That's a weird way of saying "grindr found a way to lay off half its staff without having to pay severance"
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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This should honestly be the top comment, most companies appear to be using RTO as a means of doing mass layoffs without the negative PR hit.
Exactly right - this is a thinly veiled excuse for a planned large scale workforce reduction sidestepping some of the normal repercussions.
What I find most interesting here is that WFH is essentially a benefit (a big one) at this point, and they just eliminated a huge benefit. That usually has the effect of causing some of your greatest talent to walk - and leaving behind those people who either don't care about the benefit (there may be some, but I think this number is small) or don't immediately have the hireability to resign and go for greener pastures.
The tradeoff for grindr is that it'll make them temporarily look better on paper, but the loss of talent will probably hurt them in the long run. If there's one thing that seems to be true of modern capitalism, it's that companies are more than willing to fuck their futures over some perceived short term gains.
Grindr isn't the only company doing this. I'll be interested to see how this works out for all the employers using this same tactic.
how did we get to the point where a gay hookup app is doing evil corporate schemes and attrition
Because once the firm is big enough where the decision-maker doesn't personally know the people they're laying off, it almost immediately turns into this. The severance pay and unemployment of 80 software developers is millions of dollars, enough for even people who are normal and nice to the people they know to look the other way and say it was for the good of the company.
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Right. This produces the opposite result of what a layoff usually obtains, retaining talented key personnel while cutting the chaff. That's why I'm not sure layoffs were the actual goal.
RTO itself isn't negative PR?
Less negative than 'Grindr lays off half its staff due to economic troubles'
Depends on your audience. Potential employees will hate RTO and fear bad financial news, customers likely won't care about either, shareholders don't really care about RTO but will jump ship with bad financial news
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I don't think that's entirely the case though. With layoffs you remove the positions that the company no longer needs, or can't sustain. With this strategy they're just randomly losing half the staff. You wouldn't lay off your chief software architect, or the only guy who knows how your database works, or the account manager who will take all of your vendors with them when they leave. This will cause enormous hardship for the company if the wrong people left.
I suppose they could have done a bunch of mandatory surveys first, asking employees how they felt about a return to the office and carefully monitoring the responses from key personnel, even preemptively mandating documentation or hand-off of responsibilities. That's incredibly nefarious though if that's what they did. That might even border on illegal.
You're taking them at their word that all hands are required back. It is zero effort for them to carve out exceptions for key staff -- or literally any group or individual they want to please -- while still bleating about 'come back to the office or be fired' to the press and everyone else. Corporate heads talking out of both sides of their mouth is the norm, not the exception.
They did that to me. I'm in IT in a 'critical' (read - too expensive to rehire for) role for a large company doing forced RTO. I'm the only one on the team in my state, and not near any remaining offices, because they closed my building during COVID. My boss knew I was going to walk if they tried to force me to move, so they carved out an exception for me and I'm still WFH full time while the rest of my team has to go to the office 2 days a week minimum. The whole thing is toxic and destructive to morale. I'm trying to finagle a way to get the severance package because I want out of here before everything finishes circling the drain.
That's a good point.
Ah the Thanos snap approach to firing.
I can't agree at all. We do attrition based staff reduction all the time. Years upon years of it. Is it smart and planned? No. Do we survive anyway? Sure.
They're not losing clients over this so they'll be fine if they're less efficient for a while.
Agreed with this, if it's an attrition play it's an incredibly incompetent one. I'd argue there's reason to believe you'd lose the senior employees that you'd want to keep.
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I'm not sure about anyone who was hired before WFH, but generally, a substantial change to job duties or location is considered constructive dismissal. ie, it's legally the same as being fired without cause. That might be eligible for severance and definitely for unemployment.
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Serves them right. When your product is completely virtual/ digital, there's no real reason to be in the office other than "cOLlAboRAtioN"
I'm sure they'll find plenty of top tier new engineers who will take a position at Grindr instead of literally any other job that offers full time WFH support 🙄
Wonder which executive got annoyed that they went into the office, they noticed no one else was suffering in-office with them and this is the outcome.
Hypothetically, if I was called in to an empty office during a pandemic while the top brass worked from the comfort of home, I would absolutely work quietly and diligently from my designated space, and I would absolutely not load up on beans before hand and at every urge of my bowels, wander into those empty corner offices and fumigate every chair, book, keyboard, mousepad and drawer individually and repeatedly.
Wonder which executive got annoyed that they went into the office, they noticed no one else was suffering in-office with them and this is the outcome.
The one that gets the bonus.
good.
Companies that mandate a return to the office should pay a big price.
not good, this is what grindr's owners wanted; let grindr run on autopilot to squeeze out as much $$$ as possible.
it'll eventually mean that grindr will fail; but short term profits are always more important to investors.
Considering new software engineers make tinder/grindr clones in a day for their portfolios, it wouldn't be a loss. Someone could make a competing app and put Grindr out of its greedy misery.
The software isn't the complicated part of dating apps; it's getting a user base that takes a lot of work/investment. And then finding a way to monetise that user base. Which often involves actively trying to stop them finding partners and leaving the app while pretending they're trying to find people their perfect match - although Grindr is more of a hookup app so they don't have to worry about that so much.
Match Group has a monopoly on most dating apps/sites (not Grindr, though) and it's incredible how much worse most of them have become since being bought out - all in the name of monetisation.
Absolutely true. Cory Doctorow did a fantastic talk about this (among other things) at DefCon. Well worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4
multiple clones have been available for almost 2 decades but grindr dominates so much that it's larger than all of the clones combined because of name recognition; even straight people know what grindr is and, thus, new gays will only hear of grindr unless they dig into sources that aren't mainstream (eg reddit niches and word of mouth from other gays who know about the clones).
They didn't lose their staff they constructively laid them off. They drastically changed the terms of their employment. Grindr must pay them unemployment benefits.
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One company I worked at (in Germany) did a survey asking employees for their preference during the pandemic, 78% wanted a hybrid model with less than half of their time spent in the office, citing many legitimate reasons such as childcare. The management interpretation of this openly reported survey was an "overwhelming desire to return to the pre-pandemic office culture"..in a company full of data scientists, and analysts, it didn't land so well.
If only they had qualified people to interpret the data...
I wouldn't resign. Let them fire me and take the severance
I'd imagine you aren't getting severance for this. Unemployment, maybe, since you could say your employer moved the job location too far away.
I’d imagine you aren’t getting severance for this.
It really depends on what's in their employment contracts...and I will bet that it makes a huge difference whether they accepted their positions as an advertised full-time remote position or not.
Even employers who don't make a habit of offering severance can be convinced to offer it when negotiating the compensation package. I have a pretty standard requirement in all my employment contracts that I am willing to give an equal amount of notice of departure as the company is willing to provide contractual severance. Example: if the company offers zero severance, then I have it written into my employment contract that the amount of notice I'm expected to give before resigning is zero days. If the company wants and expects 2-weeks notice, then I require my employment contract to mandate 2-weeks severance...and then I tell them that I'm happy with anything from zero days to a month and that they are free to choose the amount. This has always resulted in me getting 2-weeks or more of contractual severance even when other employees don't have that provision.
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Depends on the company. My shitty company is doing forced RTO, in a horrible way, but about the only thing they are doing right is giving standard severance packages for anyone who doesn't want to comply.
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Not up for the grind, am i rite?
You could say the company came to a grinding halt
With gay abandon no less.
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cut payroll without paying unemployment with this simple trick
It wasn’t because of return to work. Workers were attempting to unionize.
They didn't "lose" their staff— they "discarded" their staff.
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