Grindr has lost about 45% of its staff as it enforces a strict return-to-office policy that was introduced after a majority of employees announced a plan to unionize.
About 80 of the 178 employees at the LGBTQ+ dating app company resigned after the company in August mandated that workers return to work in person two days a week at assigned “hub” offices or be fired, the Communications Workers of America said in a statement Wednesday.
love seeing companies going full mask off now — not even trying to sell the ‘collaborative environment’ bile, it’s purely punitive
That’s a weird way of saying “grindr found a way to lay off half its staff without having to pay severance”
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
I’ll give you a hint, the first three letters of the answer are MBA.
My Butt Aches?
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.
How did we get to a point where people online claim a company is evil?
How did we get to a point where people started becoming anti-employee corporate apologists?
It’s cool tho. they let us know we should block them now cuz with a take that bad there’s no chance they’ll ever have a comment worthy of our sight
But they mod a joe Rogan subreddit! What if I miss out?
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“online”? People have been calling, and rightfully so, many companies for a very long time.
Let me guess- corporations are people.
That was never a thing.
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.
back to the comments above: the management knows not the people who do the actual work. They can’t immediately tell if the Chris who left was carrying his team or was the worst slacker in the company. They’ll learn after they audit the remaining workforce and see The Spreadsheet say the people who remained are bottom performers (pun probably intended) but it’ll be too late - the talent is gone, the trust is broken. Whether different companies learn from each others’ mistakes is a mystery to me, apparently the global conspiracy of billionaire CEOs is not as robust as I expected (/s)
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
Strange that they think this isn’t a negative PR hit, then.
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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.
If an important position is paid enough, they won’t leave just because of this return to office
Yes, they might. The more important they are, the higher the likelihood that they can get high pay and remote work elsewhere, and have plenty of savings on hand to weather the transition.
On the other hand, they may have a good savings buffer built up.
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.
For most roles, severance is not a guarantee and only given as part of layoffs because companies that don’t are crucified.
I.e. getting fired/quitting will not trigger some severance clause for nearly all employees, even constructive dismissal.
This really needs to be some level of labor issue. If an office decided to move across the country and you didn’t move with it, would that be you quitting? You applied for the job that was on your side of the country, not the one across the country. To me, the employer’s terms changed, which means they need to handle the difference.
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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”
This was intentional. Tech companies force people back to the office in order to cull employees. IBM is infamous for getting 20+ year employees to quit in order to deny retirement benefits. Grindr is using a time tested method.
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They don’t care. Arrow go up
Yeah, I’ve heard this referred to as The Dead Sea Effect. Seems accurate to me.
That checks out with them using IBM as the example.
IBM also designed the machines and cataloging system used by the Nazis to number Jews in concentration camps. Fun fact As in, like, specifically designed it for the Nazis.
This looks like a fascinating read. I might have to pick this up!
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).
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…
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.
Even still, that’s nothing, compared to severance or paying their salaries. Especially if they felt they needed to layoff folks anyway.
Return to office is a grift. Tech workers need to unionize.
They were doing so at Grindr. That’s allegedly the catalyst for this happening. The unionize movement has less momentum when you terminate half of your staff.
They needed to many years ago
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.
Serious question, what do you mean by employment contract? I work for a pretty large company as a salaried employee and I don’t have an employment contract that I’m aware of
I think it’s more common outside the United States. It’s incredibly rare to have an employment contract here unless you’re a high muckety muck.
Whether you realize it or not, you have one. Some companies might refer to it as your “Employment Agreement” rather than your “Employment Contract” - but it’s still legally a contract even if they call it an ‘agreement’. It is the sum total of everything that was negotiated and agreed upon when you accepted the position. Things like your starting salary, the amount of annual vacation you get, the sick pay/leave policy, agreements for annual bonuses or bonus modifiers, agreements for any stock grants or options rewards, stock option vesting policy and schedule (if applicable), whether your position is regionally bound to a specific region or location. In addition to all of the above, the state you reside in both when you accepted the position and where you live now (if it’s different) impact your employment contract.
I also work for a very large company as a salaried employee and even though I started over 5 years ago, I can still download copies of all my original onboarding documents and forms, including my employment contract. My last company was just a small 35-person startup, but we had employment contracts there also. I still have my hardcopies of all that (including my required modifications).
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.
In my country, it is required by law to give any fired employee a fixed amount of monthly salaries, depending on how long the employee was at the company. For example, 3 months if you were 5 years, 6 months if you were 10 years and 1 extra month for every next year after that
Not up for the grind, am i rite?
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Hey man, only if it’s consensual.
You could say the company came to a grinding halt
With gay abandon no less.
take my upvote and go
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.
Some of this is intentional by design. Shedding head count through willing attrition.
