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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

#131

Post by LeifCarrotson »

TheCleric wrote: post #106
mc32 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#132

Post by wly_cdgr »

jq-r wrote: post #90
JackFr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a software company! But it's not actually a software company.

It's a software tech company. They make the Grindr app. Nothing else.

No, they are a matchmaking connections-as-a-service company that happens to do it through an app.

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

#133

Post by hathchip »

euniceee3 wrote: post #127
hathchip wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting, thanks

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

#134

Post by polski-g »

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.

Businesses aren't required to pay severance to reduce headcount.

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

#135

Post by Macha »

jakarta wrote: post #123
Macha wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#136

Post by asveikau »

wvenable wrote: post #13

> 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.

> What other major costs are there besides the staff to make and manage the software?

Server costs don't seem to be mentioned anywhere here?

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

#137

Post by mc32 »

TheCleric wrote: post #106
mc32 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#138

Post by deeviant »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #78
stronglikedan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bugfi…

One of the more insightful comments I've read on HN, thank you.

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

#139

Post by willcipriano »

munk-a wrote: post #29
reso wrote: post #15

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 only corruption laws worked the same way.

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

#140

Post by twic »

layer8 wrote: post #67
factorymoo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " 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 s…

> 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.

Depends how you sample. If you look at all current employees, and ask how long they were in their previous job, i don't think it does.
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