The 1% really believe AI is their golden ticket to get rid of all of us. They’re going after professions with strong unions first and publicly, so that they can try to poison us all against collective bargaining, which is our only chance against them.
They didn’t lose their staff they constructively laid them off. They drastically changed the terms of their employment. Grindr must pay them unemployment benefits.
Even worse, during the Great Resignation, employers effectively penalized employees for their loyalty, offering sky-high salaries to attract job candidates while neglecting their existing staff. As I reported in 2022, veteran employees received salaries that were 7% lower, on average, than new hires.
The biggest raise I've ever gotten in my 20 year career was 10%. The smallest increase in salary from switching jobs was 20%, and that's an outlier. Staying in one job just isn't worth it anymore.
His boss apologized, telling him that the layoffs had nothing to do with him. It was just business.
And there's the problem. Employers are businesses, and no matter how loyal your boss is to you and vice versa, some beancounter will axe your job without a second thought. "Just business" is anathema to loyalty.
But I think most people would prefer to do their own things, work on their own projects and hobbies, instead of someone else’s.
Acting like it’s a preference to work past retirement, instead of a the financial reality for most of us, is such a load of horseshit I was tempted to write a complaint to the editor that this wasn’t published as an opinion.
Definitely. When I was a teenager this retired guy Al worked at chick fil a with me, not because he needed to but he wanted to. He had a cushy position too. He would just go talk to customers and make sure they had refills and stuff. Great guy, taught me a lot about life.
3 in 4 of Gen Z would rather have a better quality of life than have extra money in their banks, a report by Intuit shows.
“3/4 of gen z know that the world is probably gonna be pretty fucked up when they reach retirement age, so they’re doing their best to live an ok life before that happens”
Literally all of the climate change stuff they said was going to happen 50 years from now is happening now. So yeah I’m going to be 70 years old fighting for scraps with a billion refugees in lower Canada. Why the fuck shouldn’t I make sure I have fun now? The odds of getting enough money to get out of that situation are vanishingly small so fuck it.
This is it, right here. I’m a little older than the age range listed in the article and I literally became a nurse with the explicit expectation that I will have to work until I can’t stand up anymore. At least this pays well and gives me lots of options for working environments that might be a little more compatible with old age.
But the idea that I’ll ever be able to not work AND also afford healthcare? Impossible. Not going to happen. Might as well accept it.
Depends on your audience. Potential employees will hate RTO and fear bad financial news, customers likely won’t care about either, shareholders don’t really care about RTO but will jump ship with bad financial news
Exactly right - this is a thinly veiled excuse for a planned large scale workforce reduction sidestepping some of the normal repercussions.
What I find most interesting here is that WFH is essentially a benefit (a big one) at this point, and they just eliminated a huge benefit. That usually has the effect of causing some of your greatest talent to walk - and leaving behind those people who either don’t care about the benefit (there may be some, but I think this number is small) or don’t immediately have the hireability to resign and go for greener pastures.
The tradeoff for grindr is that it’ll make them temporarily look better on paper, but the loss of talent will probably hurt them in the long run. If there’s one thing that seems to be true of modern capitalism, it’s that companies are more than willing to fuck their futures over some perceived short term gains.
Grindr isn’t the only company doing this. I’ll be interested to see how this works out for all the employers using this same tactic.
If you read it. It isn’t saying corporations/business are people. It is saying they are owned by people and people have rights that cannot be violated.
People have rights and a business inherits the rights of the people who work within and own it. Just think about what it would mean otherwise. A bank or hospital holds countless private information of anyone who uses them. Any business does, as they all hold private information of clients and employees. That information by extension has a right to certain things like privacy. The government or others cannot just force their way in when they want to get information they want.
That isn’t because businesses are people. Its because businesses are created and owned by people. That’s all that law is saying and it gets twisted every time.
Because once the firm is big enough where the decision-maker doesn't personally know the people they're laying off, it almost immediately turns into this. The severance pay and unemployment of 80 software developers is millions of dollars, enough for even people who are normal and nice to the people they know to look the other way and say it was for the good of the company.
