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.
The NLRB has been notified, mentioned in the article.
https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-revises-...
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.
> “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.
The media simply doesn’t cover this for obvious reasons.
The media is corporate and pro union actions aren’t good for them either.
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.
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...
But had consensual sex with a man? Unforgivable. You must resign.
Beyond pictures, chats, HIV status and GPS data, I cannot imagine what you're alluding to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Losing people in these positions will hurt a lot more than the average engineer/sales moving on after a short stint.
Mostly only true in Silly Valley.
In non-tech hubs, the tenures tend to be longer.
> 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.
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
That's a pretty big assumption there.
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.
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.