Dating app Grindr loses nearly half its staff after trying to force RTO | Hacker News Reader

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

cnn.com

130 pointsLinuxBender161 comments

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

> 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.

I 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.

Absolutely. 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.

In 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…)

s/human/bis Bis - butts in seat.

"don't really see humans"

Didn't you mean "resources" there? ;-)

You mean FTE? Full Time Equivalent.

Good point - "resources" are useful while FTEs are things to be cut?

It's the incentives, you'd be promoted because you built a large org so you had an incentive to just continue to grow the org itself so you could go up the chain, even if you weren't making anything productive as all these businesses were flush with cash.

At interviews managers are asked "how many reports did you have?" not "how much value did you deliver to the company?"

> Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure.

It's the Burger King approach to management: all employees are just generic worker bees, and you can just go down to Burger King and order a Whopper, some fries, and maybe six engineers. Problem solved!

Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

This flawed point of view, that you can just think of employees as widgets, fails again and again and again, and yet MBA schools apparently keep teaching it, and/or people keep trying to use it.

And in this case, the failed RTO initiatives: really, I would love for one of these CEOs to explain to me what the point is. You don't think people are productive from home? Based on what, your gut feelings or conjecture? Because the opposite is true. People in offices waste a ton of time—just watch them. They stand around and bullshit. They get up and look for people to talk to (about non-work things). They make disruptive noise. What they don't do a lot of is actually get work done. Meanwhile, you're paying for their office space and electricity and everything else it takes to keep an office running.

So what's the purpose of RTO? If I didn't know better, I would say it's 1- an attempt to justify sunk costs of office leases, and 2- a huge power trip.

Doesn't matter: it will ultimately fail because offices are counterproductive to actually getting work things accomplished.

We have the metrics to show our productivity soared when we were sent home a little over three years ago. It's only been improving.

It's funny - before the pandemic hit we'd already gone through a RIF. As things started booming back we've been hiring from all over the country. We now have teams that are wholly comprised of people from all over. There's no path forward to do an RTO at this point, and our productivity numbers are simply too high to warrant it.

My understanding is as our leases expire, we're not going to renew many of them. Where people are still in the office, and we have some of those folks and have had them all through the pandemic, we'll consolidate facilities in the same region.

> Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones.

Part of the problem with accepting this is that it cuts against the MBA ethos: that a good manager is a good manager in any industry, because specialized knowledge is not required.

Which, might be true for extremely high performing managers, who will seek out and rapidly learn any specialized knowledge needed...

... but is very much not true for the bulk of managers, who lack that amount of initiative and capability, and thus need more seasoning time and domain knowledge.

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

Seems easy to believe that non-management works directly with the affected people on a daily basis, which gives them much greater insight

Very 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.

Experience

To 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.

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...

I’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.

Yeah, 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.

I 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

There are often just no docs.

If 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.

>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

Are you serious? Where's the hurt coming from?

I've been hired to take over a mess after people angrily quit more than once. The work I did took much longer than it would have if there had been a smooth hand over and there were tons of bugs and issues but the only people that were ever hurt by that were the shareholders and management with their deadlines and delivery schedules. I still got paid.

> Where's the hurt coming from?

From the stress and unhappiness of having to untangle a complicated mess. Yes, you still got paid, but wouldn't you rather have had a smoother flow of things?

I'd rather I didnt work for asshole union busters who would treat their employees like scum for a bit of extra profit.

If the company's site goes down because a guy who got fed up with that missed out step 3 on the deployment playbook I am just fine with that. It's not my site that went down and not my profit margin at risk.

Docs?? are you serious, you barely have docs with highly motivated people. best you can expect is nothing, worst is actively destructive behaviours

Code is useless without engineers. When the flight begins no one is going to do anything. Everyone checks out and spends their time fluffing their wings.

At GE the engineers know that engines don't fly without them (designs and specs are useless without engineers) so if they are in a position to do so they hold information close to their chest--tons of info are not in the design. They are very much dependent on a core group of engineers for each system. Just like any tech system, things are going sideways constantly for various reasons and they have to respond very quickly to customers and regulators. That response requires the tacit knowledge they hold in their head or under their desk. Not to mention the pet unicorn spaghetti code they develop to analyze sensor data which is crucial to projecting failure across fleets when one-offs are encountered.

Middle management has it's own game they play...it's wink and knod all the way down the chain...if they like you.

When this happens the chaos. First week everyone ignores you and 4 days left a panic around handover happens.

Leaving things in a good state doesn't really matter when they fire you unexpectedly why does it matter so much when you quit?

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

> 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.

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

No it isn't. You should still have deliverables and those don't really change no matter where you are.

Other way around.

If 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.

https://effectiviology.com/brown-mms/ could help solving the reviewing a proposal problem.

Shouldn’t there be a second person checking the work, at least every now and then?

You haven't actually explained how this slacker is easier to find out in office. Sure they can't go off to the golf course, but there are a million ways people waste time while still being physically present. Instead the scenario you describe is exactly the kind of weak management that doesn't know how to properly evaluate their employees performance that ends up substituting measuring butt in seat time for proper management.

I can't go for golf, but I can read HN whole day easily in the office.

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.

If those employees are objectively poor performers - why aren't they let go? Claims don't add up.

> 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.

You work with bad folks, period. I have seen none of that.

So there's some magic where if they RTO they will suddenly come clean?