Right. This produces the opposite result of what a layoff usually obtains, retaining talented key personnel while cutting the chaff. That’s why I’m not sure layoffs were the actual goal.
back to the comments above: the management knows not the people who do the actual work. They can’t immediately tell if the Chris who left was carrying his team or was the worst slacker in the company. They’ll learn after they audit the remaining workforce and see The Spreadsheet say the people who remained are bottom performers (pun probably intended) but it’ll be too late - the talent is gone, the trust is broken. Whether different companies learn from each others’ mistakes is a mystery to me, apparently the global conspiracy of billionaire CEOs is not as robust as I expected (/s)
This really needs to be some level of labor issue. If an office decided to move across the country and you didn’t move with it, would that be you quitting? You applied for the job that was on your side of the country, not the one across the country. To me, the employer’s terms changed, which means they need to handle the difference.
I’m not sure about anyone who was hired before WFH, but generally, a substantial change to job duties or location is considered constructive dismissal. ie, it’s legally the same as being fired without cause. That might be eligible for severance and definitely for unemployment.
I don’t think that’s entirely the case though. With layoffs you remove the positions that the company no longer needs, or can’t sustain. With this strategy they’re just randomly losing half the staff. You wouldn’t lay off your chief software architect, or the only guy who knows how your database works, or the account manager who will take all of your vendors with them when they leave. This will cause enormous hardship for the company if the wrong people left.
I suppose they could have done a bunch of mandatory surveys first, asking employees how they felt about a return to the office and carefully monitoring the responses from key personnel, even preemptively mandating documentation or hand-off of responsibilities. That’s incredibly nefarious though if that’s what they did. That might even border on illegal.
Yes, they might. The more important they are, the higher the likelihood that they can get high pay and remote work elsewhere, and have plenty of savings on hand to weather the transition.
Agreed with this, if it’s an attrition play it’s an incredibly incompetent one. I’d argue there’s reason to believe you’d lose the senior employees that you’d want to keep.
I can’t agree at all. We do attrition based staff reduction all the time. Years upon years of it. Is it smart and planned? No. Do we survive anyway? Sure.
They’re not losing clients over this so they’ll be fine if they’re less efficient for a while.
You’re taking them at their word that all hands are required back. It is zero effort for them to carve out exceptions for key staff – or literally any group or individual they want to please – while still bleating about ‘come back to the office or be fired’ to the press and everyone else. Corporate heads talking out of both sides of their mouth is the norm, not the exception.
They did that to me. I’m in IT in a ‘critical’ (read - too expensive to rehire for) role for a large company doing forced RTO. I’m the only one on the team in my state, and not near any remaining offices, because they closed my building during COVID. My boss knew I was going to walk if they tried to force me to move, so they carved out an exception for me and I’m still WFH full time while the rest of my team has to go to the office 2 days a week minimum. The whole thing is toxic and destructive to morale. I’m trying to finagle a way to get the severance package because I want out of here before everything finishes circling the drain.
My dad used to work in manufacturing. He had a pension. He got yearly raises. He was able to switch positions to make more money and they paid for his training to be able to do that. Hell my grandma used to work at FUCKING KMART with full benefits including a pension!
Now people are paid fuckall, get fuckall for retirement, get maybe a 2% raise every few years, and companies want to invest $0 into keeping and training them. No shit no one is loyal and no one wants to deal with that shit. Go back to what you were doing before if that's how you want employees to act again.
For some reason my comment keeps showing up as a reply to this comment instead of a reply to the entire thread so let's just go with that lol
In the US a lot of manufacturers keep as many people as they can as temp workers and just cycle them in and out often enough to avoid having to pay benefits or offer anything other than substandard wages.
Your comment look just fine for me, in the right place.
As for your point, I guess people prefer to get cash and spend it themselves, rather than to trust companies to invest and spend it in their name. If people were to prefer smaller salaries but larger benefits, then situation would be different. One thing is still important though - medical insurance. Getting insurance yourself, especially before Obamacare was much more expensive than for business to buy it for you.
Jobs suck. That’s not news, everyone has known that for a very long time. Sure, some jobs suck less than others, and some people genuinely enjoy their job, but generally jobs just suck. That’s why they have to pay you to do them. But it takes more than a paycheck to make a job worth it. There was a time in America where the average person could work a job (albeit, often a sucky one) making a decent wage working only 40 hours a week, take a vacation every year, own a home, have a family and a community, all the things that make working a sucky job worth it. Over the last fifty years or so, many or all of the things that make working a sucky job worth it have slowly become less and less accessible to many people.
I am one of those people. I worked full time. It sucked, as many jobs do, but after putting in a full day’s work I didn’t go home to a wife and kids or a life that made me feel happy and fulfilled. I would drive my hour commute, which I hated, pick up take out or fast food, come home and watch TV, play video games, smoke pot, and drink. I’d go to sleep, wake up the next day and do exactly the same thing. I did that for years. I was absolutely miserable. People can’t live like that.
