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Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#71

Post by Symbiote »

barbazoo wrote: post #24

> collective burnout > fortnightly manicures, hair trims and "blowouts" which the founder said showed "appreciation for our busy bees" > Working hours? Not nine to five apparently. Employees can choose the hours they want, just as long as the work gets done It's all just a bunch of BS. Give your employees reasonable time off policies and encourage them to actually take time off instead of letting them get burned out…

Judging by their recruitment page, they have a large office in London.

I don't know about Bumble, but some of my friends in the UK have found the past year very tough. The UK has had strict restrictions on socialising, travel away from home, even being outdoors.

For months at a time, my siblings have been unable to visit my parents!

I can see the benefit of a company saying "let's all take this week off". It allows holidays of people in the same team to clash, when that might normally not be allowed.

(It's not been great in Denmark either, especially the dark winter with most social life closed. But we were still able to see friends and family and stay in holiday cottages, and no-one was shouted at by police for taking a walk too far from home.)

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#72

Post by motohagiography »

ape4 wrote: post #28

700 employees seems like alot

It does until you mix that with all the employee perks and see that it could very well be strategic.

From the article:

> It also boasts a "Mommy Bar" - described as a "private lactation space" by Ms Wolfe Herd - as well as fortnightly manicures, hair trims and "blowouts" which the founder said showed "appreciation for our busy bees".

It seems like an appealing target for private equity or managers installed by a pension fund. Not sure what their ARPU and ARR look like, but when you have a company with solid revenue, perks like this are a huge signal for a bunch of "opportunities for efficiencies," I would wonder how long all that perceived value would be left on the table. It's not just a Bumble thing, I also think story-worthy perks are mostly a cheap way to attract new staff into the pipeline, and get attention from acquirers. Less than $5k in beanbag chairs used to have a 10x ($50k+) return in organic press, recruitment pipeline, and marketing buzz. Culture spend like that can have non-linear returns. That "Mommy Bar," alone probably has a 30x return on what they spent on it.

I'd absolutely close an office for two weeks in August if I ran a company that could afford to, or split it across teams. There's the question of whether you need an office you can afford to close, but from a capital management perspective, if one knew how to make a company appear both attractive yet helpless when it came to optimizing it, to attract someone who liked to solve problems who would intervene and buy in to "fix" this obvious inefficiency for you, well, that would be about par for the course wouldn't it.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#73

Post by [deleted] »

Kiro wrote: post #57
aantix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is having to partake in your misery a good thing? The large majority connect via smiles, laughs, hugs.

It's an unnecessary and superficial conditioning that we need to evolve beyond. Do we want to be cavemen or cybernetic organisms?

[deleted]

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#74

Post by colesantiago »

elliekelly wrote: post #62
colesantiago wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an app with some basic functionality. > I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers Please don't assume this. Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Bumble has a great and in depth engineering blog [0] here that doesn't make it 'an app with some basic functionality.' […

> Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Please don’t assume this. Parent comment’s question seems genuine.

> Parent comment’s question seems genuine.

Why are you assuming genuineness when the parent mentioned this:

'an app with some basic functionality'

'I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers'

'Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver'

'what the heck are they overworking on?'

This is enough to know that the parent is dismissing the effort and work of others to the point that they are expressing a reductionist viewpoint of the entire app and company, which is not ok.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#75

Post by [deleted] »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #41
silicon2401 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taki…

I'm an extreme introvert as well, my wife is all the social interaction I require, and I'm a giant homebody, but I'm still super tired. Work wise I've been under pressure for a fair bit this year and there were no experiences to balance it out with. I miss a lot of small indulgences - quiet brunches on a Wednesday morning or going to get coffee. I may even miss the movie theater occasionally. I certainly don't miss w…

[deleted]

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#76

Post by jcadam »

silicon2401 wrote: post #22
asim wrote: post #2

Good. We're taking all of July off at my company. Why? Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. Somehow we all just seem to expect things to keep going like nothing changed. We all just seem to be expected to gloss over the pains of isolation, potential death and stress of work and life with no separation or boundaries. We made a conscious decision at my place of work t…

This is a very subjective statement. The pandemic has been bar none the best period of my life. Increased physical and social distance from other people, no need to emote in public thanks to masks, no need to commute, greater accommodation for non-social options like self-checkouts. My physical and mental health have skyrocketed, and as a result I feel like I've been on vacation for a year and half, despite only taki…

Yep, As my company slowly starts going back to the office, I decided to move to a remote/rural area because I wasn't willing to go back into an office everyday. I expected to have to find a new job, but my current employer offered to let me continue remotely, so I suppose it has worked out.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#77

Post by hvidgaard »

curiousgal wrote: post #3

Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with mill…

There is this misconception that software development can be ultra lean and only really need a team of few handful of people if they're just sufficiently capable.

It's knowledge work that is almost always in the complex domain, and as such it's far from simple. In fact it's the domain of unknown unknowns. So to have a product with millions of users with an online attack vector, that takes security and uptime serious, you need the following lead roles as a minimum:

  * Architect
  * Security
  * Test
  * Agile
  * Developer
  * Operation
  * Owner
  * UX
Security, Test, Agile, Operation, Owner are at the very least full time posistions in their own right for a single service, then you need to add developers. Add requirements for new documentation and maintenance of old. You probably need some support roles too.

An app with millions of users are likely to have multiple teams that have a subset of the full application. For every feature you want to develop or any significant refactorings, you need to involve at least architect, security, test and operations. My experience is that teams around 8-10 people can be really productive and run a service. If you really want to accelerate and be best in class you assign teams to specific parts of the service that makes sense. Could be signup, search, chat, ect.

Then you probably want teams for analytics, ads and marketing, legal and before you know it, you have 50+ people working directly on a "self-standing product".

All that said, if the code base is crap, and the organization of the employees are similar it's highly likely that alone is responsible for creating the additional workload compared to a better codebase and organizational structure.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#78

Post by crsv »

joegahona wrote: post #4

I would love to know how they are measuring the success of this measure -- and I'm not being cynical. How would one even begin to weigh the tradeoffs of closing business for everyone for an entire week against the increased productivity upon return and something woolly like "improved morale." What if giving everyone a week of twice a year was actually beneficial to the company? Or even quarterly? Many companies alrea…

At a (perhaps generous) average of $120K per employee, a week off would cost $1.5MM - given how broadly this will get picked up and circulated in the media, it'll get more eyeballs than 1.5MM spent on mobile or search ads most likely.

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#79

Post by baud147258 »

asim wrote: post #2

Good. We're taking all of July off at my company. Why? Because covid was an incredibly hard period for all of us and we as humans need a break. Somehow we all just seem to expect things to keep going like nothing changed. We all just seem to be expected to gloss over the pains of isolation, potential death and stress of work and life with no separation or boundaries. We made a conscious decision at my place of work t…

Maybe it's because I already got a lot of PTO (7 weeks a years, which is standard on this side of the Atlantic), but mandating time off for all the company seems a bit much over letting employee choose when they want to take some PTO

Re: Bumble closes to give 'burnt-out' staff a week's break

#80

Post by Symbiote »

Liquidor wrote: post #45
alimbada wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One week in addition to normal holiday allowance.

Which is how much...?

The legal minimum is 20 days for the London office, 22 in Spain, at least that in Moscow. (This is in addition to public holidays.) Bumble probably offer a bit more.

In the UK and Spain, that's also the number you must use, I don't know about Russia. (In other words, if you've not used any days by December, you'll be taking all of December off. Or whenever your year wraps round.)

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