Not sure that it's such a great business decision to lose almost half your staff, and probably moreso the higher-performing ones with other options. I'm guessing that this was intended to reduce the headcount without paying severance, which sounds attractive to the average MBA brain with zero ability to think through long-term consequences.
> I'm guessing that this was intended to reduce the headcount without paying severance
The employees were planning to unionize, and the RTO plan "conveniently" came up right at that time. These are pretty classic union-busting techniques.
I'm actually pretty nervous for users from a security perspective. The Grindr data is essentially a blackmail gold mine - combine a ton of disgruntled employees with the loss of expertise to maintain app security (which had a number of issues in the past), and I don't think it bodes well.
To my understanding if 50% (a majority) of the employees signs up (ie, union cards) for the union prior to any vote, if the employer takes a union-busting act, the union is automatically legitimized and the employer must negotiate with them.
Most major corporations are all already doing union-deterrence (not illegal) as operating practice so they likely won't see an impact unless there is a black swan event that causes workforce and management to come to loggerheads.
That looks like a lot of marketing to me trying to shore up Biden's reputation with Union workers after he killed the railroad strike and left our necessary workers to the dogs.
> “We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.
That's amazing – it's strange that I never noticed that. Although I can imagine that it would benefit a lot of dealmakers to lower the public attention on this issue a little.
> I'm actually pretty nervous for users from a security perspective. The Grindr data is essentially a blackmail gold mine - combine a ton of disgruntled employees with the loss of expertise to maintain app security (which had a number of issues in the past), and I don't think it bodes well.
This shouldn't change anything from an opsec perspective. Google itself will always have record of you having downloaded it to your device. The Chinese were looking to buy Grindr for some reason. Someone could leak, sure, but nothing stops the company itself from selling out to anyone interested in membership records at any time.
> The Grindr data is essentially a blackmail gold mine.
More than that. It's leaked before.[1] Grindr data was used to catch a senior US Catholic official:
"... an analysis of app data signals correlated to Burrill’s mobile device shows the priest also visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020, even while traveling on assignment for the U.S. bishops’ conference."
“On Monday, we became aware of impending media reports alleging possible improper behavior by Msgr. Burrill. What was shared with us did not include allegations of misconduct with minors. However, in order to avoid becoming a distraction to the operations and ongoing work of the Conference, Monsignor has resigned effective immediately,”[2]
If you think that "membership records" are the most damning thing that can be used for blackmail from Grindr, I can only surmise you've never used Grindr.
> These are pretty classic union-busting techniques.
It may be a union-busting technique, but I'm not sure about "classic".
I mean how often has the economy had to recover from a multi-year work at home mandate due to a pandemic?
The massive switch to remote work and the pendulum swinging back towards more in-office work is a unique phenomena, not a recurring "classic" situation.
> " with zero ability to think through long-term consequences"
The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1]. You need to say that what you care about is long term, but that's now how we're compensated (read: incentivised). Plus you're not there to see it anyways so there are really very little incentives to think long term.
[1] some googling but couldn't find a great source for this. Though it matches what I've observed in the industry.
Yeah that is a good point. Short-term thinking and short tenures are incentivized. The short average tenure in tech is just crazy to me, considering that onboarding takes forever compared to most industries, and how expensive the hiring process itself is. Nonetheless, companies hate giving existing employees raises despite how much it helps retention.
> onboarding takes forever compared to most industries,
What? If you mean other industries where people are called engineers is used then I'm pretty sure that getting up to speed in another industry and becoming familiar with the unspoken, unwritten, unconscious rules that make the product possible must take at least as long as in any kind of software based company. Not to mention that there are often lots of constraints regarding what may and may not be done with hardware exposed to the public.
Other engineering professions have standards and licenses to streamline a lot of the technical ins and outs. Even within the same domain of software, the tech stacks and methodologies can different very radically. And you're often not just hiring mid+ level folk just to code.
Well another way to think about it is that onboarding new folks is the only way to really check if your following a sane software development practice.
If it takes folks more than a few months to onboard, you probably have too many rules, standards or other processes that are pointless. There a multiple exceptions but if you can’t onboard folks fast your management team is either incompetent or they don’t pay developers enough to care who learns.
The idea of switching jobs every year and going through the usually grueling tech hiring process is exhausting to me. However, it’s mostly juniors in Silicon Valley doing this. I would also be wary of hiring anyone jumping ship every year unless they’re not senior.
> The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1].
Note that individuals who switch jobs often inherently will figure in a higher number of tenures that you’re taking the median of here. This means the majority of software engineers will actually have a longer tenure.
So what we should be looking at is the median number of tenures, not the median length of tenures? How would one weight the latter by the former to get a more robust measure of tenure length?
Well, what do you want to ascertain? In any case you won’t capture the long tail of long tenures, because you don’t know how long current tenures will extend into the future. What you could measure is the median current seniority of tech employees (how long they are in their current job), which would be a lower bound for the median of (eventual) tenures of current employments.
