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Businesses

Bumble Closes To Give 'Burnt-Out' Staff a Week's Break (bbc.com) 41

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide have been told to switch off and focus on themselves. From a report: One senior executive revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move "having correctly intuited our collective burnout". Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers. The company announced in April "that all Bumble employees will have a paid, fully offline one-week vacation in June". A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave. The spokeswoman confirmed that the majority of Bumble's staff are taking the week off. Bumble has grown in popularity during lockdown as boredom set in and swiping to find a match picked up.
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Bumble Closes To Give 'Burnt-Out' Staff a Week's Break More

Bumble Closes To Give 'Burnt-Out' Staff a Week's Break

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  • On-call (Score:3, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:32AM (#61510286) Homepage

    In B4 systems start alerting and on-call people have to come back anyways.

    Entire company off at once sounds like a terribad idea for IT staff who manage the infrastructure, because that's a 24/7 job regardless of how much time management decides to take off.

    • I'm sure their investors are thrilled.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Altus ( 1034 )

        I don't know, I'm dealing with a ton of people looking to finally take real vacations in the near future to go see friends and family or travel. Its way worse than it usually is with summer vacationing because folks have not had the chance to travel and have been stuck in the house with their kids. Dealing with timelines and deliverables in all of that is pretty difficult. A week of downtime on development isn't really that big of a deal by comparison and if it reduces the variability for the next few mo

      • That would be a bit shortsighted. Happy workers are good workers. It's only a week and it's not like business is being suspended.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by PyRosf ( 874783 )
      If 90% of the company is off, the tickets and volume of issues would be orders of magnitude less. You keep a small crew who gets to time shift their time off into the future. Staff planning is not a problem here.

      • That's right. For example I work in IT Security. Probably 70% of my workload flows directly from other employees, people who are gone over Christmas. That includes salespeople, managers, and others opening email attachments they shouldn't open. That includes developers deploying new systems or changes that need security input. On a holiday, my workload greatly reduces.

        Another 20% or so is actively moving forward with security initiatives, like deploying a new 2FA system or whatever. That again can wait a w

    • Re:On-call (Score:4, Funny)

      by MikeDataLink ( 536925 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:34AM (#61510304) Homepage Journal

      In B4 systems start alerting and on-call people have to come back anyways.

      Entire company off at once sounds like a terribad idea for IT staff who manage the infrastructure, because that's a 24/7 job regardless of how much time management decides to take off.

      LOL. If only they covered that in the summary. You didn't even have to RTFM. Some portion of the staff will be working to support the customers and systems, and they will be given a week off at a different time.

    • I promise you that there system is cloud based with an MSP handling the day to day hell-desk requirements. When your only asset is data and your only service is linking data points, you NEED instant, geographically spread out site redundancy even if it's just to ensure shortest path routing. This is exactly the crap that the cloud was born for.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      This is a lot easier to pull off than you seem to think. By my off-the-cuff estimate, upwards of 90% of failures in large systems are caused by changes implemented by people. Things still fall over on their own (disks fill, servers give up the ghost, etc), but most of the chaos ends up being caused by people trying to accomplish their project goals. When you start the change moratorium a week before the shutdown, on-call becomes a fairly simple task.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dskoll ( 99328 )

      When I owned my company (admittedly tiny by comparison to Bumble), closing for a week over Christmas was great. Gave me a chance to update a bunch of infrastructure technical debt without being distracted. That's when I scheduled upgrades for all the software we used internally to manage the business.

      It helped that I could do it myself and that I don't celebrate Christmas, of course!

    • And people wonder why tech folks want to be paid well...

    • In B4 systems start alerting and on-call people have to come back anyways.

      Entire company off at once sounds like a terribad idea for IT staff who manage the infrastructure, because that's a 24/7 job regardless of how much time management decides to take off.

      Never mind that they even said in the summary that there are some people still covering such things during that week that will get their own week off at a different time.

      If the company relies on one person 24/7 that is a recipe for disaster as you have a single point of failure, be it from burnout or getting hit by a bus. If your company can't handle having support staff take time off you're doing it wrong.

  • I suspect it is not to avoid burnout but to avoid attrition rates from skyrocketing this summer

  • Like two weeks off for key staff (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @11:59AM (#61510390)

    A spokeswoman for Bumble said a few customer support staff will be working in case any of the app's users experience issues. These employees will then be given time off to make sure they take a whole week of leave.

    Holy cow, for support staff that is a week where all of your managers and annoying co-workers are gone, then ANOTHER week you get to just take off and do whatever! It's like two extra paid weeks off!

    • Re:Like two weeks off for key staff (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jythie ( 914043 ) on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @12:30PM (#61510500)
      Yeah, back when I used to work at a university, one of my favorite patterns was agreeing to work when the place was shut down and then taking a different block of time off elsewhere. With no users, no new things going online, I had a ton of time to sit and work on things I did not have a chance to any other time of the year, at a nice relaxing pace, and then take a real vacation after people came back. Wonderful.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Thanks for telling everyone what kind of employee you would be. Manager gone? It's a week off then.

      Of course, given that you are SuperKendall, who could tell if you worked or you didn't anyway?

  • I thought wolves came in Packs. :-)

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