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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

#101

Post by CydeWeys »

tempsy wrote: post #43
softwaredoug wrote: post #12

There IS a market for a WeWork like service. A WeWork-like model has appeal to someone like me that would love good coffee and an office/hoteling space! Especially as I travel a lot and sometimes want a reliable private workspace in an arbitrary city. Coffee shops frankly don’t cut it for working/meeting with people all day. Also there’s often a need for meeting spaces in arbitrary cities. my company would have used…

I feel like a missed opportunity for WeWork was a kitchen. AFAIK none of them sell food for purchase. Why not get all the workweek lunch revenue?

Would WeWork operate the cafeteria themselves, or make kitchen space available for cuisine-inclined people to make and sell food to the people using the co-working space?

In either case, you can imagine opting in to a monthly spend for N employees of your company, at some kind of discount, to spend at the cafeteria. Wouldn't be much different from the private club model of running a restaurant, where you have a given monthly spend that you have to use no matter what. And everyone in the WeWork already has badges so it'd be simple tap-to-pay that would go directly onto/against your monthly coworking bill.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#102

Post by stickfigure »

ch4s3 wrote: post #82
aswanson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

Really? You think optimizing office layout to maximize rental income is ”useless bullshit”?

In fairness, it might actually be. They have a lot of properties, yes, but is it so many that that can't just send a particularly skilled human around to design them?

Binpacking is np-hard but humans still do a very good job of playing Tetris. It is hard to imagine getting a positive return on automating something they (in the long run) will do a few times a year.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#103

Post by dtparr »

B_Throwaway wrote: post #66
farisjarrah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't tell if you're trolling, so in case you've confused others.

http://svdictionary.com/words/10x-engineer

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#104

Post by mlevental »

aswanson wrote: post #75
unreal37 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

lol here's a hot tip for you: anything with "optimize" in the description is not useless bullshit. like the person said: it's literally an np-complete problem.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#105

Post by CydeWeys »

rosybox wrote: post #26
softwaredoug wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Having tried to use hotels for meetings, they are unreasonably expensive and do stupid stuff like “the whiteboard rental fee is $500/day”

Maybe that's just the cost of offering these things. How much money do you think they're making off of those fees? They're probably covering costs and are low margin.

As someone who's been around enough people who book conventions, they're making a KILLING off these fees. It's the business model of the industry; they get you on the extras. Every little coffee or snack break is outrageously expensive. God help you if you cater a lunch through them.

If you think the services for a wedding are expensive, try booking a convention. Companies have way more money to spend than random couples do, and the hotels/convention centers know it.

For example, here's a typical catering menu for a convention center. Note that most of these prices are per person, and also note all the extra fees that they'll ding you for on pages 2-4 on top of the already high food costs (e.g. $2 per meal and break per person for plates).

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#106

Post by zndr »

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…

So Wework acquired https://www.teem.com/ specifically to do this, well the room booking part at least. They actually approached a different company and were rejected so they bought Teem.

I liked the product, and wanted to purchase it. We Co had so over funded Teem that the sales people couldn't keep up. They were doing demos with experienced Sales Engineers and literally couldn't explain how things worked. We had 2 demos in 2 successive weeks and the product fundamentally looked different both times.

Think about that: Imagine having unlimited eng and product resources and pushing code so fast that your sales team can't keep up sounds good right?

Wrong...we didn't buy Teem we went with their competitor who was behind on a few items, but had a concise product and a concise roadmap that met our needs, not the needs of 1000 coworking spaces tied together.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#107

Post by tootie »

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…

8 people work on the tweeting part, 4000 on ad sales.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#108

Post by oh_sigh »

CydeWeys wrote: post #97
aswanson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apps to optimize the space in their office layout for maximum efficiency That sound like some useless bullshit if I've ever heard it.

It's literally the bin packing problem, which is NP-complete. Plus you have another axis entirely on top of the already NP-hard problem: You want to minimize the number of times that you move any given group of people over time as you re-configure the office space to fit the maximum number of groups into it. This is an algorithmically hard problem, and I'm not surprised that there might be significant benefits to inv…

Can you give me an order of magnitude estimate of how many milliseconds you believe solving the 2d bin packing problem with added constraints would take on a commodity PC when n=the max number of clients in any wework building?

The problem is interesting, but it isn't one you need to set up an entire engineering team to solve.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#109

Post by ch4s3 »

stickfigure wrote: post #102
ch4s3 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You think optimizing office layout to maximize rental income is ”useless bullshit”?

In fairness, it might actually be. They have a lot of properties, yes, but is it so many that that can't just send a particularly skilled human around to design them? Binpacking is np-hard but humans still do a very good job of playing Tetris. It is hard to imagine getting a positive return on automating something they (in the long run) will do a few times a year.

> It is hard to imagine getting a positive return on automating something they (in the long run) will do a few times a year.

That's totally fair. I think they actually do some other types of more mundane optimization that are geared towards managing the properties. I think a number of the engineers also work on the learning platform for their education services.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#110

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Merrill wrote: post #78
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 sort of did that for a while. The differences between what management thinks they have, what is actually running, what data centers are charging back, what licenses are being invoiced, what finance is depreciating, and what is actually needed for operations can be astonishingly large.

I just took on a project that uses micro service style architecture (8 services total) and runs on AWS, has no customers, and costs more per month than I've seen very high revenue projects spend in over 6 months for hosting. I can't imagine how bad it would be with older projects with more cruft.
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