That will also skew towards shorter tenures, (a) because shorter tenures tend to occur earlier in a career rather than later (so a previous tenure is more likely to have been shorter), and (b) when you’re sampling at a random point within a career, you’re more likely to hit a long tenure within that career, which conversely means that the previous tenure (or more generally, any of the past or future tenures) will more likely be shorter than the current one in that career.
Also kind of insane. 1-2 years? In any large codebase or platform, it takes a year to become familiar with and touch a decent portion of it. Also, talk about never having to live with the concequences of decisions you've made in terms of long term support and maintenance. But I guess these are all rockstar developers doing the hopping around so that's not really their concern is it.
I would say it's better to do 2-3 years early on as a young employee. Older, more experienced tech people tend to have longer tenures as they gain years of experience.
> Value is more in making connections and using internal networks than banging out code, biasing towards longer term.
bingo. it's about finding the right people and building them solutions.
my boss used to fly into different offices early to make time to see different people and just ask them pain points. buy coffee and donuts for the different team and pick their brains for things that needed solutions. a couple times he had them just show him and walk through stuff.
many of our deliverables and projects came out of that, and we became dedicated git-r-done staff.
The one~two year turnover is usually for employees that can easily come and go. Key individual contributors for instance often stay for far longer, forgoing more lucrative options to keep working on an environment that fits them.
Losing people in these positions will hurt a lot more than the average engineer/sales moving on after a short stint.
> The West Hollywood, California-based company also gave a severance package to staff who were unable to relocate, in what the CWA alleged was an attempt “to silence workers from speaking out about their working conditions,” according to a statement from the organization.
Being that the job market is currently favoring employers over employees, I'd say they'll likely have no trouble finding new staff that has no problem with working in the office. They still have enough staff to get the new folks trained up. This would have hurt them a few years ago, but not now.
You're overlooking the main issue with firing half your staff: you've just lost a huge swath of your institutional knowledge. That's what turns your living codebase into legacy code. A new hire, even a fantastic code ninja guru rockstar 10x unassailable god king new hire, is going to have to spend a lot of time learning your codebase. Even when they are at a level when they can productively dig through it to do bugfixes and feature implementations, they'll likely have big holes in their knowledge: Was this weird hack a temporary solution gone permanent, or the result of an important tradeoff between elegance and performance? Is the new hire going to find the relevant pre-existing extension point to add their new feature, or are they just going to build a new one?
The reason you hire software engineers on salary instead of just hiring contractors is because you need vessels to store knowledge in. That knowledge can be passed down and maintained with a relatively low rate of turnover, which is the opposite of "in 2 days we're replacing half our workforce".
I agree - but I think this decision was made pretty consciously. As in, they did internal equivalent of PE buyout. Accept you're not growth company, get rid of large portion of the staff, cut all new developments and prospects, rest of remaining stuff just supports existing business. And extract all the wealth from this position that you can.
If I got a business to a few million in recurring revenue it would be very tempting to slice expenses down to just maintenance mode, take a huge salary while riding it into the dirt for a few years and then retire.
The real thing is to treat a product as a sustaining engineer product, so minor new features, catering to the users you already have rather than trying to chase growth, etc.
publicly traded companies don't want steady profits. They want infinite growth, and growth requires investment in R&D. Hence the huge hiring sprees over the pandemic.
But prospects point towards a recession, the boons of the pandemic are over, and interest rates aren't dirt low anymore. Which is why companies are indeed shifting down to "maintenance mode".
It'a a mix of a declining economy and convinient union busting. Many other companies are ding this sot layoff strategy and don't have looming unions to worry about.
real life example: there are comments in code I've seen that are like "don't delete this or it breaks X"
but there is no X, no mention of what X does in any Confluence page, and deleting it borks stuff badly. asking around and no one is sure what X is or does, and short of refactoring the code, no one has bothered to get rid of it.
a simple question of "wtf is X?" turns into multiple meetings, failed QA tests, general custerfuckery, all of which have a $$$ cost in hours wasted.
the people that knew are gone and DGAF, but would happily consult for a heafty fee.
Losing half your staff is going to hurt you no matter what the labor market looks like. It’s likely that they’ll be losing a disproportionate number of high performers, and it’s going to take more than a year to work that many people through the hiring pipeline, and ramp them up fully.
Yeah they can have folks trained up a year from now assuming they can fill the spots immediately. For the next year or so, they'll probably be far below capacity.
> probably moreso the higher-performing ones with other options
They probably didn't get the memo that other companies tend to give some leeway, unofficially, to higher performing employees when enforcing RTO so the whole thing is for weeding out, and nothing else.
Higher-performing employees generally have more options than lower-performing ones, so they aren't desperate enough to go through a disruptive and expensive move in order to keep their job. For similar reasons, I'd expect senior-level employees to be over-represented, because they're more likely to have kids, a spouse, and an existing mortgage.
True but the switching costs are still quite high for higher performing employees and it seems like the pool of tech companies requiring working in an office presence is also gaining share (ie pool of companies to switch to without in office work is low).
Yes, as already predicted in numerous places we witness forming distinct styles of work with full WFH being in minority so the candidates who want to WFH need to be more competitive. If I wanted I could easily switch my job to an office-based one with a better pay; doing the some for a remote job is much more difficult (but well worth the effort!).
