do you mean by "care less about work"?

Do you mean they care less about the business? The two things overlap, but not perfectly. One can care about the business 100%, and be apathetic about the "work".

It might even be true that managers care about the "work" to the detriment of the business.

SoftTalker3• 3 years ago

Agree we would need data. I've seen both sides of this. Some people like WFH because they can totally slack off. Some like it because they can get more done. Some people have options because they have great social skills and know people from their fraternity or other social groups. Some people have options because they are good.

the-smug-one• 3 years ago

Is it a big assumption? "Ease of getting a new job" hopefully does correlate with competence (which I equate with 'good performance' here). It's not saying "people who stay at a job with mandatory RTO must necessarily be bad at their jobs", so I don't see why you decided to insult those of us who enjoy remote work.

pavel_lishin3• 3 years ago

In general people who want remote work care less about work

It's pretty weird to frame someone's care for their family and personal life as an insult.

mullingitover• 3 years ago

Management at Grindr are getting a live demo of the Dead Sea Effect.

area51org9• 3 years ago

TIL about the Dead Sea Effect. I've been talking about the effect for years without realizing it had a name. Thanks!

dclowd99014• 3 years ago

As 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.

Simulacra• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Yeah, 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-h2• 3 years 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.

area51org9• 3 years ago

Ironically, 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.

sph2• 3 years ago

What 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• 3 years ago

"How many time do you need to rewrite your UI, your backend and redesign the logo"

Just one more time.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

funny 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.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

That's what Musk thought about Twitt...er, X. How's that working out?

mrkeen• 3 years ago

All speculation:

* I imagine massive amounts of legal compliance work are required, varying from state to state (internationally).

* Support requests from customers, requiring varying levels of developer time

* working on the matching algorithm

* tempting getting former users back in

* maintaining data analytics pipelines so the CEO has something to ignore in favour of gut feeling.

* and the remaining 170 staff are agile coaches.

WhatsName• 3 years ago

50% of any large tech company are not engineers but people working support processes. Think lawyers, HR, controlling, compliance,...

Now assume a third of the tech half is required to keep stuff running (sys admins, SRE, devops), one third doing the actual developmemt and one third make sure the app is actually aligned with user interests (testing, ui/ux, security)

Split the app teams by platform and you end up with roughly 15 iOS/Android Devs.

sph2• 3 years ago

I still don't know how you keep the schedule of 15 iOS/Android devs full on an app that's pretty much done. How many lines of code are they changing/features are they adding over 8 hours a day on average?

I agree with your breakdown, but what's missing (and not very easily measurable) is that 80% of these 178 people are working at 20% performance. "Working with their hands in their pockets" I like to call it. This is how you keep around 15 mobile devs. Modern office work is a pile of wasted human time and nonsense, enabled by 20 years of free, low-interest money.

insanitybit3• 3 years ago

Do they do advertising in their app? If so that can easily occupy a few teams of engineers at scale, maintaining the bidding and serving systems, among other things.

outworlder5• 3 years ago

What do they do to require 178 people to function?

That's a quite low headcount for such a high profile app, to be honest.

There's more to companies than just developers.

layer8• 3 years ago

Discussed yesterday (250+ comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241

burkaman4• 3 years ago

Headline 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.

ProjectArcturis4• 3 years ago

And 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.

burkaman4• 3 years ago

Yes, 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• 3 years ago

Is this just underhanded layoffs? Like they needed to shrink headcount and didn't want to pay severance?

burkaman4• 3 years ago

The 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.

susanasj2• 3 years ago

CEOs 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.

rchaud2• 3 years ago

CEOs 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.

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

Both 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.

area51org9• 3 years ago

If 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.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

The 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"

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

"Relocate to office"

burkaman4• 3 years ago

Some 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• 3 years 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. 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.

area51org9• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

You can literally solve the housing cost issue if every company guaranteed remote. Live and work anywhere, housing solved.

FredPret• 3 years ago

Layoff-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.

cmrdporcupine3• 3 years ago

It'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.

ProjectArcturis4• 3 years ago

Musk 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.

area51org9• 3 years ago

The thing with C and D players is that while things can appear like they're going just fine, in fact, they tend to slowly and surely inject damage (badly written code, badly designed systems, ad nauseam) that will likely cost the company tons of money.

In other words, penny-wise, pound foolish.

CommanderData• 3 years ago

Companies never see all of their workforce quit. It's a very very rare occurrence, he's taking a safe bet.

area51org9• 3 years ago

You're right. Usually the better people leave, and the people who remain are largely dead weight. Really good strategery there.

ProjectArcturis4• 3 years ago

No, it's retaliation for the employees voting to unionize. Still real dumb.

paulcole2• 3 years ago

A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and apparently D players fire A + B players.

How many people have you ever met who self-identified as a non-A player?

NelsonMinar• 3 years ago

This article has more details on what's happening: 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.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

Interesting 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.

amanj41• 3 years ago

that's absolutely brutal

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

I agree. I gave him the name of a good employment law attorney.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

Infuriating. 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.

no_wizard2• 3 years ago

Workers 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• 3 years ago

Don'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_wizard2• 3 years ago

Can’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• 3 years ago

Interestingly, unions lobby against more government protections, because it lowers the value of what the union is offering to its members.

jononomo• 3 years ago

Sheesh, I've heard of Grindr but I'd be surprised to learn that the company was larger than about two dozen people.

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

[dupe]

ChrisArchitect2• 3 years ago

More discussion yesterday over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421241

carbine• 3 years ago

it's laughable that engineers and product teams wanted to unionize. get real, people.

Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force RTO

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