Have you considered getting a hobby that involves leaving your couch and interacting with people? Sounds like your life is unfulfilling because you couldn’t be arsed to improve it. No fairy is going to spawn in your house and make your life better for you, go do it.
If you’ll notice, I used past tense. I have made a number of changes to my life over the past several years. One of the first things I did was quit my job. My life now isn’t perfect, but it is improved. I drink less and I don’t smoke pot any more. I also don’t eat out hardly at all. I learned to cook and now I prepare nearly all of my own meals. I don’t know that I’d say I’m happy, but I’m certainly less miserable.
I had an employee review with my manager this week, at my request. She told me she wasn’t comfortable uptraining me right now even though they badly need the help in the position I asked to be crosstrained for, because they’d rather hire someone just for the role; but we could talk about it again in two months. After a little digging, I found that (A) they can’t afford to lose me from my lower-paid role and (2) they know I’m looking for another job and don’t want to train me until I demonstrate I’m planning to stay.
My response is that (A) well you’re definitely gonna lose me now and (2) I’m definitely no longer willing to stay.
If they communicated better, and offered the training/position/salary increase as incentive to stay, that would (imo) be a better course of action. This just feels rude and incompetent
Well I mean I am awful with people, but this problem even I could solve. They had about 3 possible holes to fit the peg through, but no, they just threw the toybox out of the window.
MAYBE OP is just awful at their job. But if they wanted to keep him where he was, that makes little sense.
Additional info: I typically work the least desirable shifts because of family obligations. Me leaving this position or even dropping to part time would leave a hole in the schedule, and she’s very lazy when it comes to the schedule. I’m offering to take the same shift in a different role.
Somewhat related, advice about being irreplaceable is bad for this exact reason. The more replaceable you are, the easier to promote you and take longer vacations. Sure you might be able to get fired more easily, but most managers won’t put forth the effort.
Not trying to be an asshole, but this is privilege in action. For low paying jobs, managers will fire you at the drop of a hat. Jobs that pay better are more secure.
I asked questions during the review. My.manager was evasive but it wasn’t hard to put together. In the restaurant industry, everyone is hiring right now as they expand for patio season. That won’t be the case as much in two months and we both know it; if I’m going to leave it’ll likely be in the next two weeks.
I remember doing self assessments before reviews, I just gave myself 5s because they were going to change everything to 3.5 anyhow unless you invented cold fusion and sucked everyone’s dick
Well, Mr Chalupapocalypse, your breakthrough on cold fusion is really profitable for the company, but the VP of marketing was disappointed you didn’t cup his balls during last week’s blowjob session, so…best we can do is a 3.9
Similar situation on my end awhile back. Location had begun losing people. I was in a bottom rung management position, more title than authority, and the team knew it. However, I was also the only manager willing to be consistently on later shifts. Due to pretty intense compartmentalization issues were often isolated and fixed by managers within each department. Except later on at night I was alone with a smaller team. This presented a bit of a situation:
If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
I wasn’t being trained to receive the skills necessary to deal with many situations so I began enabling key members of the evening team and standing in front of them if mistakes were made, acting as a wall.
Due to all of this, and a lot of work being handled by a smaller team, (and some issues going consistently ignored by senior management) we saw several people leave. In the middle of all this I was isolated and made out to be the reason for some systemic issues, told I could no longer take the initiative to help, and the team caught wind.
Eventually I began looking for other jobs. When I let my bosses know boy were they surprised. By the time I left one manager had claimed to have started having anxiety attacks during their shift, the whole unreachable during situations thing became a problem for upper, and well…long story short shit and fan began to meet.
If a problem came up I was expected to text or call a manager. As you can imagine, they did not often reply or pick up.
Many problems require rather immediate solutions.
These are not your problems. If management has enacted a procedure that doesn’t work, don’t change it or you will be blamed for any failure.
Send a few emails to document your opinion that there are problems. Otherwise, do exactly what was recommended. You want the policy to fail. Don’t try to improve it without management support.
I learned this in my previous job. We were a city-owned theater, which came with all of the trappings of government bureaucracy. But we were also open after hours, and did a lot of technical work for our shows. The city’s IT would log off on Friday at 5pm, and not log back in again until 8am on Monday. We were one of the few departments that was open over the weekend and after hours, (often until 1 or 2am when loading shows out.)
