> 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.

I'm not sure if unionization plans came before or after the RTO plans. If it was before, I'd actually consider it a new union-busting technique.

It was before. They didn't acknowledge it and put the RTO in effect. (Second-hand account.)

> These are pretty classic union-busting techniques.

The NLRB has been notified.

The real question is will they do anything.

It's likely.

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-28-bidens-nlrb-brings-wor...

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-issues-d...

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/national-labor...

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.

You’re getting downvoted because that wasn’t Biden, it was Congress. Biden is probably the most union-friendly president over the past 50 years.

which I wouldn't have expected, honestly

From the _IBEW_ ( https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/2306... ):

> “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.

No it doesn’t benefit any deal maker to do this.

The media simply doesn’t cover this for obvious reasons.

The media is corporate and pro union actions aren’t good for them either.

Whether someone truly cares about an issue or whether they are pretending to care, if the outcome is the same then does it actually matter?

Sure, plenty of rules exist. The real test is in how those get enforced.

NLRB just changed a key rule so a lot of union-busting by the employer now essentially automatically forces recognition of the union.

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-revises-...

Again, that's a nice rule. But how is that enforced? It still has to be proven that RTO is intended to union bust. That's the tough part.

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.

Your understanding is correct.

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/us-circuit-cou... ("U.S. Circuit Court Directs U.S. Marshals to Take Haven Salon + Spa Corporate Officials into Custody for Refusing to Comply with Board’s and Court’s Orders")

They forgot to mention that all of their customers just left also. One of those employees has all the data. Guaranteed.

> 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]

[1] https://www.engadget.com/grindr-location-data-sold-for-years...

[2] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pillar-investigates-usccb-g...

Amazing how quickly they solve the "problem" when it involves completely legal consensual adult activity, compared to when it's a YOUNG boy

I'm pretty sure the Church was just doing damage control for a vow breaker.

Yeah. Rape a kid? Silence and you get moved to a different location where you can continue raping kids and be moved to a further new location.

But had consensual sex with a man? Unforgivable. You must resign.

GPS for "meeting young boys" just points to church, unfortunately. One's much easier to track with tech.

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.

I have not, but I've been around.

Beyond pictures, chats, HIV status and GPS data, I cannot imagine what you're alluding to.

> 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.

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.

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.

And good luck hiring anyone respectable after that show of disloyalty.

Jokes on the people that stayed. The CEO should thank them for their sacrifice in working overtime constantly “for the good of the company.”

The people who stayed can give their two week notice next week and argue that they are way more critical now.

Unless they do it en masse, it won't work.

actually if they do it one by one it's just better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am really surprised more CEOs don't do this.

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 market doesnt reward to, effectively.

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".

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

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.

Without knowing their staff size in January 2020, it's hard to know how many of these people were proactive hires with no real job to do.

> probably moreso the higher-performing ones

That's a pretty big assumption there.

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 imagine if tech companies continue to force the rto issue they will continue losing talent to other companies

Anecdotally I'm currently in the process of leaving a tech company and joining a legacy fortune 500, where I'll be full time WFH.

> " 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Jobs Georg, who has changed jobs 10,000 times in the last three years, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

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.

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.

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.

1-2 years for first few years in the industry, possibly a decade. Older employees tend to stay much, much longer.

>Older employees tend to stay much, much longer.

A lot of things probably going on there.

- Personal/family situation probably favors stability over mobility

- May already make pretty good comp so jumping for something better is less incentivized

- Value is more in making connections and using internal networks than banging out code, biasing towards longer term.

> 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.

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.

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.

> The median tenure in tech is one to two years before moving on to another team or company [1].

Mostly only true in Silly Valley.

In non-tech hubs, the tenures tend to be longer.

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.

They did pay severance.

> 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.

They’d have to pay more if they have to layoff people (WARN related expenses). That’s probably what OP meant.

> 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.

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

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.