I’m pretty sure this was basically an unofficial layoff.
The company seems happy with the result. Plus, everyone they hire in the future won’t have an issue with office work. Short to mid term it may be painful. Long term as in 5-10 years this will be a blip.
It's a terrible decision. The company is mortally wounded now, and the management (CEO especially) lost any trust, however small that was. Also, all the employees who quit took the six month severance.
Buried lede. The RTO requirement was in response to the staff attempting to unionize. Either retaliation or a clever method to clear out the workers who were most in favour of the union without breaking labour laws.
Labor laws are a lot more assuming than criminal laws in the US - if you do something that looks suspect and you had foreknowledge of the situation you're trying to resolve, then there's nearly no mens rea component - it is just assumed you were acting in bad faith.
If you had foreknowledge that your employees wanted input (via a union) on employment conditions, and then you unilaterally push an arduous employment condition on them, you have violated the spirit of what they are seeking.
Grindr went public via a SPAC acquisition last November and has lost 90% of its value since. I'm gonna go ahead and say it's a bad move to make RTO demands from your staff when they already see no future at the company and have one foot out the door.
The company's problems will be solved by better leadership, decision making, product vision, adaptability and faster execution...not more butts in seats at the office.
Unfortunately the “leaders in tech” are MBA brains that have no idea what they are doing long-term and when the going gets tough they turn to the age old strategy of making life miserable for their employees. This is true in the United States, anyway, where we have very little in the way of labor protection.
I don't think the problem is "MBA brain", at least not directly. MBA types may have earned a reputation of being distinctly out of touch with the "factory floor" and the end user, but their actions are often rational if viewed through sufficiently Excel-tinted glasses. To me, the RTO push does not seem rational in that way.
I fully admit that this is a half-baked hypothesis based mostly on vibes, but I suspect that a lot of execs operate more than they'd admit on "ape brain" concerns of social dominance, and feel threatened by the prospect of not having underlings in a contiguous physical territory. Part of what makes the cubicle (never mind the open layout) such a cultural touchstone for corporate soullessness is that the physical space you inhabit distinctly belongs to the company; it is not "your" space. Conversely, WFH takes that space from the company and gives it to the worker, at least metaphorically. Perhaps this is even the post-postmodern, meta-ironic, lazy-teenager version of "seizing the means of production", although I'll leave that argument to people who have actually studied the likes of Gramsci, Adorno and Deleuze.
I agree. If a company asked its team of MBAs to figure out the ideal work situation, they'd run the numbers and conclude that saving on expensive office space, expanding the talent pool, being able to hire in cheaper regions, keeping employees happier and reducing attrition etc. made remote work the more favorable option. The problem is instead power tripping execs who ignore this advice and go nah, what we really need is to go back to the good old days where I could boss people around.
you're forgetting the sunk cost of renting some office in town. If the numbers are big enough, and especially when you want to downsize anyway, it may make more sense to enforce RTO to kill two birds with one stone. RTO works on the gamble that you keep enough of your staff afterwards to be fine.
IDK if 50% means they lost that gamble, but it sounds higher than expected. I wouldn't have place it higher than 20-25% for a company Grindr's size.
SPACs are a pump and dump scam designed to get liquidity without oversight for founders and VCs. It doesn't matter what happens to the stock afterwards, because the people who matter get out after the first couple of days.
How many engineers does it take to lose chats, give bots unfettered access, not back up my messages, and spam me with low quality ads?
It’s worth pointing out that the fees they charge for the premium subscription are absolutely outrageous. $20-$40 PER MONTH.
I guess they just added a web client, which absolutely no one needs, that probably cost a pretty penny.
Scruff makes a drastically better product at similar scale with ~50-100 employees (hard to tell exactly) - Grindr appears to be suffering serious bloat.
>I guess they just added a web client, which absolutely no one needs, that probably cost a pretty penny.
I'd argue the opposite, they absolutely need a web client, as Grindr (and Scruff) are getting their lunch eaten by a new Seattle-based competitor that has no app store presence and fully embraces the freedoms that come with that, and is cheaper to boot.
I'm unfamiliar with their issues and that is pretty damning, however, it's become clear that a web-based app that isn't bound by draconian puritan values is turning up the heat on them. Scruff has recently launched a web-based app separate from their main one as well.
Oh I agree. Web based is 100% the way forward with this type of app.
For some more details, they use a websocket for basically all interactions on the app, such as messages, online status, etc. They were blasting internal data into that websocket for some cases, which included IPs, Hashed and salted passwords, the salts for said passwords, user reports, private photos, emails... and a lot more such as ISP, user agent and verification codes.
I tried it out, it is a very different app from Grindr and despite the very low floor I’m not sure I agree it is better. Totally disrespectful of the web platform and the UX is not great. But if you are looking for quick and/or anonymous sex exclusively it appears to be best of breed.
But if you have a web client and app store apps, which are frontends to the same thing, doesn't that mean that your site is still constrained by the app store rules?
Less data can be grabbed from a web app, which is better for users.
Less apps going through the app store ecosystem means 30% lower rents if you can divorce the app store billing, which is better for the company.