Slackers will still slack off. Maybe it's just you can't tell when you're in the office - that's all.

Nobody is "coming clean" the cry and fight for remote work is just an attempt to stay hidden and out of site so they can continue to collect paychecks while doing the most minimal amount of work.

> 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.

So this is what they were doing with in office work and you think remote work is the issue?

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.

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.

> 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.

Worked with someone really good at this. She'd walk the halls in the office with a very serious, determined look on her face, always with laptop in hand. Always drifting past where the Directors and VPs sat. Always striking up conversations with people above her on the totem pole (never, ever being seen talking to a lowly worker bee). Always visibly demonstrating vague "bustle" and "activity." A naive manager would observe her behavior and think to himself "Ahh, yes, the buzz of Business™ Being Done". People like this see their careers absolutely THRIVE in the office, and are desperate for RTO.

This is the Costanza Disposition, the idea that all you really need to do is look annoyed and people will just assume that you're super-busy and overwhelmed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC8PzhNuh7w

Yes, exactly this! Forgot all about the Seinfeld reference. The more years I work, the more I realize how much of it is this ridiculous performance art / theatrics. And the most talented actors are winning.

> 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?

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.

This is the experience I've made with remote work. Whenever I was at the office, I spent way more time hanging out with colleagues and socializing. When I'm at home, I'm way too worried about seeming like I'm slacking off to actually really slack off.

> 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.

> 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.

That's their point.

There 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-productiv...

Yep, if there was compelling, rigorous data to show a major productivity boost from RTO - evidence strong enough to shut up the opposition, at least some companies would've revealed it by now. We've seen zip, nada, zilch.

The RTO mandates are a pure labor/capital power play. It's really not much more complicated than "we want to remind you we're in charge, and to show you just how we're in charge, we're gonna make you do something you don't want to do"

Where I work, I have access to the data. There is a clear drop in PRs, lines of code committed, and new documents created.

To further that we have moved to 3 days RTO, and have Monday and Friday as WFH. Guess what? Github activity and slack message counts are nearly non existence on Friday, and just a blip on Monday.

Companies have the data, they don't need external studies to tell them what they already know. This is why they can move forward with RTO without worrying about any of the nonsense the WFH crowd drone on about. WFH folks know they are wrong, and companies know the WFH peoples are wrong, and that is why every comment suggesting otherwise is a knee jerk reaction to mob anybody who suggest differently.

Good luck WFH folks, while I am at the office making impact, you won't even have a chance when it comes for review or promotion time, because you can't list "answered the door for a package delivery" as anything useful.

Many studies also said a handkerchief over your face prevented Covid.

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.

> 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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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"

"Relocate to office"

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.

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.

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.

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.

that's absolutely brutal

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like I said, in the long term, it's poisonous.

Long term? It took 9 months!

Frankly, I keep waiting for the big bang implosion there, but it seems like it's just going to be a long pathetic whimper.

The implosion has already occurred. Over 80pct of their pre-takeover headcount is gone. Pricing their API in five-figure sums tells you their ad business is dead.

And they're on the hook for $1.2 billion in interest payments annually. Are they even making that in revenue now? We won't know because they're privately held.

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.

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

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

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

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

Doesn'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.

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

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.

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

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.

Not very covert really. A week after workers announced they were unionizing, Grindr hired lawyers who specialize in employer labor relations and what they’re calling “union avoidance” (aka union busting). And then two weeks later Grindr announces their relocation/RTO mandate.

From Littler Mendelson’s website (Grindr’s lawyers):

“We guide companies in developing and initiating strategies that lawfully avoid unions”

But yeah, I agree severance is probably their strategy to limit any pushback the NLRB might have on this, but just not sure how strong of a case Grindr can make. Especially after the recent rulings from the NLRB that gives more protections to workers trying to unionize.

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.

In the US they are federally required to provide severance if it meets certain conditions.

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...

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

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

See related discussion from yesterday here [1]

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

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).

Grindr has astonishingly high salaries.

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. :)

you’d have to compensate me extra to have that name on my resume

I’m curious, are there parts of their tech stack or the execution of the product that would embarrass you?

The 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...

Maybe it's that "our business is organizing anonymous sex hookups" that is embarrasing? I'd feel the same about Tinder BTW. I think it's one step above having a porn site on your resume. The tech may be interesting, but the content is not "respectable"

I mean i've seen resumes with palantir on them, i'd much rather have grinder on my resume than palantir.

LOL. Now I’m just imagining the interview….”yes you could say I have extensive knowledge in this domain”.

Why’s that?

Well, it's not only big tech that pays high salaries.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Just one more time.

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.

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

People 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.

twitter 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.

Why work on a weekend? Just buy from here https://codecanyon.net/search/dating

My guess is that handling bots, spam and abuse is one of the harder parts of the app at this point. It's a constant moving adversary that only gets worse the more popular your social app is, and not handling the problem can really drive users away.

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.

Funny you should say that - I’m an Erlang dev and Grindr has tried to recruit me in the past. Apparently they already use it.

Wonder if it's for their messaging stack, which probably has ejabberd buried inside

Why not go to https://status.twitter.com to see?

(Whoever was responsible for renewing the certs apparently got fired...)

that's hilarious. i was expecting something funny, but not utter fail

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

They could band together and start their own dating site.

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

[dupe]

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com