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Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

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Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#61

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #52
youeseh wrote: post #15

Say you own a co-working space. You probably should have some way to let: - People book conference rooms. - Let people check in and check out. - Let people book hot desks. - Manage access for members, hot desks, event participants etc. - Lots of other stuff. At some point, the off the shelf software is no good, especially if you're looking to... build a single experience around the world for lots and lots of office b…

It's a classic case of hire engineers first and figure out problems to solve later. This works great if the company already has a massive revenue stream (Google, Facebook etc.) so the engineers can just mess around and once in a while come up with something great. For a company losing $2B+ a year, not so much. Once WeWork solved its core engineering problems (bookings), engineering job descriptions got more and more…

[deleted]

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#62

Post by paxys »

cagenut wrote: post #29

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

AWS consultants most definitely exist already.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#63

Post by spectramax »

Johnny555 wrote: post #38
spectramax wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without meaning any offense to anyone, I am also genuinely curious how is a company such as Twitter have so many employees? Outsiders like myself know what goes into running GE or Tesla (and is easy to understand), but I would really appreciate someone from silicon valley enlighten about various needs for a company such as Twitter (or WeWork, etc.); what really goes on inside the doors, how are teams organized, what…

As a company grows, development becomes harder due to the need to interface with so many teams -- a feature that you used to be able to implement a couple days after a lunchtime discussion with your coworkers turns into a detailed design and design review, design revisions to prevent breaking functionality that other teams use, a revised design review and approval, security review and approval, and then finally imple…

I found this from another front page article about Automattic: https://automattic.com/about/

If you go to their about page, they show a little table, where they have 163 million monthly active users and only 966 employees. Not sure how good this comparison is with Google and Amazon because the kind of tools Amazon builds vs what Automattic builds (WooCommerce, Wordpress) are totally different.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#64

Post by jrockway »

codingslave wrote: post #59

Literally last week I got an email from WeWork looking for a Senior Data Engineer with "High Comp". I never understand these companies, aggressively hiring before they lay everyone off

I think it will cause a lot of cognitive dissonance if you treat large companies like you'd treat a single person. Imagine there is one person in charge of everything; it would be super weird if they bring you in for an interview on the day they're firing everyone else. But that's not how these large companies work; one person made the hire someone and some other person that's never met the first person made the decision to lay everyone off. You have to look at it like a distributed eventually-consistent database. In that context, everything should make sense; there was a netsplit and the consensus algorithm produced a different state in each cluster.

(There's a reason why we try not to design database like that. Perhaps there is a management lesson in there somewhere.)

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#65

Post by Spooky23 »

spectramax wrote: post #7
ulfw wrote: post #3

What do five HUNDRED people in tech do at an office rental company?

Without meaning any offense to anyone, I am also genuinely curious how is a company such as Twitter have so many employees? Outsiders like myself know what goes into running GE or Tesla (and is easy to understand), but I would really appreciate someone from silicon valley enlighten about various needs for a company such as Twitter (or WeWork, etc.); what really goes on inside the doors, how are teams organized, what…

Consumer VC companies are businesses that require growth at all costs. So they need to invest in man-hours to churn out features.

If they were a normal company, they’d focus on the top x projects that generate value and spend as little as possible on the rest.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#66

Post by B_Throwaway »

farisjarrah wrote: post #50
bob1029 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but system creation+enhancements can be made by a single engineer in a large % of those cases. Overwhelmingly so if you already have a working live system to start with and you are seeking incremental improvements (vs a full rewrite). There aren't many technical challenges I have encountered, when reduced to their smallest functional dimensions, that couldn't be fundamentally addressed by a single engineer. Ob…

Most of the time one competent 10x engineer could indeed build out all the special features that a company needs. The problem is that one person generally doesn't know all the best practices required of every problem domain, so they may implement things poorly. Furthermore, the one dev thing really doesn't scale up. As soon as your product gains any critical mass and you have an outage then the platform is hosed beca…

There are no systems running Windows 10X in production yet.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#67

Post by ryanSrich »

cagenut wrote: post #29

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

Why not use the hundreds of software tools that do this automatically?

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#68

Post by cfors »

cagenut wrote: post #29

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

I would never recommend it, but the thought has crossed my mind (definitely more than once) that the scream test could work wonders with cloud infrastructure [0].

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/anitag/2012/06/07/i-scream-...

edit: I suppose Chaos Monkey could be purposed for this task in hindsight.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#69

Post by unreal37 »

youeseh wrote: post #15

Say you own a co-working space. You probably should have some way to let: - People book conference rooms. - Let people check in and check out. - Let people book hot desks. - Manage access for members, hot desks, event participants etc. - Lots of other stuff. At some point, the off the shelf software is no good, especially if you're looking to... build a single experience around the world for lots and lots of office b…

WeWork had apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency. They had one of the lowest sqft per paying member in the business.

They also were into custom spaces. They needed software to design the office floor plans for big customers like MixPanel.

Lots of software. Not just booking rooms and events.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#70

Post by theli0nheart »

ryanSrich wrote: post #67
cagenut wrote: post #29

I kinda wish there was a job for like, DevOps Hatchet Men. I don't want to lay people off, but after they're laid off I feel like I could probably delete about a million dollars a year worth of their AWS bill right now and they'd never even notice the stuff missing.

Why not use the hundreds of software tools that do this automatically?

Because there's a thing called "CYA".
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