I imagine a future where the webapp installs a PWA to mitigate the rent-seeking app stores. But I am sure the app stores would insert a clause preventing a "lite" version of PWA's to be installed.
Major caveat being Grindr’s new web app makes it significantly more easy to download high resolution images/videos (using browser extensions) from disappearing messages and ‘private’ albums shared with you. On the app at least they block screenshots and screen recording.
Of course don’t share what you wouldn’t want copied. However, the false sense of security they communicate to the average non-technical user about their ‘privacy’ features like disappearing photos and locked albums is quite disingenuous and harmful.
On the contrary, I'd argue a web client is important for a number of reasons. Many apps, such as Instagram, aren't properly supported on iPadOS. In this case, a web client neatly solves various usability, window management, and accessibility issues.
Misleading title. Grindr is likely trying to remove everyone who was talking about unionizing and doesn't think they got enough of them in the first round of constructive firing measures.
It's in the lede, to be fair (even before the article get paywalled off):
>Grindr Inc. 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.
(1) You can't assume losing half of staff is a downside. RTO is a great solution for bloated companies which overhired during the pandemic.
(2) On the flip side, RTO is only a lever for large tech companies who pay great salaries. Startups' advantage is that they can compete for talent by offering remote work that large companies are not willing to offer due to their large real estate commitments. You may just be better off embracing remote work forever.
On the flip side, it's expensive to lay off people whereas people going on their own is cheap. When the CEO is looking at short term margins, which he seems to do in the article, it's all positive to cut by 2 your biggest expense for "free".
Challenges will arise in 6 months or even later, but maybe Arison doesn't really care. He's been CEO since barely 1 year and may leave the boat when he will boast massive profits before a downturn.
> You can't assume losing half of staff is a downside. RTO is a great solution for bloated companies which overhired during the pandemic.
Grindr didn't have a bloated staff. It had less than 200 employees, half that sw engineers. Tech stack is modern, solid and has no legacy code in it. It wasn't stripped to the bone, but now the company lost any fat it had, lost all muscle, and some bones in the process too.
The salaries were not high, but people enjoyed working there because they were at the same time helping the LGBT+ community which majority of employees were a part of.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the number of staff. It is directly related to the ADL’s campaign of convincing advertisers to pull out. It appears there will be a lawsuit.
What about the ADL itself? Here’s their call to action against Facebook. Why wouldn’t they go after twitter… Oh wait they did barely one month after acquisition.
Sorry, I should have been less brief. I don’t deny that the ADL has been campaigning against xitter, I just hold extreme doubt that they are the main reason xitter lost half of its ad revenue. I think that is more likely caused by other factors.
Do you have insider knowledge of the _other factors_ you _think_ is more likely the cause of revenue loss? Isn’t almost all of twitters revenue pre paid blue check, advertising? Where else are they generating income? Wasn’t twitter losing money before? Has twitter ever been profitable?
I’ve linked to proof of boycotts and the ADLs position in convincing advertisers to drop twitter due to the ADLs “research.”
You provide nothing other than you opinion or assumption presented as fact. I digress, you can believe whatever you want to.
You've proved that the ADL is calling for an advertising boycott, which is a 1st amendment protected right. You haven't proven anything in regards to the effectiveness of that action.
Here's some vetted research from reputable institutions unconnected to any boycotts showing a demonstrable increase in hate speech on twitter https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.04129.pdf.
I don't have insider knowledge, but I would be perfectly willing to believe that advertisers find it untenable to risk advertising alongside hate-speech, or to be associated with a platform that has failed to signal that they won't tolerate hate speech, and as a result they have pulled their campaigns.
Whether that is because the ADL alerted them to the increase in hate speech, because it is their job to understand cultural phenomenon and trends, or because they have web browsers and eyes, I would not be able to tell.
> You've proved that the ADL is calling for an advertising boycott, which is a 1st amendment protected right.
The First Amendment is somewhat beside the point, since Elon is alleging that they are defaming him/Twitter. Defamatory speech is not protected by the First Amendment. So it's totally fine to call for a boycott — but totally actionable to call for a boycott using defamatory statements.
It will be difficult for Elon to prove defamation, since he is a public figure, of course.
It will be virtually impossible since none of the "defamatory" claims fall under matters of (legal) fact. In fact, unless Elon really wants to burn more money, I doubt he ever files an actual lawsuit and this is all bluster. Then again I'd probably lose my shirt betting agains Elon doing foolish things.
elmu could wake up tomorrow and allege space aliens were trying to break into his brain, and the same group of sycophants would take his word for it as is now
for everyone else, he is an entitled, inherited-wealth internet troll with a history of lying
you don't see him filing his lawsuit against the ADL like he said he would, do you?
how about him stepping down as CEO of twitter like he said he would?
How much wealth did he inherit from the emerald mine?
It takes more than a couple days to create the suit. We’ll see what happens. If you have any _facts_ that he’ll never sue I’m all ear. Probably just your assumptions.
He isn’t CEO. He hired a CEO, Linda Yaccarino. Again either you don’t follow what’s going on or you’re intentionally dense and arguing points that you don’t know about.
