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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

#111

Post by singlow »

cwyers wrote: post #76
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…

I'm struggling to think what of that couldn't be done with off the shelf software, honestly. Hell, most of it could be done with Outlook and Active Directory.

Not in a way that scales or is user friendly. You might be able to use those as a base for something very hackey. I helped build a full suite to do everything in that list for a coworking "start up". It gets complicated pretty quickly and you need a custom ui and good control of the data model for custom business logic. If you want self serve subscription payments and reservations you'll need a few programmers. But not 1000 of them.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#112

Post by nostrademons »

bob1029 wrote: post #27
momokoko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary. Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or increasing advertising conversions by 1%. etc etc.

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…

The percentage of changes that actually improve things drops significantly as the company gets more optimized, so you need to try more things to have a good chance of actually getting one implemented.

Say that a tweak to the page improves ad revenue by $50M. 98% of tweaks have neutral or negative effects. The expected value of the tweak is thus $1M, well over one engineer's salary. You need to have 50 of them going on in parallel to have a good chance of actually finding a successful tweak, though. (Well, technically about 150 to have a 95% confidence that at least one will prove useful, but there's also a good chance that more than one will be useful then.) That's what all the engineers are doing - independently implementing different changes and discarding 98% of the results.

When I did this kind of work, the vast majority of engineering time was actually spent measuring the results. It was not unusual for the actual implementation work to be done in about 3 hours, but the experiment design, approval, configuration, logging, data-collection, and analysis to take 3 weeks. And that was with a fair amount of existing tooling for measurement & process.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#113

Post by dwoozle »

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.

That’s a very weird take. That’s probably one of the highest value problems to solve in the entire economy.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#114

Post by megablast »

unreal37 wrote: post #69
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.

Um, ok, so they just put in more chairs than anyone else.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#115

Post by Someone »

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.

If I understand their business correctly, way more than a few times a year. I think they have problems of the kind

”there’s a team of 5 Monday to Wednesday, one of 7 Tuesday that also have a meeting room, one of 4 Tuesday to Friday, one of 3 for the next three weeks, one of 2 that have to sit side-by-side, …. Figure out who to place where, minimizing the times we have to tell customers to move desk, maximizing the ‘cohesion’ of desks assigned to each group. Oh, and do this knowing that the problem may change at any time”

And all of that, hopefully, in a building with a high occupancy rate, all the time.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#116

Post by tga »

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…

There are companies that provide office space everywhere. Check out Regus for example -- http://regus.com.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#118

Post by ulfw »

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…

A lot of those are build-once (if you don't buy third party) and do tiny updates later.

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#119

Post by mrgreenfur »

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…

Maybe they are using all those ML teams to build "self driving offices" (a la uber) or Self-greeting receiption? or predictive room bookings

Re: Report: WeWork expected to cut 500 tech roles

#120

Post by CydeWeys »

oh_sigh wrote: post #108
CydeWeys wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, yes, I think you would need an entire engineering team to write, maintain, scale, and run a system that solves this problem. For example, my employer has a whole team working on internal tools for booking/managing/re-allocating conference rooms. It's almost exactly the same problem, it's non-trivial, it's complex, and it takes an entire team.
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