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Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

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Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#121

Post by Apocryphon »

morkalork wrote: post #100
vips7L wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not match what I’ve observed in the industry.

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.

It's usually closer to 2 years than to 1.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#122

Post by duped »

paxys wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#123

Post by jakarta »

Macha wrote: post #76
jakarta wrote: post #62

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.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#124

Post by OkayPhysicist »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #116
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bugfi…

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.

Oh, in this case it was just shameless union busting. Taking an axe to your company yourself is a helluva lot cheaper than hiring the Pinkertons.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#125

Post by layer8 »

philipov wrote: post #79
layer8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#126

Post by jstarfish »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #14
mjhay wrote: post #6

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 exp…

> 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.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#127

Post by euniceee3 »

hathchip wrote: post #91
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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.

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#128

Post by vuln »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #117
ikomrad wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great.

"Elon Musk says Twitter’s ad revenue is down 50% and cash flow is negative" https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...

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.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/05/tech/elon-musk-adl-lawsui...

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#129

Post by skyyler »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #117
ikomrad wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great.

"Elon Musk says Twitter’s ad revenue is down 50% and cash flow is negative" https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el...

Ha, I thought this was positioning for the new lawsuit when I clicked the link, and then I saw the date.

It really isn't working out well, is it?

Re: Grindr Loses Almost Half Its Staff on 2-Day RTO Requirement

#130

Post by rpgwaiter »

mc32 wrote: post #77
mynameisash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they? 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.

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.

> are craigslist or eBay software companies

Yes, obviously. What other market would they possibly be into, the only thing those companies do is make software

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