Just admit it you hate the guy and will recite anything and everything to reaffirm your unsubstantiated claims.
The ADL is not powerful enough to cause a 50% drop in Twitter revenue…most businesses don’t care about what they say.
The reason for the drop is Musk’s erratic behavior. Advertisers paused or halted their spending entirely because Musk is known for making on-the-fly decisions, and businesses don’t want to get caught up in his latest antics.
There is no proof outside of Musk’s statements that revenue has dropped since X no longer makes public their finances, and there is no proof that anything the ADL has done rises to legally actionable defamation. They have certainly mounted a boycott campaign, but that is not proof of defamation. Myriad other organizations have also called for boycotts. It is curious to me that you are so personally focused on the one boycott that Mr. Musk cited as the sole cause of the revenue drop.
I did link in another post a peer reviewed study from a third party showing that hate speech has measurably risen since Mr Musk’s takeover.
There certainly is a lot of correlation here, but all of us, including you, are speculating on the causality. You are leaning heavily on the statements of a single man who has a proven track record of being incorrect, to put it gently. We are leaning on a variety of other heuristics that can be summed up as “A known bullshiter has said something that sounds like bullshit, and makes no sense to our understanding and experience of the world.”
What kind of proof would be sufficient to you for the claim “Elon Musk makes erratic and unpredictable decisions with his businesses”? Would a list of previous erratic decisions sway your mind?
I mean, Elon is also blaming the CCDH for his loss in advertising. He’s not exactly an unbiased source here. Just because he says it, doesn’t make it true.
Do you have any sources or insider knowledge that you can present that would put Elon himself on the hook for loss in advertising? I’ve replied to multiple comments citing ADL CCDH and others actively seeking to sway advertisers away from twitter using “research.”
Instead of presenting a counter argument with facts or data to back it up you resort to calling Elon a liar. It obviously shows your bias. You can believe whatever you want to believe.
elmu is a liar, thus him and his word simply can't be trusted
do you have any reliable sources or insider knowledge that you can present that would prove true these unreliable, unconvincing claims of an infamous liar?
it is actually a fact as determined by a court of law
but your opinion that he is not is cute
I imagine such silly, reality-denying opinions accompany the same derangement that drives a very small, very loud minority of people to shriek hate and "hate!" at everyone who points out that elmu is a notorious liar
No I think this was the goal. This wasn't just "start commuting to the office in your city", this was "pack up your life and move to Chicago, all software engineers have to work from that office now". It was obviously absurd and intended to force at least this many people out.
Which is kind of ironic because in the last 3 years after the company was returned from Chinese ownership back to the States, pretty much all employees were new and all worked remotely. So the "Return" part is misleading a reader thinking that the employees were working from a office pre-pandemic. That's just not the case.
They don't even have offices to return to. I know someone who had just started there when they did this. The paperwork they sent her regarding RTO didn't even have an office location on it, but specified she had to live within 50 miles of the unspecified office. In the end, it turns out they've rented some WeWork space.
A few weeks ago our CEO decided that we should be at least one day per month in the office (my commute is 2h over all by car). They say it is not mandatory and will not be enforced. Also, everyone can select the day that fits them the best, so not everyone will be at the office at the same day. When asked about the reasons for this, since we did pretty well during covid when everyone moved to HO, they gave the following reasons:
- People have to identify with the company more. When asked about the details of that they complained that a lot of people just log in, work on their issues and log off. So basically doing what they are paid for. I answered that this is not a bad thing, which was not well received.
- People need to socialize more. According to them everyone needs to be more friendly with their peers. I think that I am friendly to my peers and direct reports, but I admit that not everyone can do that level of socializing online. OTOH I will not be able to socialize as well in person. Also, while I'm generally friendly I never join events for exactly that reason.
- Silos between different departments. According to them there is bad blood between some departments and they hope to resolve this if everyone get to know each other better. I can't really confirm this, as all my interactions with different departments always go well. However, since there is no mandated day I can't understand how this will tear down the silos.
- Onboarding of new colleagues is considered hard/not as successful as it should be. Again, in can't confirm this as three people joined my team in March and they are doing pretty damn solid.
- According to them, before covid when everyone was in the office things were better. I asked them how many employees there were at that time: 50. Currently we are ~160. IMHO it is kinda obvious that communication and peership is better with 50 than with 160 people and office presence will not improve this.
- According to them, meetings and workshops are better in person. I can't really agree on that as I feel that since moving to HO, meetings have been way better and a lot more productive.
Some other things to consider: from 7 people in my team 3 are located in India, so they will not be able to come to the office anyway.
Also we have two office locations in Germany, so we will not be able to everyone anyway. Also some people have 100% HO contracts and they will not come to the office since they live a few hundred km from each location -> kinda unfair IMHO.
I think all their reasons are frankly pretty bullshit and coming to the office will not improve any of those. As the situation will not improve by this I expect them to go up with the days in the office since "we need to do more to improve things!11".