So naturally, we butted heads with IT a lot. Because we didn’t have access to change things we often needed to change. Whenever we needed to urgently troubleshoot something before a show started, our hands were almost always tied by IT. And IT’s given solution was always the same. Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. But when you have 2000 people waiting on a show to start at 7pm on a Saturday, you can’t wait for IT to get back into the office on Monday.
Historically, the solution was to use our own gear. Every technician had their own personal laptop, so they could use that instead of the city laptop. But this caused issues of its own, because we couldn’t connect to any of the city-controlled gear as the city network was MAC filtered, (and IT obviously wasn’t going to allow our personal devices to connect to their network.) We worked with what we had, worked around problems we couldn’t fix, and it was a lot of extra stress for no extra benefit; The higher-ups didn’t see a problem because the shows were never visibly impacted. And IT didn’t see a problem, because the higher-ups weren’t complaining.
Eventually, we just started letting it burn. Shows suddenly started 15 to 30 minutes late, (which was unheard of in a building where even 2 minutes late was considered unacceptable.) Clients didn’t get equipment they had paid for, because it was broken on Friday evening and we couldn’t troubleshoot it over the weekend. Projectors didn’t have video feeds, because techs stopped using their personal laptops for shows. Et cetera, et cetera. Instead, the techs simply started noting every time they wanted to fix something but couldn’t because their hands were tied.
And wouldn’t you know it, the system got fixed. IT was suddenly required to keep someone on call for weekend tickets. Because when people stop propping up the broken system, all of the flaws get discovered and heads roll until shit gets fixed.
“Jill, I’m afraid we have a problem. Your quality of work is very high, as always. But you don’t look enough like your job isn’t soul crushing. I’m not saying you look like you’re bored out of your mind or that I think working here is depriving you of your will to live. I’m just saying that there are times when you’re not smiling like a completely unhinged person and that makes me question whether you really want to be here.”
Reminds me of my art professor’s story about getting her doctorate, in which a bunch of tenured professors came together to review her work to give her the degree. One professor disagreed with giving her doctorate because apparently she didn’t look like she had a tough time getting it. That sent my art professor over the edge because she’d worked so hard and suffered so much for it so she started crying in front of the professors and told them she wasn’t going to bother getting her doctorate anymore and that she was quitting right there and then. The other tenured professors were quick to convince the other to change their mind and eventually gave the degree, but my art professor still remembers how shitty it was to decide something so important to her on the basis that she suffered much less than her peers in producing something good or better work.
Despite the popular belief that younger generations are champions of remote work, one-third of Gen Z and millennial workers say they’d be willing to work fully in-person if it meant shaving a day off of their workweek.
[. . .]
Other sacrifices that Gen Z and millennial employees say they’d make in exchange for a four-day workweek include working longer hours (48%), changing jobs or companies (35%), working weekends or evenings (27%) and even taking a pay cut (13%)
Fuckin based honestly. I thought they would ask for less compromise, but if they’re gonna go for the gut we’d better just tell them how it is. Less hours are proven to make better working happier more productive and cooperative employees. They’re just potentially less compliant.
It’s immensely satisfying that we’re entering another era of strikes. As they get more common it’ll trigger a domino effect that will pervade our entire work culture.
Forced return to office lost around 30% of our staff. Now over-work and a lack of staff replacement, because nobody wants the in-office job, mean that we are losing even more staff to stress and illness leave.
And suddenly all these contracted products and platforms, that are already being paid for (because nobody checks if staff resources are available in advance) are failing or stalling because there is no available staff or time to deploy them.
Not to mention how much time and efficiency is being lost by forcing the rest of us to operate in an office.
Meanwhile, back in reality, my company isn't upside down on commercial real estate & likes making more money so we are getting a smaller office to house our servers & equipment.
Mine was a bit hesitant but they are now talking seriously about getting rid of more offices and they had done one pass on that before. I would sorta like them to have an office subscription
My company did the same. We had a six week assessment period where everyone was required to come in two days per week. Once that data showed no major difference in output, we got a smaller office (for receiving and such) and everyone was told the office is optional. Smart business that kept people happy.
Find me a company deeply invested in office real estate (in particular, expecting a return on that real estate), and I’ll show you a company against remote work.
The real detriments don’t exist. True, I have met workers that don’t like remote work: companies have latched on to those people as an excuse to continue what is otherwise an entirely transparent narrative.
If anything I gain productivity by working from home. I see companies that don’t support that kind of work as entirely being behind the curve.
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