This isn't David vs. Goliath. archive.is blocks Cloudflare DNS because Cloudflare doesn't pass EDNS subnet information. This has been addressed directly by the Cloudflare CEO on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
I was told my in-person office (nothing at all special) cost the company 15K per month several years before covid, and when i was working part time remote, i have to either go full time remote (thus freeing that cost for someone else) or full time in person. i went full time remote, of course. Gotta imagine real estate is one of the bigger costs for in person software companies.
From the article it seems the CWA union has been trying to organize the workforce just prior to this announcement and has filed a complaint with the nrlb, so maybe this is union busting? The article not only mentions RTO but also a relocation requirement.
Yes, they told all software engineers to move to Chicago within a few months, even ones that live somewhere like LA and used to or currently work from a Grindr office there. It is transparent union busting, and they hired the most prominent union busters in the country to advise them on this process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littler_Mendelson.
Looks like the stock is up 11% on this news. Does this and the the staff cuts at X demonstrate you can take out significant numbers of engineer without drastically impairing the user experience?
I doubt most tech execs would have the wherewithal to make this kind of decision but it's clearly the case that many big tech cos staffed up too hard during the pandemic with average salary per employee rising too much
It demonstrates that investors see expenses go down and therefore want to buy more stock.
Whether it's because they believe correctly that Grindr is overstaffed, believe incorrectly that Grindr is overstaffed, or just intend to sell again before the consequences become clear is something that will only become clear in time.
it demonstrates that investors want to see a return on their investment more quickly in a higher cost of capital environment. Look across tech, all of these companies staffed up hard, raised at too high of valuations, and are now fat with slow growth and no profitability.
Even in ZIRP times, layoffs resulted in stock price growth also. See for example Amazon's Feb 2018 layoffs which caused their stock price to jump from $70 to $80.
Depends where in the US they are and what their contracts stated. Particularly pre-pandemic contracts which may have stipulated they should go to the office. In that case it sounds like they could either take the "shut up" money and resign or be terminated for cause.
It's funny how so few people realize that the end of ZIRP means the end of tons of companies like this. Without nearly-free debt, many of these companies have no business model at all.
> Staffing is the “single biggest cost” after fees paid to app distribution platforms like Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, according to Arison.
This is a hilarious quote. It's a software company! What other major costs are there besides the staff to make and manage the software? I think I even find it a little disturbing that fees paid to Apple and Google are higher than salary paid to staff.
Sometimes when I'm in a weird place, I keep "cleaning up" some piece of software until there's basically nothing left. I kinda fixate and forget the entire point of what I'm trying to do.
Running a company is the single biggest cost to running a company.
Yes, the railroad industry literally made this argument last year when (successfully) appealing to the Biden administration to block a railworkers strike.
> During hearings before the board on wages … the railroads argued that labor from railroad workers does not contribute to their profits. “The Carriers maintain that capital investment and risk are the reasons for their profits, not any contributions from labor,” the PEB report said. “The Carriers assert that since employees have been fairly and adequately paid for their efforts… then they have no claim to share in the [profits].”
> the railroad industry literally made this argument
No, they didn't. The article you cite misdescribes the situation (for ideological reasons that are old hat to anyone familiar with the history of socialism). The railroads didn't argue that they should be able to spend zero money and make all the profits. They argued that they were paying money: they were paying employees fairly and adequately for their efforts. And having done that, they, as the owners of the company, took the profits that were left after meeting all company expenses, including paying labor fairly and adequately for its efforts. That's literally what owning a company means. An employee is not an owner. Profits are what the owners get after paying their employees.
A much better argument against the railroads in this case is that the railroad routes that their companies have exclusive rights to are granted by government regulation, not in a free market, so the revenues that are available to them, and which determine what their profits are after paying their employees, are not due to their sound business acumen, but to their ability to buy government regulations that favor them. But the article you cite does not say that (again, for well known ideological reasons).
The situation is basically that railroad workers asked the Biden administration to weigh in to improve the terms of the latest contract that the railroad company management was offering them, and the Biden administration told them tough luck. Which is indeed a bleak situation. But misdescribing it as "railroad company management wants to pay zero money and take all the profits" does not help; it makes it worse because it makes the workers sound unreasonable since the claim is obviously false. (Btw, I'm not saying the actual railroad workers are making that claim. Only the post I originally responded to was.)
The fact that railroad service in the US sucks is also bleak, and is a product of the same government regulation that has put the railroad company workers in the bleak position they are in. If you don't like the obvious implication of my previous post, which is that the government should open up railroads to free market competition and force the railroad company management to either show actual business acumen or give up their profits to someone who can, there is another possible response: since the government has created a railroad monopoly, the government should grant ownership of the railroad companies to all railroad workers, not just the company management. That way all workers would naturally share in the profits, because they all have a share in ownership. That would actually be more in line with what "socialism" claims to be about: everyone gets a share in the ownership of the capital they use to produce value. But the article that was cited doesn't make that argument either (once more, for ideological reasons that are obvious to anyone who is familiar with the history of socialism).
Paying my cat sitter is totally out of control! It's my single biggest cost, after my mortgage, food, utilities, travel, clothing, internet, entertainment, drugs, coffee, gas, and succulent plant collection.
Is this a serious reply? I mean, don't cats just ignore everyone? What do cat sitters do apart from spoon food from the packet into the bowl, replenish the water and occasionally tickle the cats tummy?
Sadly, finding a good cat sitter is a real-life thing. We are owned by a diabetic cat who also has severe abandonment issues and has been know to attack sitters without warning. We haven't been able to have a holiday since before Covid.
It actually is. Cats vary in their personalities. Each of my cats (including my semi-feral cat -- abandoned during the Dixie Fire, very slowly trying to socialize him) wants human interaction. Yes, they are ok being left to their own devices for days on end, but there are fewer issues and they are clearly happier if they get regular interaction.
Cats are pretty sensitive to changes in their environment. They have a hard time with change, it's just if you're not paying attention it's hard to tell until they stop eating and you have to take them to the vet.
I imagine it depends on the cat. I've moved cities and states with a few cats a few times and they were back to mostly normal within a couple days and only stopped eating out of stress for maybe a day.
Takes them weeks to completely relax, but I wouldn't say that puts them in a relatively "sensitive" category when compared to other animals.
It's true, it really depends on the cat. I know ours inevitably end up upset in one way or another when we go away for any amount of time and the cat kennel was an unmitigated disaster.
Fixed cost in accounting means all the costs except for the cost of making the next sale, which is called marginal cost or variable cost; so for example the marginal cost of a sale of IntelliJ is the cost of accepting payment, delivering the software somehow (i.e., mostly server costs these days) and support costs.
Marginal cost of a car in contrast is the cost of the materials that go into the car plus the cost of any parts or subassemblies not made by the car company.
So, your "tech is special because the fixed costs are extremely low compared" is false.
Programmer salaries are fixed costs because if you suddenly start selling twice as many licenses each month, there's no need to hire more programmers or have your existing programmer work twice as much.
Many (most?) technology companies manufacture and sell physical products, and have dramatically different cost structures than a pure software company like Grindr.
Probably more than you'd expect. They have two levels of subscriptions [1][2]. XTRA is $19.99 per month and Unlimited is $39.99 so potentially the revenue per hookup could be pretty high, at least as far as per user app revenue goes, assuming a reasonable subscription rate.
> I think I even find it a little disturbing that fees paid to
Isn't it pretty typical in many (most?) industries that dev cost is not the dominant part? Even pretty "pure" development like a movie or a game can have a bigger marketing budget than entire production cost, let alone salary only. Other industries R&D is often kept to 10-15% of costs (M&A complicates this).
Yeah, it's pretty normal that software companies, perhaps with the exception of those with large datacenter footprints but probably even them, have people as their largest cost.
Unless a company is doing a computationally expensive thing (like deep learning, or big data crunching etc) or the domain is commoditized/low value then the opex should be an inconsequential amount, and only at massive scale does it become worth optimizing (relative to the cost of engineer's time to do that optimization).
Optimizing for runtime speed can be a product advantage though, but in my experiences are usually unimportant so long as it's not absurdly inefficient.
I don't think that has much bearing on my question of ranking server costs with other costs (which I don't know the answer to, I'm just saying it's a cost among all the others cited). Further, I think their app is pretty popular so it does require some of that optimized engineering on the server side.
I don't think it's inconsequential at all once you have a substantial user base, especially since increasingly people tend to use resource hog frameworks and overpay for AWS and other cloud services.
in this case i use inconsequential to mean it's relatively small. It doesnt matter if you save $1M on $1B expenses. Even though, yeah, holy crap that's a million dollars!
And generally it's a waste of limited resources to chase saving $1M in server costs when you can cut 1K head count and save $100M.
Apple IAPs are highway robbery. They charge ~10x the industry standard for card processing (30% vs 3%) and they only get away with it because sideloading competitors is impossible.
Edit: as the saying goes, people don't want a drill, they want a hole. So if Grindr isn't a software company but a matchmaker that happens to write software (or CaaS/PaaS), then I don't know who truly is a software company. Microsoft is a productivity company, Amazon is a retailer & B2B services company, Google is an advertiser, and so on.
But the thing is the software is largely written. Presumably they'll be updates, but it would be surprising (and probably a bad idea) for them do a massive software projects. It's also unlikely that they are going to grow their top line significantly at this point, so business-as-usual and keep a close eye on costs.
Are Craigslist or Ebay software companies? They obviously need software to run, but like Google who are mainly in the ad business, these people are in the matchmaking/social business not software business --unless they were to sell their software to other parties who were user/client-facing.
I think of it like this: would the business exist without the software they wrote in house to facilitate the business? If the business ceases to exist without the software: it's a software company.
I do like that definition, but there's also the question of what kind of business would it be? There are companies that have to write their own software, because there isn't commercially available solution that will allow them to scale. Companies like energy trading companies, banks, hedge funds, ISPs and so on. They might buy some solutions, but build others.
eBay also doesn't magically become an auction house, just because they decide to buy a platform, rather than develop one. Amazon (the webshop) isn't a software company... but they write a ton of software.
I think that Grindr is pretty solidly a software company.
Unlike most other dating apps (Tinder/OKCupid/Match/Bumble/etc.) there is no actual “matching” mechanism. You are just displayed a grid ordered by distance of the X closest people to you, which requires basically a chatbox and an app that can interact with location services.
If that's the criteria, can you name any company that's not a software company in 2023?
The local steel mill got hit with ransomware a few months ago. The Windows virus didn't touch the furnace controls, cranes, sand dispensers, or forklifts, but it shut down their custom software that lets them receive purchasing requests, queue work orders to the foreman, and eventually ship to and bill customers, and they were shut down for weeks.
Is a steel mill a software company?
I suppose the local Amish bakery/furniture store might continue to accept cash if their borrowed battery-powered POS terminal went offline, but every other business I can think of from Boeing to Wal-Mart relies on software to facilitate the business. And at various levels of scale, they all grow from purely running on an Office license to some custom spreadsheet logic to an in-house database server.
The steel mill wrote the software, they've got a couple guys writing C# for an ASP.NET app that runs their custom CRM and pushes orders, CAD files around, keeping the workload consistent so that you don't end up with a bunch of parts in a row that all need the largest gantry crane at the same time, ensuring that patterns cut in-house are ready on time, making sure that the shop knows what color paint goes on each part, and so on. And that's not even getting to the custom automation software that runs on their PLCs and so on.
Sure, in that specific example they only have about 5 out of a couple hundred employees who can write C#, and maybe 10 who can program PLCs, plus some contractors like myself. But your definition of "software company" was effectively "dependent on custom software to operate", and that's been true of every single one of hundreds of automotive/furniture/aerospace/heavy industrial manufacturing plants that I've been in throughout the past 10 years.
> The steel mill wrote the software, they've got a couple guys writing C# for an ASP.NET app that runs their custom CRM and pushes orders, CAD files around, keeping the workload consistent so that you don't end up with a bunch of parts in a row that all need the largest gantry crane at the same time, ensuring that patterns cut in-house are ready on time, making sure that the shop knows what color paint goes on each part, and so on. And that's not even getting to the custom automation software that runs on their PLCs and so on.
Then yes, they're at least partially a software company. (I personally tend to think it's a spectrum, with this steel company at the bottom and ex. Collabera at the top.)
They're selling a service --that service runs on software. That software is their "secret sauce" --but like a capable CEO, the company is not in the business of a great CEO or great software, it's in the business of selling their services that are facilitated by their software --but that software could be internally developed or it could be a white-label software.. kind of like what we see in the malware biz.
The only thing grindr does is make software. The "matchmaking service" is how people use that software. They don't have banks of matchmakers saying "on these boys would look cute together, let's introduce them."
Imagine a dastardly villain called up the CEO of Grindr and said, "I have a missible pointed at your datacenter. It's going to destroy either your server that has all of your source code, or the server that has all of your user data. Which one do you want to live?"
The CEO would nuke the code without a moment's hesitation. Almost all of the value of the company is in the service it provides and the data is has to enable that. The software is just a means to an end. They'd rewrite the app and move on with their lives.
Now compare that to, say, Ableton. While Ableton has user information for registration and stuff and would certainly be heartbroken to lose it, they would survive the loss. But their software is the company.
I think the distinction the original person was trying to make is that to be a software company you need to sell the software someone would use to offer such a service instead of offering the service yourself. They would stipulate that a tech company is specifically a company that sells technology to others, not any company that uses technology. Otherwise, all companies are tech companies.
You can not buy the software that Grindr uses to do matchmaking; you can only buy their matchmaking service.
...But also, Adobe invests a LOT more in developing proprietary, highly customized and specialized, highly sophisticated software in-house and from scratch. The Grindr app seems much
closer to the "built with generic open source lego blocks" side of the spectrum, no? Maybe it is not so clear-cut and drastic, as they probably also have a lot of custom tech - e.g. matchmaking / trust&safety algos? - and Adobe IS using lots of OSS building blocks as well, I expect. But still, I do think there's a difference.
But going back to the first part - I appreciate your implicit point, but most any company is best served by thinking about itself first and foremost as an [its function] company. So yes, Adobe IS an artist tool company more so than / before it is a "tech company".
If the companies that dominated the artist tool market before computers had had the good sense to think of themselves in this flexible, adaptable, big-picture way (instead of as paint-chemtech companies or whatevs) there's every chance one or more of them would have the $$$ that has instead gone to Adobe. They already had the customer & vendor relationships, the brand awareness, etc - i.e., the hard parts.
If you are a poker player, it's likely that it currently makes sense for you to play NLHE almost exclusively. That doesn't mean that it's correct or in your best interest for you to think of yourself as a NLHE player rather than a poker player.
> If the companies that dominated the artist tool market before computers had had the good sense to think of themselves in this flexible, adaptable, big-picture way (instead of as paint-chemtech companies or whatevs)
Essentially, the Polaroid company. Their biggest income was film, so they saw themselves as a film company. When digital photography came along, they did some research in the area, but largely decided, "We're a film company, why would we sell this thing for lower profit margins?"
I think I agree, depending on the value they place on the app and their willingness to turn the app into something completely different if the market requires it.
